In her essay “The Age of Egocasting,” Christine Rosen describes the “personalization of technology” by which “the individual’s control over the content, style, and timing of what he [sic] consumes is nearly absolute,” and how such technologies “enable us to make a fetish of our own preferences” (1). Our preferences — as publicly enacted in blogrolls, in “100 Things About Me” lists, in the way we express tastes and preferences and likes and dislikes and praise and blame in weblog posts, in the way we hurry to post our own answers to online quizzes that tell us who we are, in our audioscrobbler and iTunes playlists, in the very weblogs we choose to comment on — are, in their performance and in our self-conscious sense and monitoring of that performance, ourselves. This, Rosen says, is egocasting: “the thoroughly personalized and extremely narrow pursuit of one’s taste” (2).
We’ll return to the issue of the public construction of an online self (via egocasting) in a bit. First, though, I want to turn to the perspectives Thomas De Zengotita offers in Mediated on the individual and social practices and effects of (though he does not use the term) egocasting.
According to de Zengotita, the individuation of economic consumption and the concomitant individuation of advertising (“Buy our products to help yourself become uniquely you and stand out from everybody else,” the commercials whisper, or — as The Baffler urges — “Commodify your dissent!”) turn us into highly self-conscious, media-flattered consumers. There’s a cable channel for everyone, and Amazon, Audioscrobbler, and TiVo all know what you like and show you more of the same. As a result, “The flattered self is a mediated self, and the alchemy of mediation, the osmotic process through which reality and representation fuse, gets carried into our psyches by the irresistible flattery that goes with being instantly addressed” (de Zengotita 7). Remember that summer when “Don’t Believe the Hype” was on every radio wherever you went? Or “When Doves Cry”? Or “Paradise City”? The experience of that summer has become mediated; difficult or impossible to disentangle from the experience of that song. And so it goes these days, more and more, with fewer and fewer experiences wholly separate from any media connection — and, in fact, de Zengotita argues that we have begun to see our own experiences as a form of media. We are all self-aware method actors in our own lives, de Zengotita contends, performing those lives through representation and association. Even the public blogroll is a form of mask, a way to tell other people what type of person you are. What type of individual you are.
Thing is, the increasing individuation offered by the remote control, the iPod, the TiVo — by the explosion in the choice of media one can consume — is a result of the circumstance that attention is a scarce resource. I know I’ve made strong arguments in the past against attempts to impose an artificial scarcity on information qua experience good, but I’d find it really difficult to argue against the proposition (especially as someone in the middle of a dissertation) that any individual’s attention is a limited commodity. There’s only so much time in the day. So the fragmentation and individuation offered by egocasting, and the accompanying social intricacies of the associations offered by blogrolls and playlists and the results of online quizzes, are actually both cause and symptom of the clusterings of Pierre Bourdieu’s relational infinitude of social classes (see Distinction and Chapter 1 of Practical Reason, as well as the MSN Neighborhood Finder and Tetrad’s PRIZM market segments). Rip, Mix, Burn is an act of identity formation and class alignment.
What an interesting idea–is it the construction of a public self only? Who we want people to think we are? what happens to the internal self? Does it get pushed out of the way? Ignored? It sounds like the individual is sacrificed to individuation, and I don’t know where I would go with that except to ask who is in control of our development, our selves or our media, or, our readers? In other words, is the me that you read on my blog the me that I was hoping to project? And what about the silences? The things that I don’t share, but which are equally important in knowing who I am? For instance, just because I don’t have blogs about jazz on my blogroll implies all kinds of things, from my hating jazz (which I don’t), to not knowing anything about jazz, to loving jazz but not having the energy to create a list of musicians on the blog.
I’m getting ready to go to a retreat house where I will spend several days and nights in complete silence, without a single electronic device in sight, so I’m primed to be thinking about everything that isn’t expressed on a blog.
I’ve got two different arguments going on here, I think: one, I’m taking from both Rosen and de Zengotita the point that highly individuated consumption of media is a relatively new mode of identity-formation. I don’t know how you feel about jazz, but your feelings about jazz constitute a self-known identity of the Joanna who feels X about jazz. The second argument, which I take from de Zengotita (and also from my research on Roman culture), is where your question lies: “is it the construction of a public self only?” I certainly won’t argue with your poststructuralist implication that we have multiple subjectivities and wear multiple masks, both publicly and privately; that there is no one stable essential constant self. On the other hand, the signifiers “Joanna Howard” or “Mike Edwards” point towards identities that we find convenient to think of as unitary and unified and singular.
The thing is, you’re setting up the public as opposed to the private, as if there are two separate jars that make up “Joanna Howard,” and you put some things in the jar marked “Private” and nobody ever sees those parts of you and you put some things in the jar marked “Public” and those are the parts of you that you’re willing to share with people. I’m not sure I entirely agree with that construction. But it’s kind of beside the point: what de Zengotita is saying (and what Rosen isn’t saying) is that the formation of “Joanna Howard” is becoming an increasingly public process as a result of the ways in which our contemporary media work. Even if we don’t advertise to others the fact that we like jazz (although we often do), we aren’t just liking jazz, we’re becoming People Who Like Jazz and so aligning ourselves with Other People Who Like Jazz, publically or privately — and with contemporary media, there are enough People Who Publicly Like Jazz to make that alignment possible, and so a preference or a taste or even an isolated act of consumption becomes associative and social.
In such a circumstance, I think asking “Who’s in control?” is also beside the point, because control is decentralized and delocalized (or, perhaps more appropriately, individuated, and therefore supremely splintered into infinite localizations): to borrow Foucault’s language, control of the formation of identities, cultures, and classes functions on the capillary level.
But asking “what about the silences?” is important. Some suggest that there are parallels between Foucault’s capillary function and the perhaps over-glorified term “networks.” I might respond that there are dark spaces in networks; gaps, lacunae, isolates, blockages, oases. Silences.
I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on how those spaces might function in relation to the network of identity formation.
Joanna, when are you going into retreat?
As usual Mike, I need to think through my response carefully before I write it down here. For now, I won’t say that silences are inactive–I don’t think identity is binary though I can see why you assumed that I thought so–can’t think of the right metaphor–identity is sort of like a panopticon , only there isn’t one figure controlling the rest.
Michelle, I’m leaving for my retreat in a week or two, depending on when I can get a room. Want to come with?
J, [audible hah!] Don’t I wish. Way too attached to my progeny and guarded around strangers but want to anticipate your departure as I have enjoyed your company.
Sorry, Mike. I’m carrying on a conversation here that has nothing to do with your post.
Speaking of egocasting, I was just doing a little egobrowsing and came across this Vitia comments on my book and Mike’s responses-and lemme tell you, what a pleasure. I don’t do a whole lot of this, I promise, but I’ve done some and it’s rare to find discussions that really nail how the book operates and what its actually about…
Thanks
tdez
Wow — thanks, likewise, for the comment, Thomas! I’m glad I was able to do the book some justice. And it looks like the conversations you’ve started might be really helpful to me in fleshing out some of my ideas about online identity formation and economic commodification.
Um, OK. You’d do well, TROR, to describe more explicitly the connections you see among all these phenomena. What, in your own words, might the juxtapositions that you offer indicate?