Just thinking about yearbooking myself.
Aside from the clear detrimental effects the Inmternet is having on our language, the Internet is also having a disgraceful effect on us getting all above ourselves and hoity toity.
Now the yearbook I think is a lovely example of new technologies giving a new twist to the old -
there are amany examples of the ‘book’ online – such as some sites quaintly ask ‘visitors’ to sign the ‘guestbook’ and so on – and a great many ask us to sign in – and then out – as we leave. (and don’t forget we still insist on referring to web pages.)
But I digress.
What I am talking about today (if I can only keep on topic) is the way we are constantly invited to DISPLAY ourselves in so many ways.
And don’t we just love it … filling in those facebook profiles, (you can even pay for help)uploading dozens of images laying a trail of our online self all over the digital web.
Thus we have sites and pages on eBay – with a profile pof our buying and selling; we can have a YouTube profile and a space to customise; we have our fabulous blogs and Flickr streams blah blah blah.
I am thinking about how we have these cubby holes, these HUBS, which store our digital selves and we lay threads frpom them, reaching out to other spaces. There is this idea I am playing around with that is about writing and multimpodal text making where we develop an online self – the self as textually constituted – that pays homage to our off line life and each infleunces the other. Jill Walker writes about ‘distributed narratives’ and this is an idea to which I keep returning – and I am thinking now about distributed identities – that we produce through text.
But hey look at this – this is a grand way of the Internet playing with identity.
