Tuesday, March 4, 2008

what they become

“The way you see someone is the way you treat them. And the way you treat them is what they become.”
-Goethe
This seems to bear some relationship to the precession of the simulacra as posited by Baudrillard. It makes wonder if perhaps, even before the most basic of technologies to help the human in his continual prediction and simulation of reality, something as basic as our identities as individuals could have been preceded by a kind of mental construct of the simulacra on the part of others. This kind of mental construct simulacra acts in the same way as modern forms of manifested simulacra. It is to a large extent the imagined version of ourselves by others which determines who we might be, and furthermore, we are necessarily defined by our relation to, acceptance of, and reflection of the many imagined, mentally constructed versions of ourselves which exist internally in those surrounding us. Goethe would have it that we inevitably assimilate to the real action based reflections of the construct of ourselves in others.

How does the precession of the self manifest itself in new media? One example that is obvious (though perhaps generally overused to exemplify phenomena in new media and the Web 2.0) is Facebook and similar social networking sites. Now, perhaps, the individual can craft themselves (though not in an organic or seemingly wholesome way as one might hope, but rather through a medium riddled with pointless applications hungry for “access to you personal information”) by giving the rest of their world a permanent, searchable, basis for their impressions of the individual. These impressions, which could be described as internally occurring simulacra, end up reflecting onto who the person in question actually becomes. This only works because while previously I may have been very free to form my own opinion of Bobby and treat him as such, I now have a profile which I accept (foolishly?) to be a more true representation of Bobby than the one I formulated on my own with much less information. Bobby, in turn, becomes his Facebook profile, which from the start was his simulation of self.

No comments: