Windows and Internet Identity + Performative Language

According to Boyd, social networking enables teens to create their personal, individual identity by imagining themselves as part of a public. She writes, “publics play a crucial role in the development of individuals…by interacting with unfamiliar others, teenagers are socialized into society. without publics, there is no coherent society.” As individuals create profiles, customized representations of their identities, they imagine the reactions of an imaginary audience, a “public” they desire to join. Social networking allows the individual to constitute his self-hood through a hyper-customized profile that visually defines a contrived individual identity, while simultaneously makes him conform to a given public that is “a collection who share a common understanding of the world, a shared identity, a claim to inclusiveness, a consensus regarding the collective interest.” Unlike in real life, the individual’s identity cannot be fluid, adapting situationally to present different identities to different publics—it must be fixed. It is interesting and somewhat paradoxical that in order to become a part of the collective networked public, one must actively construct an unique, customized, and defined representation of individual identity.
This paradox reminds me of the concept of the window in Keenan’s article. Keenan discusses different interpretations of windows, asking whether windows reinforce self-hood through gaze or whether they bridge the gap between self and other, public and private. The window that constructs the self is a “humanist window, the “window door,” the vertical frame that matches and houses the standing, looking, and representing figure of the subject.” (126) Keenan writes later that “the window defines the place and possibilities of the subject…” (132) However, Keenan’s window also challenges the separate self by opening it to a public. He defines the public as all that is different and other to the subject, not as “a collection of private individuals experiencing their commonality.” (133) The window also lets in light, opening the individual to the public and deconstituting his subjectivity: “the enlightenment of this other light exposes me to all that is different in and beyond me.” (136) I’m quoting all this to highlight the dual, paradoxical functioning of the window, which both reinforces and challenges subjectivity.
“The window is the opening in the wall constitutive of the distinction between public and private, and also the breaching of that distinction itself.” Perhaps social-networking sites are windows, constructing and deconstruct individual subjectivity. Myspace requires an individual to construct a profile that reinforces his selfhood and identity, yet its openness and connectivity joins this individual to a public which makes privacy impossible. Even the interface of social networking sites, the computer screen, imitates the a window.

On another note, Keenan’s window and Myspace also have similarities in their conceptions of language and speech/writing as active. Keenan’s final point is a comparison of light passing through a window to language, which is also public because it deconstructs subjectivity. “What if the peculiarity of the public were…the rupture in and of the subject’s presence to itself that we have come to associate with writing or language in general? Language exceeds the subject, opens up a window to the other in the monad…” My interpretation of this is that language, and especially writing, is public because it connects an absent subject to whoever his language addresses. (I’m not sure if this is correct, but I wonder if this idea of language/writing as deconstructing subjectivity is comparable to Barthes' Death of an Author?) But more than simply surpassing its origin, language is always performative: “If we make images and express ourselves, we do so only at the risk of the selves we so desperately long to present and represent…Language intervenes in the lives of those who seek to use it…” (138)
On Myspace, language and writing are also actions—Boyd argues that when we create our identities online, writing replaces behavior. Teens “write their community into being.” This confusion of speech and action was a big idea in a lot of the readings this week, such as Viruses Are Good for You and A Rape in Cyberspace. A final question—were speech and action conflated with the advent of the internet, as the Virus piece suggests, or, as Keenan says, has language always been a public performance that both reinforces and challenges subjectivity?

--Alice Hines and Zach Smith