wot wot

I'm interested by a few things that this week's readings touch upon. First, the significance of a customizable profile as digital body. Sartre mentions at one point that an individual can never view himself as an object, an other, this is a power that we all intuitively know people have over us--that's why we feel embarrassment. Along that train of thought, each person is really two people--I am I, who see, and there is Max, who is seen. In general we have only very limited control over our external form, it takes enormous amounts of practice to learn how to project the desired image of ourselves to other people. Things like Facebook allow one to extend these things infinitely and at leisure--there is no spirit of the stairs online. If you come up with a beautiful insult or rejoinder long after an argument you can still post it up and in future other people will see it too. That was a bad example, but perhaps I make my point clear.

I wonder if there are any writers like the guy from "A Rape in Cyberspace" talking about online forum culture, which is an entirely separate phenomenon from social networking sites, and I think a fairly interesting one. MUDs are horribly outdated, but much of the terminology is still used on a number of forums. I'm a member of a particularly infamous forum, which contains among other things separate subforums for music, literature, general questions, academic questions, debates, and so forth. Each one has its own rules, which are enforced by moderators as on most forums. There's also a particularly interesting forum whose only purpose is to belittle other users. People who "hang out" in that subforum enjoy locating a specimen who they think is ripe to be made fun of, and then search through their post history--not just on that website, but on any others that the user has made locatable in his career on the forum, intentionally or not. People can create their own identities, but that means that when the public gets a hold of them there isn't even the comforting celebrity cushion of "You don't know me! You just know what the newspapers/television/radio say!"--after all, if it's online, you probably put it there on purpose.