Gchat, Gmail, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Tumblr, Wordpress, Myspace, new Myspace. What does it all mean? If the barrage of information and new technology that is the social media age leaves you feeling like a lone byte beaming through the existential emptiness of space, fear not. FM is here to find (or construct) meaning for the conventions of these destabilizing times.
Skype:
The eye of the Skype camera is the eye of society concentrated into the small, apparently innocuous circle on your computer, as your data becomes party to the government and beyond. A conflation of Big Brother and Big Papa, Skype is the panoptican. It is bourgeois exhibitionism masquerading as connectivity. Every time you shimmy those clothes off for a sexy Skype sesh with your significant someone, you do so under the cold, calculating eye of the dominant discourse: cruel, impersonal, paternalistic, and extremely judgmental of your thighs.
Facebook Profile Picture:
The profile picture represents a futile attempt at essentialization of the self: The user selects a single image, one conglomeration of pixels and bytes, that he hopes can convey Who He Is to that girl he sits next to in math class.Self-image is not projected with sly subtlety but uploaded explicitly and unabashedly. There’s a fundamental honesty at play: “Here is how I want you to see me,” the user seems to say. But that upfrontness denies the individual the right to complexity—to an identity that requires more than what’s “worth a thousand words” to express.The self-aware user, unable to stomach being pigeonholed, eschews caricaturization—she exhibits an eclectic medley of pictures. She attempts to obfuscate, to hide from the medium that demands she choose symbols to manifest her capital “I” Identity.In selecting a file and clicking “upload,” we cry out for recognition from the collective consciousness of cyberspace.
Twitter Retweet:
As retweets proliferate and clog the twitterverse, unoriginal parroting threatens to become the status quo of online communication. The tweeter’s intellectual product becomes no more than the sum of others’ profundities, appropriated and re-appropriated through the unique lens of the individual’s web-addled consciousness. Gone are the days in which writers couched their intellectual plagiarism in literary allusions or quotations analyzed into the body of a new text. Instead, retweeting weaves a global web of intertextuality. Is the time to pronounce the death of originality upon us? Eh, that’d probably get a bunch of re-tweets, too.
Gchat:
While some say the
alienation of online
instant chatting tools is
a negative manifestation of
the existential loneliness of this
contemporary age, reducing
human contact to mere
sound bites, we say
Gchat is the next wave of
poetry. The heavily
enjambed lines and rich
colloquial tone of the
Gchat force us to ask: What is an
author? As our culture of social
media shifts the register from
prose to verse, Gchat
provides a new
model for collective authorship
as two (or more) subjectivities
grapple to articulate
primary experience.
