DISQUS

digital digs: Michael Wesch on the YouTube identity and the history of whatever

  • robert · 5 months ago
    I get it, Alex. You're just scratching the surface here, no? There is much, much behind this and a statement that narcissism increases the potential for escaping narcissism is a step towards something much more, perhaps an article? I can't see ever agreeing with the formula, however, and I think quite a few theorists that both you and I love would find twitter when used as intended (what are you doing?) disgusting. To me, the matter is not how the network is used or designed. Much of the time, that is an utter waste. Rather, the matter is how the network is re-used or used in the areas where freedoms aren't allowed. Take away our freedom of speech and twitter becomes golden. Let us say what we please, and twitter is shit. For some, the network needs to be reused so that it can open the possibilities of expressing for others that which cannot be expressed. If we can change the culture of narcissism, then the network could assist us in that change. On the surface, however, the network capital.izes on our obsessions with ourselves.

    I like your new design by the way.
  • digitaldigs · 5 months ago
    Twitter has me think of Benjamin, in particular the notion of how fascism offers us "freedom of expression" as a substitute for social power: life style instead of life, or the introduction of aesthetics into politics as he puts it elsewhere. From a Deleuzian p.o.v., of course, one couldn't imagine the tweet or the YouTube videolog as a free: there are many forces at work there. Indeed we might think of Web 2.0 apps as confessional technologies (a la Foucault), as exemplars of the repressive hypothesis par excellance! (Though maybe all of that is a little too easy).

    No. I would say that as long as one is imagining freedom and democratic participation in the conventional ideological way, these technologies are crap: bread and circuses at best. The trick with expressing oneself otherwise is in recognizing first that the fantasy that authentic self exists and can be mediated always falls apart, that it relies upon perpetual ideological and technological reassembly. Without reassembly it's all just ones and zeros, voltages, light waves, etc.

    Thanks re: the design. It seems to be getting positive feedback.