This is a Letter, This is Another, This is a Third. Now Start a Blog.

28 October 2006

Arsenal 1-1 Everton

Cahill 10' (A)
van Persie 70' (F)

It's impossible to deny the absurd proliferation of blogs that has occurred in the last year. As some people find their way awkwardly into the spotlight as a result of their personal lives, others figure that it's a cheap and easy way to potentially get in the news as well. Of course, there's also a sense of community, and that creates a breach between the telling of private things and the revelation of those private things to all who are bored enough to read your blog. All bloggers know the story of Jessica Cutler, the Washingtonienne, who charted her personal crusade to sex up the Capitol via the internet. Sure she's getting sued, but she's also in talks with HBO and Disney to make a television serial about her antics. So everyone thinks, if I can get a deal with HBO just by talking about sex, well fuck, where do I sign up? There are other ways to get noticed via the internet, as well. LonelyGirl15, the Numa-Numa dude, MySpace; everything is an avenue to sell yourself, or what you present as yourself. The fact that some people achieve success out of the internet doesn't fascinate me; that just makes sense. What does fascinate me is that the internet presents an arena where you consciously cultivate your identity, pruning it like a fine row of hedges, until you're simply an avatar backed by bands and movies and books. For some people, this is nothing new. The popular girls back in ninth grade realized that life is often about how you present yourself, and you can alter that by changing your clothes, your hairstyle, your makeup. But identity is more than just immediate, visual presentation. It is also about how you define yourself: what music you listen to, what colors do you adore, what's your favorite food, do you want to travel, does history fascinate you, do you like oak wood, do you like wood at all, maybe you don't give two shits about wood, what about the environment, do you drive a Hummer, do you like giving hummers, do you like getting hummers, do you hum when you shower, do you hate showering, are you a smelly fucking bastard? Identity is such a finely-tuned thing that we rarely think much about it beyond our physical presence. But when you sign up for MySpace, suddenly you have to put your identity into words: okay, well, I like the movie Music from Another Room... but do I want hot 20somethings seeing that on my profile? They'll probably think I'm lame. So all right, that's off the list. I've altered my identity at a very important focal point: I like romantic comedies, which tells you something about who I am, but I'll be damned if anyone on the internet is going to know that (this blog aside!). But that's only the first step. I can lie about my height, my relationship status, what I'm doing with my life, who I want to meet. Even your top 8 reflects who you are. Do you put a lot of close friends, hot people, or bands up there? The internet demands us to answer the question of how we want people to see us. These few choice words then define us, in the eyes of other people. Isn't that fucking weird? Two sentences that I write out of boredom will have a huge effect on who talks to me and who doesn't. But the process is also self-reflexive: suddenly I start to take on the characterics of my internet personality. I haven't watched a romantic comedy in at least a year. I start uttering the same, absurd non-sequitors that I wrote on my profile. Is my avatar becoming me, or am I becoming it? My identity is blurred by my own self-definition. I worry constantly that I am simply turning into my representation of my self, that my actual self is slowly dying from lack of attention. This worry reaches a fever pitch when I am interacting in real life and it occurs to me that I will need to change my profile, upon finding a new band to like, reading a new book, watching a good movie, getting a girlfriend, moving out of my house, getting a new job. I get excited that my profile will change, that my life will appear dynamic, that things are happening to me! I am not just some lump who sits in front of his computer or the TV, I am a person, look, look, I am living oh I am living life and it is so wonderful. The flip side of this coin is that I see other people are living too, or at least, that they're pretending to live. I'm obsessed with my own identity, but I'm also obsessed with interacting with other people's identities. I check their profiles: has anything changed? If so, is it worth commenting on? People I don't see much now that I'm out of school and we're all slowly going our own way, the only chance I have to stay up-to-date on their lives is by looking online, while praying to the highest power known to man that they are just as obsessed about their identity, that their manifestation of their selves is also becoming them, and that we are all merging on the internet in a mess of labels and definitions, souls removed as they are unnecessary. We roam the internet as soulless personalities, a lump of tags and categories, interacting in banal ways with ephemeral changes in nomenclature.