Meme’s ripple moiré-like through social networks, alongside the anecdotal asides, the personal images, the congratulatory :) announcements and the red-faced acknowledgments of the foibles of alcohol-induction. Friends are redefined as contacts, conveniences and inconveniences, acquaintances, business opportunities and the providers of over-excited holiday-chats, often virtually overstaying their welcome. The two-dimensional plane of the screen becomes an accepted portal that offers a quasi-linear viewpoint into comments, links, RTs - and all the other collateral effects of digitised personal life.
In a fictionalised retelling of this text, we can imagine a faceless individual scanning the avatars of those in their network, thinking to themselves “who the fuck am I curious about tonight?” The character chooses the third friend on their randomly-ordered friend list on the left-hand-side of the plane, as dictated by a curious obsessive-compulsive facet they have allowed developed in the last few months. Perhaps they will notice an increase in communication between this “contact” and the subject of a previous relationship, and a shroud of jealousy, anxiety, or upturned mouth corners (a smile), or all three might envelop the characters face and posture? Hunched shoulders and a leg caught in spasm; one sock on and emblazoned genitals (male or female); tired eyes all dried out with yellow crusted mucus: indicating they are indeed awake at an inopportune hour.
>New daff punk lol! So cool, love TRON! What a great debut album
>still hip.
>It’s not their debut.
>Like (3)
>Thomas-Angelo O’Harris was born at 3am this morning! So cute, but very bloody too! My wife has a beautiful placenta btw ;)
>Thomas-Angelo? Are you fucking serious?
>Like (1)
>I like Angelo, don’t mind him he’s probably pilled up again.
>I’m not fucking pilled up. You should name that child a good republican name like Bobby.
I could go on, but I should note that the above mentioned updates are fictionalised, as is the aforementioned character with the emblazoned genitals etc. What role does love play in these instances? A painful reminder of its unrequited-ness for those that don’t have it but no longer bothered to look for it, although every avatar is sizeable for those that don’t have it but are ready to seize any opportunity that presents itself. Roy Ascott wrote of the Telematic Embrace in the 1980s - an essay that examined the potential for romance to ignite between a couple who never have knowingly met in reality, but through the exchange of text and a good imagination, can become mutually entrusted.
MissKitty: > Hello!
HotStuff83: > A/S/L?
MissKitty: > 17/f/DC
MissKitty: > u?
HotStuff83: > 18/m/philly
MissKitty: > u live in the projects?
HotStuff83: > no, some friends do.
MissKitty: > cool!
MissKitty: > do u own a gun?
HotStuff83: > sometimes ;)
MissKitty: > ...
HotStuff83: > wanna cyber?
MissKitty: > em... k?
HotStuff83: > What are you wearing?
MissKitty: >Just a pair of jeans, a top, a woolly jumper my grandma got me, and some walking boots.
MissKitty: >what u wearing?
HotStuff83: >nothing. absolutely nothing.
Endnote: MissKitty is actually a 57 year old man who, at the time of the above correspondence, was wearing nothing, absolutely nothing, and HotStuff83 is a 23 year female sociology student writing an essay on cybersex and role-playing on chatrooms in the late 1990s. She did ok with her essay.
Online interactivity between humans becomes a negotiation of supposed and actual fictions: pretense, game-playing, disguise, intrigue, sex and fantasy. The users adopt the characteristics of espionage, feeding each other with vague elements of their subjective realities. Many assume that the clouding of the body in telematic interaction empowers the user, enabling to portray their innermost reality - but in practice we see an extension of how the user wishes themselves to be. Think of the Talking Heads track titled Seen and Not Seen, from their record Remain In Light: a man talking about changing his face, and the implications for his personality in doing so. When online, do we match our appearance (our avatar and self-description) to our online personality, or do we cultivate a personality to match a desired avatar? Is it a disguise? As Roy Ascott says - “where is the mind located when identity is as much bound up in the avatar as it is in the material body?” Are we playing at espionage as we watch our contacts from our panoptical watchtower? Do our disguises fool our subjects?
We pander to our desires - whether they’re covered in a blanket of felt irony or galvanised sincerity, desires that are probably synchronous with our subconscious. Perhaps the disguises we cloak our bodies in on these social networking sites are actually psychological microscopes, illuminating our deepest personal preferences and unsatisfactions.
