I joined Twitter at the end of January. Another excuse for the time lapse in reflective posting? Perhaps.

Similar to my venture into Facebook, this was also a long time coming. Contrary to what the majority of my friends and colleagues have to say, I personally haven’t really been won over by Twitter. I am definitely in favour of it as a tool for opening up lines of communication globally and any kind of alternative source to mainstream news media, but in terms of staying connected to my multiple selves and generating a sense of connection with my ‘followers’…it just hasn’t happened yet.

Many people prefer Twitter’s more open platform over the more relationship-focused Fbook – the fact that you can ‘follow’ people without them necessarily ‘following’ you. Many people think the technical structure of Fbook is messier and more complicated than it needs to be. In terms of information distribution, I find Twitter to be more surface-level and quantity-based, however, this isn’t to say that it doesn’t lead you to deeper levels of information, because it does indeed do that.

My lack of excitement could be because Twitter doesn’t seem to be designed for dialogue, but rather an encyclopedia stream of fast-paced communication, meant to be retweeted from one person to the next. On many levels, Twitter is a great tool but if I were to imagine it as a physical environment and atmosphere, it would be very noisy and constantly shifting. Facebook, on the other hand, is not necessarily somewhere where I would suggest to take your first date, but the visual thumbnails do spruce up the walls a bit… even if it’s all a warm disguise for the corporate building just beyond the screened facade. At least Fbook is designed for threaded conversations where ideas can emerge in between ‘friends’…but then again, perhaps it depends on who your ‘friends’ are – if all your ‘friends’ do is tend to farms and read their horoscopes, than I’d suggest you hop on over to Twitter to see what everyone else is thinking about. But be prepared for the mental shock to your networked system…

Just as I was settling into the twitterverse, a friend and fellow Postselfer suggested I might want to check out Empire Avenue — “the social stock market game!” She warned me that it could be perceived as a disturbing angle on social media, yet might be a strangely effective way to do social networking. Since I had already worked up the nerve to embrace Twitter, I thought I should join right then. Not even five minutes later I had someone asking me to connect to all of my social networks. This freaked me out so I adjusted my settings a little bit to retreat back into more of a voyeuristic role. Since I’m quite dumb when it comes to the real world stock market, I don’t anticipate becoming very savvy with this virtual one but it has been interesting to think about it through more of a philosophical lens — “Buy shares in your friends, family, favorite movie stars, musicians, businesses – anyone – and earn virtual cash for wise investments! Become a virtual millionaire!”

It’s also interesting to see someone else create a project which takes a completely different spin on the “value” of identity with/in social media…

So….it’s been a while, how have you been? how’s your networking? how’s your self? Ever notice when you let something slide for awhile and then go to do it again, just how strange it feels and how hesitant you are with every move? I’ll just try and jump right in but I’ve got a lot of catching up to do with several entries already planned.

I don’t like skipping more than a month on here, I feel out of sorts when I do. I started feeling guilty at the beginning of March, and a little depressed that I wasn’t staying on top of it. Although I was still keeping track of ideas to reflect on throughout March and April, as each day passed it became more and more difficult to face things from behind. For these reasons, I have backdated this entry, along with several others to follow between then and now. I even feel guilty about backdating…but it’s not as if I haven’t been thinking about my self in network…I’ve made lots of notes…really, I have.

Posting to the Facebook portal is easy since I often don’t include more than a link or a simple thought, mainly so I don’t forget about it and can hopefully return back to reflect some more. In fact, I encourage you to “like” the portal on FB so that you can get updates and stay connected…but, if you’re like I was just over a year ago, you are a conscious resistor to the social network, and, well, that’s ok…you do what you need to do in order to survive.
 

Ken Lum, Mirror Maze with 12 Signs of Depression (2002-2011), Vancouver Art Gallery

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James Lindsay, Postselfer, Facebook Portal:

“This thing about the project being ahead of Postself (heidi) is significant because her ‘being behind’ is an internal demand to practise and perform her selfprojection, which is Postself; including, of course, formal writing required for the academic project, though that is a demand from *outside* Facebook. As a practising networked self, will Heidi always feel ‘behind’ by dint of the performative and collective aspects of Postself? She mentions it often, and her interest in procrastination gets a mention too,…Is this part of the performance?…is this part of being networked? And while Postself grows in bytes and meaning at her First Birthday, Heidi as artist tends and renders.”

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[ font manipulation added by Postself | images: Aurel Schmidt's wiki page from Whitney Museum ]
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Master of the Universe/ FlexMaster 3000, pencil, colored pencil, acrylic, beer, dirt on paper, 89.5 x 52.5", 2010

I am interested in the idea of the performed self. Although it is not one, not the definite article, as soon as it is performed. I am interested because of the paradoxes that proliferate around the notion. I am interested because of the habit of thought whereby the self being called on to create or produce, the first thing it does is create a self or subject. I am therefore interested in the proximity between creation and performance.

There might be then selfish reasons to write anything here, to add my voice, as it were. It might also seem like blatant self-promotion to create and perform a self in fb, here. For me, I think it is almost report-worthy. Since, on the reactivation of my account several days ago, I have acted on every suggestion of friendship regardless of whether I’ve known or have ever met the person (or other) and in doing so have ignored the injunction to only send a friend request if I personally know the person (or other) to whom I’m sending it.

This is dishonest behaviour any way you look at it. It is not the behaviour of a friend. Perhaps I am not taking fb seriously? Maybe just publicity seeking? Am I guilty of manipulating these poor people (others) into thinking they have a friend when they are just numbers to me?

But then is fb a place of sufficient seriousness and honesty to make such a confession? Do you think? Is it a place at all? Or a place of ubiquitous displacement?

Because this also enters into the question of performing selves. It is not neither here nor there; it is here and there. Performance is a placing as well as an acting, but a placing in displacement, for which a there declares its nearness to a here, close enough to be in hearing – for the audience. With technological enhancement a hearing can take place over some considerable distance but not, however often you hear it, in absentia.

To make my case open and shut, I would like to present another’s, which is clearly not, not decisive, not at least in view of my own reportworthy misbehaviour, but furthers the problematic of self, creation and created self. This might be called the case of the lost family member, because we lost someone.

details, Master of the Universe/ FlexMaster 3000

I mean ‘lost’ in the ‘lost contact’ and not the mortal sense, and in the sense that you speak of one succumbing to an addiction, the ‘substance’ of that addiction, moreover, being as substantial as it would be for any other; an assertion I’d like to substantiate here, because the susceptibility to becoming addicted to its habit tells us something about facebook. It also adds to the characterisation of fb as the future of the net in its function of Netopticon.

This person over approximately a year – a year less ordinary for having a greater share of emotional upheaval for her than others, particularly for her – loved fb, and used it at first to give expression to her taste in music, art, uploading videos and images, sharing and commenting on them, frequently updating her profile. Her investment of time and interest increased quite rapidly, to the extent that the outsider remarked the greater frequency with she was using fb and longer stretches she was online.

The insider remarked that she always seemed to be online and that she would comment compulsively, especially on her own posts, even if others were not doing so. The insider also noticed the halo of positivity surrounding her fb utterances as it grew more and more pronounced and things shone more and more brightly and positively. Certain insiders started to find her utterances odd, oddly uncommunicative, confrontingly gnomic at times and self-referential, despite the sunshiney attitude.

Weeping Woman, pencil, colored pencil, acrylic on paper, 32 x 22", 2008

When the outsider remarked on her spending so much or even too much time fb-ing, just how great her emotional investment was became clear, to the point that she would remove herself and her laptop away from the vicinity of people she felt were critical of her behaviour. Difficult with family. When the insider challenged her online to defend the increasing eccentricity of her fb persona, she both took the argument offline, calling it a betrayal, and unfriended the critic. But the moment of the gulf becoming evident between her online ‘positive’ – Michael Jackson would call it ‘blanket’ – behaviour and her offline aggressive territorialism regarding a media network she made personal rather than social, the moment of there appearing a split between the two, was not the decisive one.

Because you’re right, of course, this did not look like the pathology of an addiction, just some online acting-out. Self-creation. New media infatuation. I began to think her activity had taken on a pathological dimension when she gave up fb. I was not around for the ‘break’ which some say occurred when she did, the screaming, tears, the as sudden descent into a depressive lethargy, but received a letter, an email, telling me a piece I’d written and posted at Square White World giving my reasons for having left fb several months earlier had been written to her, for her alone.  I was allegedly talking to her. Same with another thing I’d written, Dear Visitor it was called.

No I Couldn't Possibly, Thank You, Yes, pencil, colored pencil, acrylic, beer, 31 x 25", 2008

She was off fb for several months and the addiction reasserted itself with a vengeance. To avoid the betrayals of possible critics, this time she adopted a new identity, made new friends, keeping only those whose interaction with her previous fb self had been affirming and uncritical.

To remove the threat of criticism offline, she removed herself from most of her familial relationships. Leaving home, in fact. Before she did, however, she gave a lengthy disquisition, a testimonial really, justifying her imminent departure. Preeminent among her reasons for leaving were that she had discovered she was an artist, was supported in this finding by the fb community, and required space to ‘go mad.’ I am an artist, she said. But I’ve not yet found my medium.

I suspected this last of being disingenuous in view of her fb activities. I was using facebook in a different way, she had said at the time she gave up. Cases of addiction – to fb particularly – often resort to this plea, of using the drug or having the habit in a different way, to maintain the appearance that there is and they have a choice. But what struck me and stopped me from commenting was the legitimacy with which such a claim could be made: I am an artist and fb is my medium.

With this case, I would like to add to or return to the image of the optic of a Netopticon its carceral property, and call it, in view of the prison which we are not said to be trying to escape only resist, a description of Stockholm Syndrome. The other side of the optic is obviously the desire to submit oneself to it. In its carceral incarnation as a gaze of permanent and global surveillance to which we apparently all fall victim, what else could the willing prisoner be said to be feeling but love for his guard?

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further reading:

Alex Gartenfeld writes about succumbing to the desire to be looked at as being the ultimate crudeness. Because there is this other side to the image of the Netopticon: the net offers a democratic theatre of participation and the desire to be seen takes on an ontological function. Witness here, also, Tiqqun’s Raw Materials for a Theory of the Young Girl, here. By way of contrast, Alain Badiou‘s categories of truth-procedurals, politics, love, science, art, seem positively comforting, existing out of reach of the representational system and neoliberalism‘s commercialisation of ideology, political, personal, paradigmatic, via art to advertising. Via the social to the self, by way of the ad.

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~ Simon Taylor, http://squarewhiteworld.com

constantly shifting

in-between

moments of solitary insight

and an addictive desire to be observed and liked

You think you know me. You think you know what is best for me. You think you know what I want. What are you basing this on?…my activities and interests, the things I make up in my profile, the things I link to in my status? Isn’t that a bit naive of you? Did you ask me what I want, what I need? No….you just decided for yourself, didn’t you.

Why do I continue to put up with this? What people must think of me sticking it out with you…the things they must be saying behind my back.

It’s not just me, you know. People are angry…I have Friends who are angry…and they are voicing their opinions of this recent change of yours, which, I must say, seems to be having a negative affect on your community. Some are taking it quite personally. I hope you really did do your research…I hope you thought this one out….

Yes, the little things are what we miss but, if you think about it, those little things speak volumes about the level of control you are taking from the users making up your environment. What if we want to arrange the order of the information we choose to provide about ourselves – are you going to let us have that option? Some people have decided not to play your little game, opting to remove the persona that once existed on his or her profile. Is that what you want – a bunch of faceless nodes in your network that rebel against the restrictive and formulaic design?

I’m sorry to have to take this tone with you. Things had been going well… You must know that I speak out of concern….out of….

I’m sorry, I just can’t continue with this conversation until I know that you are really listening.

Are you there Facebook?

Will we archive these digital documents of our selves? Or will we post them once to share and then move on? What I like about all of the recent user-friendly applications that have emerged on the social media scene, is that they make us look back at what we’ve done and at representations of our selves, even if for some selves this means a reduced version of a digital identity. But for how long will we pause, glance, look, watch and see these formulaic creations? Is anyone interested in thinking about them….critically? Compiling a year of status updates might provide a profound realization of one’s self, yes? Are we learning about ourselves in this process? Do we have the time to even engage in this kind of behaviour? Are you growing impatient while reading this list of questions? Are you wanting to move on to another soundbite?

How fast time flies….my Selfpost spanning the past 7 months: (via Pummelvision)

:: self-data-portrait mined from the internet ::

…created using Personas by artist Aaron Zinman >

“In a world where fortunes are sought through data-mining vast information repositories, the computer is our indispensable but far from infallible assistant. Personas demonstrates the computer’s uncanny insights and its inadvertent errors, such as the mischaracterizations caused by the inability to separate data from multiple owners of the same name.” (credits)

Although I’ve been consumed with many tasks, I continue to live up to my manifesto on a daily basis. In fact, I am now finding that I tend to use Fbook as a strange kind of coping mechanism that contrasts what I am faced with on my other screen. At home, I work with a double screen set-up and I often go back and forth to Fbook when confronted with difficult work, the same way I venture to the kitchen for snacks. I also continue to maintain and archive my Postself “list” of anything and everything to revisit and expand upon later. Just this past week, several topics have made the blogosphere and entered into our FB portal discussions — namely, the cartoon profile campaigns that have popped up and emotional reactions to the new FB layout changes — plenty food for thought.

Speaking of archived lists….for some time now, I’ve been wanting to post about our relationship to Facebook as a digital archive — an archived database that is connected to and integrated within all of the other networked social media applications we use, such as Flickr, Twitter, Vimeo, Youtube, Tumblr, etc. For instance, I will often find myself ‘sharing’ something just to have the link made readily available in my profile and just in case one of my friends posts something in response that triggers an idea or another resource to follow up on. Because it seems I’m on Fbook so much, I tend to search through my archived links rather than venturing over to my delicious account.

This networked language we use today may be new, but the act of archiving one’s personal life is not. The internet, however, provides a multilinear process for us to use, consisting of interconnections to different locations for self-storage. A couple of years ago there was an art exhibit developed in San Francisco called “Self Storage,” which was inspired by the historical precedent of the Dymaxion Chronofile, a system that Buckminster Fuller devised to chronicle his life. I began thinking more about Fuller a month ago while preparing a paper for a conference. Then, just like anything significant and meant to be contemplated, his name kept popping up all over the place. I think Bucky Fuller was extremely far ahead of his time, with interests and behaviours quite relevant for our current cultural moment. It has been said that his life is the most documented human life in history…

From Stanford’s R. Buckminster Fuller Archive:

The centerpiece of the collection, in many ways, is the Dymaxion Chronofile, an exhaustive journal of Fuller’s trajectory from 1920 until his death in 1983. Fuller had been collecting clippings and artifacts since he was a child. But in 1917, he began a formal chronological file which he would later call the Dymaxion Chronofile. The Chronofile was a vast scrapbook that included copies of all his incoming and outgoing correspondence, newspaper clippings, notes and sketches, and even dry cleaning bills. Initially, the Chronofile was bound into handsome leather-backed volumes. In later years, to save space and expenses, the Chronofile was simply stored in boxes. By the end of his life, this exhaustive “lab notebook” of his life’s experiment amounted to 270 linear feet.

Fuller intended for the Chronofile to be a case study of his life in context, in which his daily activities were presented in parallel with developments in technology and society. In it, he at once traced the evolution of his own thoughts, relationships, and business ventures; and documented new inventions, trends, and technologies that were emerging on the broader level.

Click to view slideshow.

There’s already applications being produced that allow for FB interactions to be archived in books. Which makes me wonder how we might “selfpost” differently if we knew there was the potential of our digital identities to be preserved not only on paper but bound within a book.

* thanks to Postselfer Marianela for this Youtube clip