As almost all of our self-representations are now so profoundly inflected by digital curation, I wonder if we should even try to pretend that not only does social media lie, it is fundamentally incapable of telling the truth. Image: Bing’s version of DALL-E 2.
True, perhaps, and yet all technology, all cognitive hyper-extension through art, language, culture – it is all really just one vast and monumentally intricate selfie, a world that replicates and represents itself through us, in us, as us. Curiously, and more than a little bit Zen, is that if everything is self, then nothing is.
Instagram is – at base – narcissism, self-obsession, insecurity, pathological inadequacy and the normative, technologically-mediated ubiquity of endless self-surveillance as peer-group pressure on steroids. It’s probably offensive for some people to hear these analytical assessments but, really, that’s ok – it is a part of a core psychological narcissism that the confrontation with and of […]
Context: Visualising Facebook I find it interesting that, beyond regional or other associated differences, a philosophical observation to be made is that the underlying and universal property here is that of recursive information system self-replication. So, we observe persons, cultures, national identities visually and linguistically self-replicating through a rapidly-evolving language and grammar of idiom, meme, […]
The technology through which we measure, celebrate and cultivate our selves is simultaneously the blind-spot in our vision of that Self; this is as much a symptom of the technology as it is endemic of the introspective cultural and psychological process of self-definition. A technology of language and communication (or, really, any other art) has […]
I do wonder if we perhaps miss the forest for the trees, here. The primary function and operational practice of any cognitive or cultural communications system is that of encoding self-replication as sustainable continuity. Where we are all quite intimately bound to and fascinated by these technologically-mediated interpersonal spaces, in an implicit near-narcotic and narcissistic […]
What I find unrelentingly entertaining about the technologically-mediated collective and aspirationally-individuated self-definitions of our historical moment is not that we (all, and each in our own ways) seek to create and sustain these distributed and functionally differential or dissociative Others of self-representation that we endlessly cultivate. What is more interesting is that we rarely notice, […]
Technology is always and already the cognitive hyper-extension of our minds and the many ways in which we may choose (or be chosen) to see ourselves through the diverse manifestations of this technology constitute the complex forms of introspective life that we (perhaps inadvertently) inhabit. The material extension and concrete presence of technology masks it’s […]
The extent to which we manifest or express individual self-determination in a virtualised, distributed public display of visual social-media identity-construction is simultaneously the measure of our imprisonment by that dragging anchor and inconstant vessel of Self. Self-definition is (a) freedom but it is simultaneously the persistent dragging anchor and burden of an external world, internalised […]
Selfies are memes and memes are cultural selfies through which a logic and self-replication of the question of individual or cultural self-identity reproduces itself.
Personality or persona is the most concise form in which a reflexive attitude and interpretation (both from and) towards the world can be captured…
Daedelus Kite 