Good stuff Jill. I would argue that creating and defining ourselves through emblems IS our national identity. America was founded on subverting one identity to build a new one. The New World was built by defining symbols of freedom and individualism. Nothing more American than world building , crafting identity is the American spirit etc etc
This is awesome!!!! Justin Smith-Ruiu's "It's All Over" for The Point covers some of the same ideas, although he is far less optimistic. He has some quite depressing conclusions about how this sort of algorithmic thinking plays out:
"But something’s wrong here. Burroughs does not in fact entail the others, and the strong and mature part of the self—that is to say the part that resists the forces that would beat all human subjectivity down into an algorithm—knows this. But human subjects are vanishingly small beneath the tsunami of likes, views, clicks and other metrics that is currently transforming selves into financialized vectors of data. This financialization is complete, one might suppose, when the algorithms make the leap from machines originally meant only to assist human subjects, into the way these human subjects constitute themselves and think about themselves, their tastes and values, and their relations with others."
He goes on to justify the title of the piece, but I think he probably goes too far. As you point out, we are always making choices that constitute both ourselves and how we would like to be perceived. As Joan Didion writes in a quote similar to Sontag's, "style is character," and to the extent that we have always had character (personality), we have always had style. Making these choices is nothing new, but insofar as they have already been made for us--whether by a company that prescribes a connotation to their product or though an algorithm that offers the feeling of discovering something new--they are not our choices at all.
This is my very college-discussion-board type way of saying that I appreciate your more sympathetic perspective. Smith-Ruiu definitely misses on the benefits of the emblem-based social world.
Good stuff Jill. I would argue that creating and defining ourselves through emblems IS our national identity. America was founded on subverting one identity to build a new one. The New World was built by defining symbols of freedom and individualism. Nothing more American than world building , crafting identity is the American spirit etc etc
agree fully
So well written!!!
This is awesome!!!! Justin Smith-Ruiu's "It's All Over" for The Point covers some of the same ideas, although he is far less optimistic. He has some quite depressing conclusions about how this sort of algorithmic thinking plays out:
"But something’s wrong here. Burroughs does not in fact entail the others, and the strong and mature part of the self—that is to say the part that resists the forces that would beat all human subjectivity down into an algorithm—knows this. But human subjects are vanishingly small beneath the tsunami of likes, views, clicks and other metrics that is currently transforming selves into financialized vectors of data. This financialization is complete, one might suppose, when the algorithms make the leap from machines originally meant only to assist human subjects, into the way these human subjects constitute themselves and think about themselves, their tastes and values, and their relations with others."
He goes on to justify the title of the piece, but I think he probably goes too far. As you point out, we are always making choices that constitute both ourselves and how we would like to be perceived. As Joan Didion writes in a quote similar to Sontag's, "style is character," and to the extent that we have always had character (personality), we have always had style. Making these choices is nothing new, but insofar as they have already been made for us--whether by a company that prescribes a connotation to their product or though an algorithm that offers the feeling of discovering something new--they are not our choices at all.
This is my very college-discussion-board type way of saying that I appreciate your more sympathetic perspective. Smith-Ruiu definitely misses on the benefits of the emblem-based social world.
I need to read the smith-ruiu!! and so glad you enjoyed :D