teleportraiture

Janet Bruesselbach has produced a series of portraits via various online chat platforms (google connect, skype etc). I love the way these images turn the ephemerality of digital talk into something fixed and permanent; capturing these moments that are so fleeting. At the same time, to me her work insists upon the permanence of our digital world, reminding us that 'moments' online have lives that long exceed our own, stored, searchable and retrievable in an historically unprecedented way. As such, these images can be understood not only as images of people, but as portraits of the ghosts in the machine.

google effects: augmenting the reality of your face

Image source: http://criticsunknown.com/slideshow/google/

In March, google released a range of aps intended to 'enhance' the experience of its online chat forum, Hangouts. According to a recent article in Slate, the most popular of these aps is 'google effects', an application which enhances your experience of Hangouts by enhancing your appearance: it allows you to adorn your chatting visage with a range of masks which are digitally mapped to your face, moving when you move and "retaining proper size and orientation as you lean forward and back or sway side to side" so as to give the appearance that you are wearing them in real life.

As you can see from the image above, the masks are cartoony and over the top: they do not so much enhance your appearance (in the sense of making you foxier) as they do hide it. Seth Stevenson argues that it is this very disruption of the reality of your face that makes google effects so popular (and useful): it obscures the visibility of your facial expressions and takes the pressure off the need to look a particular way while interacting online. This, for Stevenson, ironically allows users to interact with less emphasis on visibility, rendering Hangouts more like traditional orality oriented forms of communication like the telephone.

While I agree that google effects may well lessen the pressure of online chatting (and possibly increase its utilisation)(who hasn't been put off skyping sometimes as a consequence of a bad hair day/desire to have the conversation on the toilet/etc), I think there is something else going on that is not just about reducing visibility and rendering Hangouts more like the traditional invisible talkiness of the telephone. Rather, google effects allow us to use masks as a graphical shorthand to communicate complex emotions - turning us into the fleshy manifestation of emoticons.

In this way, google effects foregrounds the prismatic nature of online identity: by adding an additional layer of artifice to the digital visage, it forces us to think twice about who we are, and implicitly evokes the fact that identity itself is artifice; that the layers of selfhood are unendingly constructed, that we are masks all the way down to the bone. In this way, google effects insists on a narrative of digital identity in which the emotion/emoticon is a simulacrum, dissimulating (in the baudrillardian sense) that there is nothing beneath the sign.

And just as a geographical map interprets (and imagines) territorial space, so to does the mask of google effects precede (and configure) online identity, replacing the parody of a real world mask with the pastiche of a prismatic digital self. This evolution of the performance of identity for the digital realm recalls Jameson's insistence that one of the defining features of postmodernism is the replacement of parody by pastiche. What, then, are the implications for digital identity of what I'm sure will be increasingly complex and 'realistic' (hyperrealistic?) augmentations of self? Is it simply empowering us to self satirise (or go to the bathroom while we chat) or will the avatarisation of self online have real implications for the way in which we understand and perform our identities in the webisphere (and beyond?)

And what of the content of the mask? At what point is an obama mask an obama mask, and when does it turn into an obama face? (yes, that is a true blood reference, with a little touch of point break thrown in for good measure). Will we see an explosion of efforts to trademark our face to prevent our online impersonation? At what point do the things that you say while wearing my face defame me?

digital dualism vs augmented reality

In his recent piece in The New Inquiry, Nathan Jurgenson discusses the fetishization of 'real life' (as opposed to web life) in contemporary culture.

He argues that the discursive valorisation of 'the real' can be understood as a reaction to the proliferation of mobile technology. Indeed, he argues that the constancy of our interconnection/-nectedness has left us longing for a more pure or authentic pre-digital self, manifesting in the celebration of tropes of the homemade, the offline, the rustic.

However, Jurgenson takes the view that the romanticization of the meat world is based on a false assumption that there is dualism between our online and offline worlds. Rather, he argues that we are living in an age of augmented reality, where the online and offline are interconnected, mutually constituting and reinforcing, and that there is artificiality at play in suggestions that we have 'collectively lost the offline experience'. Instead, he claims that we are now able to appreciate offline life in a way we were never able to before.

It strikes me as cynical to suggest that we appreciate something more because it has been compromised, and i don't think that Jurgenson pays enough attention to the way that the online physically (and psychologically) disrupts and coopts our experience of the offline (doesn't he care that his friends are on their phones during dinner?), but I do think he makes a good point regarding the dissolution of the divide between offline and online life when he says that "the clear distinction between on and offline, between human and technology, is queered beyond tenability."

And maybe, as Jurgenson alleges, this isn't a bad thing. Perhaps, the more comfortable we get with our augmented reality, the better we will be able to manage the new rules of the game - and the less we will be bothered by our friends tweeting through dinner.

But for me - and you can call me old fashioned - there will always be room for a twitter free zone, for conversation that is not mediated by a character limit and for loose talk, muddled up, spontaneous opinions that aren't edited to most flatter the opiner. Does that mean I reject the augmentation of our reality? Do I think we have to switch off to plug into the 'real world'? No. But I do think it's important that we keep discussing the way that the various modes of 'real life' both online and off intersect, bounce off and shape each other, and the way that senses of self are profoundly informed by the way that that self is performed and communicated. 


What do you think? Is it a zero sum game? Or can it be both and neither?

multiple selves

It has become almost redundant to refer to the web as the technological apparatus for the emergence of multiple selves. Sherry Turkle talks about the way that web allows us to “recast identity in terms of multiple windows and parallel lives” and explore multiple aspects of self in parallel. Laura Robinson notes that “these technologies present self-ing opportunities for an ephemeral self, without commitment to a masterself that becomes an ‘I’ or ‘me’.” 

Clearly, the theoretical paradigm of multiple selves reflects the postmodern critique of the narrative of the essential self with its attendant rejection of the ‘myth of wholeness’. And it is the desire to preserve this revolutionary potential of multiple selves - the choose your own identity riff that Chris Poole lionises - that has led to so much uproar around ideas like google passport.

But how much are we actually walking the walk of all this prismatic identity talk? More and more the read-write-webverse seems to be trending towards an interconnectedness of self that forces us to be one person online. 

In fact, an emerging consequence of the collapsed contexts of the web seems to be that we are perhaps more our selves online than in the real world - I am me in ways I didn't have to be me before, I am the same me to my mum and my boss and my friends, even when once I would have preferred to keep those versions of my self separate and distinct.

Is this leading to a situation - like a certain social network founder would have it - where privacy itself is no longer a relevant ambition? Is the web finally going to catch up to the Australian legal system? Or are we going to find new ways to carve out private spaces in the share-everything landscape of the web? 

Of course, it's still early days in the evolution of the web and it's hard to predict what it will look like five years (or even a year) from now. But I worry that the longer we allow things to continue as they are - where we rely on the privacy settings of corporations with absolutely no interest in protecting our privacy - the more we will disenfranchise ourselves from the conversation and handover control of a big part of our identities to 'the man'.

What do you think? Can we still have private places in open spaces? Or do we need locked wall garden internet communities to keep our secrets for us?

Connected, but alone

In Sherry Turkle's recent TED talk, the Life on the Screen author turns her analytical gaze on the paradox of why she loves to receive texts even as she worries that too many texts may be a problem. In essence, she is interested in exploring the way in which the increasing ubiquity of technology may be changing the way we relate to each other - and the way we relate to ourselves. For Turkle, the central difference between the excitement she felt 15 years ago with regard to technology and the concern she feels now is the fact that 15 years ago we would go online, hang out - and then turn off. 


It is the absence of turning off that gives Turkle the sense that technology may be taking us places we don't want to go. She cites what she refers to as the 'Goldilocks effect' of technology - the ability it gives us to moderate our self-presentation, interactions and relationships in such a way as to keep other people 'not too close, not too far, just right'. In so doing, she argues, we have lost the ability to have a real conversation, and we have lost the ability to be alone, with the result that "we expect more from technology and less from each other". Sadly, a lot of the examples she gave of the increasing alone/togetherness of our social lives rang true for me. 


What do you think? Are we trying so hard to be constantly connected that we can't be by ourselves? Are we editing and retouching ourselves so much that we are no longer able to experience authentic intimacy? Is the way that we communicate online inauthentic, or just a new kind of authenticity?