Two figures stand in a gallery—a child on each side of the mirror, both partially dissolving into particles. Behind them, their silhouettes loom larger, projected against a digital wall of cubes, like memories rendered in 3D. And it feels like we’ve stepped into the quiet moment just before someone asks: which version of me are you remembering right now?
There’s something tender and unsettling about this space. The lighting is clinical, but the emotion bleeds out like a slow leak—fragile bodies beginning to scatter, dissolve, glitch. As if the act of looking too long might erase them.
It’s been a week of strange echoes. News cycles running loops. People grasping at the idea of truth in a world increasingly filled with mirrors. Some things broke open. Some were quietly swept under digital rugs. Somewhere between a resignation and a riot, we pixelate—holding form just long enough to be archived.
This image feels like it knew. It feels like a commentary on identity in an age of projections and versions. A gentle child split between real and reflected, both crumbling. Not from violence, but from time. From attention. From the gentle weight of existing too visibly in too many places at once.
And maybe that’s what art is doing lately—standing still long enough to let us watch ourselves fall apart. And if we’re lucky, reassemble differently.
In the last couple of months, people worldwide have witnessed their lives abruptly moving to the digital realm. The ‘real world’ that phone-addicted teenagers were previously missing out on has, essentially, disappeared and pushed us to our screens for work, entertainment and socialising. Our online
Tricking the reward system
Desire, ambition and addiction - the three elements hiding under a chemical named dopamine - could be seen to encapsulate our social media experience. We reach for our phone when we need comfort, validation for our successes and an ego-boost. Numerous studies have shown that social media platforms tap, albeit less intensely, into the same neural circuitry as cocaine, hooking us on the feeling of reward - the little popping numbers of likes, tweets and whatnots. These feelings are not accidental side effects but carefully designed techniques, as evidenced by examples such as Instagram's policy of withholding likes that was modelled to first disappoint users only to reward them later.
According to GlobalWebIndex’s study, 47% of internet users aged between 16 and 64 years in selected countries, have reported spending longer on social media during coronavirus outbreak, out of which 15% plan to continue with this new behaviour in the future. So how can we avoid falling victim to such dopamine-driven feedback loop and its consequential effects on our mental health?
Week 2- Contentions with my Global Digital Citizenship.
Last post I touched briefly on the idea of a ‘self-narrative’, a notion of a self-identity throughout social media. Wilken and McCosker call this a ‘social-self’ (2014) a phenomenon brought about by globalization and its focus on individualization. This individualised social-self is the key to our digital citizenship. I, however, have great misgivings with a digital citizenship in a globalized world.
But first, strap in kids cause we’re about to board the definition train- full speed ahead!
Globalization is a sociological term that that is both concrete and ambiguous. It is an expanded neo-liberal economic structure and erasure of cultural boarders through many social practices and technology, or in this case social media (McGrew, 1998). It characterizes the social processes of the past couple of decades. Everything around us is globalization.
Individualization is an aspect of globalization; it’s the focus society places on the self; the formation of the external identity and of the ‘me’ (Wilken & McCosker, 2014). How do we structure our self-image, our own narrative, and our own biographies? Through sweet sweet capitalism, and more recently, through social-selves and digital citizenship.
Digital citizenship is the ability to contribute online, a social inclusion that is seemingly boundaryless. Those with digital citizenship are digital citizens, people who can navigate the digital world effectively and regularly (Mossberger, Tolbert, & McNeal, 2011).
My concern comes when we try to bring together the ideas of citizenship, digital citizens and politics that are still very much set within their nations (despite the ramifications of being global through globalization) into this notion of a ‘global digital citizenship’.
T. H. Marshall explains that a citizenship is a legal right to live in an existing society (Mossberger, Tolbert, & McNeal, 2011), basically I get to suckle at mother-country’s socio-cultural-economic teat and politicians have to listen to me because I have a vote, I keep them in power with said vote and my taxes pay for their condos- I mean our roads and health-care. The key here is the legal right which digital citizenship lacks.
Further in a globalized world, our digital citizenships are no longer local, they are global. We only need to look as far as the international coverage of the US election for proof. Everyone took part in it.
Searson et al. contends that a global citizenship and by extension digital global citizenship is voluntary (2014, p730), but I disagree. In a post-industrial world where technology rules, we don’t have a say in creating a digital citizenship, global or otherwise- even through pure accident as a side-effect of our eternal search for the social-self.
The notion of a global digital citizenship falls apart when legal legitimacy is brought up. My local citizenship gives me the power to change my country. My digital citizenship doesn’t, and my global citizenship has no impact on the world. I have no say over Trump’s decision on the Trans-Pacific Partnership and yet it would affect me greatly. As digital identities and citizenships become more important there needs to be new rules that allow those affected by the man-child god-ruler with their finger over the ‘nuke everything’ button to have their say instead of screaming into the white-blue void of Twitter.
sources cited under the cut
References
McGrew, A. (1998). The Globalisation debate: Putting the advanced capitalist state in its place. Global Society, 12(3), pp.299-321.
Mossberger, K., Tolbert, C.J. & McNeal, R.S. (2011). Digital Citizenship: The Internet, Society, and Participation. The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, London, England.
Wilken, R. and McCosker, A. (2014). Chapter 17: Social Selves. In: S. Cunningham and S. Turnbull, ed., The Media & Communication in Australi, 4th ed. Crows Nest, NSW: Allen & Unwin, pp.291-295.
Searson, M., Hancock, M., Soheil, N. and Shepherd, G. (2015). Digital citizenship within global contexts. Education and Information Technologies, 20(4), pp.729-741.
Collapsed into the same experiential space, the past and present colliding, our digital selves are archives of our identities. This is the holographic self—not a timeline of identity, or a steady accumulation of wisdom, but the criss-crossed network of being a person, mapped out onto screens. To be a digital human is to be many, and in more than one place at once. Am I a good person? Depends on where on the timeless web of self you stand in order to look and judge.
http://www.walkerart.org/channel/2010/how-to-disappear-in-america July 15, 2010 Dialogue/Interview 1:24:06 “Last summer, after writing a story for Wired magazine about people who fake their own deaths, journalist Evan Ratliff decided to vanish and invited the public to try to find him. While he attempted to stay hidden for 30 days, he was caught in 25, thanks in part to the digital breadcrumb trail he left behind. Join Peter Eleey, curator of The Talent Show, and Ratliff as they discuss data-mining, surveillance, and other ramifications of a culture awash in in information.” "Gone Forever: What Does It Take to Really Disappear?" By Evan Ratliff August 13, 2009 | 11:28 pm | Wired Issue 17.09 http://www.wired.com/vanish/2009/08/gone-forever-what-does-it-take-to-really-disappear/all/ "Writer Evan Ratliff Tried to Vanish: Here’s What Happened" By Evan Ratliff November 20, 2009 | 8:45 pm | Wired Issue 17.12 http://www.wired.com/vanish/
With all the discussion which has been surrounding the recent launch of Google+, I have naturally been thinking about Media, about the services which mediate our digital selves. I have found some of the rhetoric to be particular interesting, and it sparked my desire to write out a few of my own thoughts on these digitally mediated selves we now embody so mundanely. The narrative which was of particular interest to me was that which references a desire or a need to maintain a coherent and unified 'Body' (as it were) online. The desire to maintain an identity under a single service as much as possible, to try and aggregate our online self under a single medium. This seems to also be the desire of many of these service providers themselves. They also want to be the repositories of our embodied digital selves, to be The place where we go to express and socialize in all it's forms. From the service providers, therefore, I am not surprised to see this interest in aggregating all of a person's digitality. From the actual users, I find it more interesting. Now, I feel like I should state up front that this is not a critique of those users who share that desire. I will also state forthrightly that it is not a desire I share. However I see no particular reason to undermine those who do desire it. I simply saw this particular narrative as an opening in which some of my own thoughts on online presence crystalized and decided to use it as a jumping off point. This discussion of Media online brought to mind a (relatively!) old word. One which I feel I haven't heard used in a serious context in quite some time, but which was bandied about heavily in the 90s: Multimedia. This is a word which, at the end of the 20th Century, related very firmly to consumption. It meant a proliferation of passive media options in a single source. Text + Video + Sound == Multimedia. Once the novelty wore off of being able to package multiple media formats in a single artifact (document?), and instead became the norm (largely thanks to the rise of the Web), the word fell out of style. The key element of this word is that in this classical usage, even when it was billed as "interactive", it was always a collection of essentially passive media. With the rise of Web 2.0, and the proliferation of active medias, I see an opportunity to revive this word and give it new meaning. Multimedia simply means multiple medias after all. If we are aware of the fact that the services we use online are ways in which we are mediating our selves, then I personally desire very strongly to be multimedia. In effect we are all already multimedia beings. If we look at the concept of the Cyborg, we all exist and express ourselves through multiple media everyday. Rather than seeing this dispersion of the self through multiple medias, refracted online and off by our multimedia existence, as threatening I see it instead as creating a clearer expression of the Self. For me, personally, my self is not a unified coherent whole. It is a fractious, untidy beast as much a creation of myself as of others, my environment, genetic chance and daily chance. The concept of a unified self, or a wholeness to my various expressions and outputs strikes me as a fanciful fiction. A narrative with which I create a continuity from discontinuous events. I prefer my oline presence to reflect that. I post some things in twitter, some on tumblr, some things I link between them, some I don't. I like to leave long comments on articles and blogs I read rather than writing responses here and linking them, because for me those thoughts came from that article as much as myself, and I'd rather leave them there. I enjoy having a dispersed self, spread out a little all over the Internet. I am a multimedia cyborg.
