Post-Due Date Tid Bit

While I was commenting on one of the other posts from this section, I remembered an episode of MTV's "True Life" that is extremely relevant to the idea of online identity, RPGs, and cyberpunks. YouTube disabled embedding, so here is a link: view the video here.

This episode follows three women who have various problems interacting with others in the "real" world: social anxiety, stage fright, shyness, etc. They use the Internet and RPGs (role-playing games) to overcome these problems and lead fulfilling lives--all while being online. The full episode shows each of them trying to take their online confidence and personalities into the real world, but as the end of the clip shows, it doesn't go well for any of them.

What is so different about interacting with someone online? Why is it so much more comfortable for these people? While I understand being able to put up a front and simply sign offline if something becomes too intense, suffocating, or intolerable, but the same is true of "real" life--we have the personal freedom to walk away from any situation that we feel uncomfortable in, extenuating circumstances aside. We can walk away from relationships that we don't feel are thriving. We can walk offstage if the audience is staring too hard. We can put our clothes back on if we feel too much pressure.

If people are turning to RPGs and the Internet to act out their actual personalities, what does the computer hide? Any ideas, guys?

Catfish: The Creepiest Movie EVER

WARNING: SPOILERS!

The above two videos are trailers for the recent documentary film Catfish, during which the main character (Nev) and his two best friends record an internet love story with a twist. One day, out of the blue, Nev receives a Facebook friend request from a young (elementary school level) girl, Abby, who likes to paint. Her mother (Angela) also friends Nev, and they all become both Facebook and IRL (in real life) friends--Abby's mother sends Nev paintings, letters, even money. Over e-mail, G-chat, and Facebook, Nev finds himself becoming a significant part of their lives, and visa versa. Nev also becomes Facebook friends with Abby's older sister, Megan, who is close to his age. The two exchange photos, videos, sound clips, etc. and about halfway through the film, become involved in a sort of "would-be" relationship: as Nev says, if they were to meet and have the same chemistry in person as they do online, they would instantaneously be in a relationship. Nev believes that everything Abby, Megan, and Angela is telling him is real and true because he sees these characters interacting with numerous other people--family and friends--via wall posts,  tagged photos, etc. They have a real life, so they're real people.

Except, the spin is (surprise!) they're not. Nev and his friends decide to go visit Abby, Megan, and Angela--unannounced. They find their "home" abandoned, and in the second address Nev was given by Angela, they find Abby and Angela--neither of whom are who Nev expected them to be. The mother, who lives at home with her husband and his two severely handicapped sons (in addition to Abby), has been spending hours upon hours on multiple computers and cell phones creating an entire world that doesn't exist. She likes to paint, not Abby. She has fallen in love with Nev via her role-playing as Megan. She even goes as far as to lie to Nev and tell him she has cancer so he'll be sympathetic instead of angry when he finds out the truth.

How could Nev had guessed? He didn't meet one single girl through Craigslist or on Myspace, where it would be easier to spot  a fake. He met an entire family, including cousins, aunts, uncles, sons, daughters, and friends. All of these fake characters interacted with each other and with other people, creating an online world that didn't exist. This film addresses many of the topics in this section's texts: Nev fell in love over the internet, leading us to question what "mating" has become and what role touch plays in the creation of a relationship; Angela created around 20 "living" characters, showing us that a life online isn't  close to life in the "real" world; and questioning whether or not we even need physical bodies for digital and technological bodies to exist?

(This is an image that Nev photoshoped--he sent it to Megan to "make her smile.")

Was Angela crossing a line, or simply taking role-playing out of Second Life and into her "first" life? Ollivier Dyens defines what "artificial life" is, and it's scary to say that Angela's world of fake characters and manipulation doesn't seem too far from our own world of untagging and profile pictures: "A-life is also the cultural body, the human-saturated environment, the protection of endangered species, and the spread of automobiles. A-life is life that breaks away from biology, replication of culture rather than genetics. Artificial life is our extreme dependence upon electricity, our pharmaceutically maintained lifestyle, and our technologically controlled and protected existence" (94). By creating so many different people, Angela was spreading her "cultural DNA" in the same way that we do by opening up a twitter account or telling our friends to follow our Google Reader. Having so many different three-dimensional characters in a two-dimensional world made Angela extremely culturally relevant--they covered a huge range of ages, both the sexes, and many different types of personalities

It would appear to me that Angela was crossing a personal boundary...but not a cultural one. She had created artificial life and allowed it to grow and breathe without her (at one point in the film she tells Nev that the situation took control of her). Her world became, in the words of Dyens, a "living idea" (22). A "virtual being [...] is an expression of new life, a life made of signs, culture, and knowledge" (33). Angela's living idea became it's own cultural bubble--each of the characters did what a "real" person would be expected to do: listen to music, have favorite bands, like to make art, share pictures with his/her friends, respond to wall posts, comment on other people's content, etc. Her world was entirely made of signs, culture, and knowledge. And she manipulated all the signs to point to reality.

Is Angela a cyberpunk? Was Megan or Abby a cyberpunk? Dyens quotes Bruce Sterling as he says that cyberpunks are "hybrids," "brain-computer interfaces" (73). They are "a common narrative on the ride of a new type of cultural body (created and formed within computers)" (73). Each of Angela's characters was a blend of her own self (she was the one acting the parts, so there had to be at least a shred of herself in each person), what she would expect that character to do (a male persona would type differently than a female person, for instance), and a computer (each of these characters truly only existed within a computer). It seems as if this sort of interaction between a person and a computer is becoming the norm--it is not just a part of a bleak, A.I.-esque future. People around us in the normal world are creating "cultural bodies" that exist without physical bodies.

(From the film A.I.)

If someone were to take your internet presence, lift it up, and carry it over into a region of the country or world where it hadn't already reached, would it live on? Would you be able to create a following on Facebook and Twitter and Foursquare without using your physical body? The internet certainly has enough information about us to carry on without our bodies--hell, it can steal our bank account or spam our friend's e-mails. Who (or what) is more powerful here? Clearly the Internet has the power to mislead someone entirely in a way that a physical body couldn't. Our "soul abides in machines" (Dyens 95).

Can We Ever Do It For Ourselves?

This song, TLC's "Unpretty," was released in 1999 and became the band's second single to hit #1 on the Billboard charts in the United States. According to the Wikipedia article on the song (I know--not necessarily the most reliable source, but the only one), it originated from a poem written about "a woman's struggle with her self-image" (Wiki). Both the poem and the song also address the comparisons that women make "between themselves and the sometimes unrealistic concepts of beauty, as it is commonly portrayed in the media" (Wiki). We see one young girl contemplating getting breast implants because her boyfriend likes the look of a large-chested woman and another girl attempting bulimia because all the images she finds in magazines are of skinny women. However, both of these women find their inner strength and decide that no one should have the power to make them feel so "damn unpretty." Their body is theirs alone, and shouldn't be controlled by the wants and pressures of others.

As we read in this section, it's not necessarily that simply to decide to stay true to your natural body. First of all, putting on makeup or using cellulite creams changes the way that we think about a "natural" body." Secondly, women are facing lots of pressure to age "gracefully"--and that doesn't mean naturally. Thirdly, what if it were possible that having cosmetic surgery was completely about the person going under the knife, and not simply about outside pressure? 

The first two of these questions have been widely discussed in our readings, documentaries, and class discussions, but this third question seems to linger. As we saw in Youth Knows No Pain, even when women (Sherry) put up a front that their surgeries or enhancements are done for themselves and themselves only, we find it hard to believe. As Shawn Levy said in the article "A Little Too Ready For Her Close Up?," "[the] era of 'I look great because I did this to myself' has passed" (Holson). Casting directors are looking for natural (but also perfect) bodies--and senses of self too: Carrie Audino, casting director of Mad Men, said that "I do think there are times when you sit in a casting session and listen to what someone things is beautiful or handsome, and there is this very skewed outlook based on their own insecurities. Because they have issues, they have an issue with someone else" (Holson). Macy Halford recognizes that some physical qualities can be see as "psychologically and physically damaging traits" (Halford). So we are now expected to either have work done that is perfect, unnoticeable, and seamless or be completely happy with the way we look. Period. The other side of either option clearly reflects poorly on the individual, and those around him or her (read: her) feel uneasy about it as well.

Is there really anything wrong with a woman getting her "nose done" if it will honestly, truly make her feel better about herself? While I was sitting at Peet's Coffee the other morning, I heard a girl on the phone with her mother talking about how she was going to the doctor because she had a sinus infection. And believe me, she was one of those "I don't care if you can hear me or if I'm about four decibels too loud for your pre-caffeine ears, I'm on the phone" types. Except the moment that she mentioned her nose job, her voice fell hushed. She stammered over the words "nose job," stuttering to correct herself, saying "got my nose fixed," and finally landing on the words "had that surgery done to correct that thing." She became so overcome with embarrassment that she left. The girl who had just been screaming about the copious amount of snot coming out of her face left because she said nose job.

This girl, along with many others, understood that there is still a stigma surrounding cosmetic surgery. People feel "unpretty" and they want to fix it. I think the real issue isn't that people are getting botox or nose jobs or breast implants, but rather that most of them aren't doing it because it will genuinely make them feel better. We live in a world where media is both the cause and the effect of the way we feel and the way we act. Without television and magazines, we might not know that our eyelids were differently shaped than Reese Witherspoon's or that our noses were bigger than Julia Stiles'. We wouldn't feel so close to celebrities that we found ourselves on par with them, and therefore comparing ourselves and feeling that we could “come closer to becoming a celebrity by having ourselves surgically altered" (Blum 154). Botox and nose jobs and breast implants are ways of getting closer to a "perfect" image of a celebrity, a person outside of oneself, instead of the "perfect" image of one's own body.

 

Is it possible to step outside of influences that exist outside of ourselves? Can we separate them from our own thoughts, or has the media's idea of perfect (whether that be altered or unaltered) become too intertwined? Even if we could untangle these ideas, would that make surgery okay? These are all questions that cannot be answered, because we are so far into this image-based society that we cannot pull ourselves out.