Thursday, July 3, 2008

MySpace: The Post 9/11 40-Acres-and-a-Mule

"In Cyberspace all positive properties are externalized in the sense that everything you are in a positive sense, all your features can be manipulated. When one plays in virtual space I can for example be a homosexual man who pretends to be a heterosexual woman, or whatever: either I can build a new identity for myself or in a more paranoiac way, I am somehow already controlled, manipulated by the digital space." - from the 'About Me' section of the MySpace of Slavoj Zizek

It is in the spirit of this (supposed) Zizek quote that I consider the MySpace headline as the post-9/11 epitaph: It is both an introduction to a 'hyper-You' and an epitaph for your analog-Self.

To further explain what I am saying (and to provide some much needed entertainment in this so-far dry post), here is yet more Zizek. Pay attention to what he says here about the Matrix the computer component in The Matrix) as a generator of fictions:



Thus the myspace headline becomes a declaration of your hyper-you: the digital layer in the palimpsest of the system of fictions that constitute the reality of your being.

No comments: