(I started to comment on Karl's post below about the post by Paul Miller, the offline blogger for The Verge, and it got long enough that I figured I'd just post it here. It's meandery. You've been warned.)
I have a fair number of thoughts about the concept of
"online presence," born of several years of my own blogging and Flickr-ing,
and several years prior to that of avid blog reading. There are plenty of
arguments out there that one's online presence is more presentation than
presence--rehearsed, performed. As if there's a mask that one dons when one
logs on.
Of course I have both experiential and anecdotal evidence that
people's online personalities are not always entirely in line with their
offline personalities, but this argument has still always struck me as a bit
odd. I mean, aren't we all always performing our own presence to some extent?
Is what we present to the world ever fully aligned with who we perceive
ourselves to be in our private, internal experience? Sure, the Internet changes the nature of the performance, but is the way we shift into some other version of ourselves online really that different from how we shift our performance of self in any other situation?
It seems to me
that really, our online presence is just one more facet of our "real"
selves--maybe this is what Miller means by looking at the whole
buffalo, seeing all the facets? (Though that's not really the impression I got from his post.) I know for me, my online self is, in some really significant ways, more me--more my own experience of myself--than any other self I present to the world. It's a kernel self--a deeper part of me than the ones that tend to get space in the real world, and the part of me that's most important to me in many ways.
Along with the "we're all just performing ourselves on the
Internet" argument, there have begun to be other people arguing that we
need to stop making a distinction between our lives on the Internet and our
lives in the real world. This makes enormous sense to me given the level of
community and deep friendship I've found through my online interactions. Not to mention that deeper expression of self.
But--and this is, I think, where it comes back to
hermits--maybe there’s something to be said (for some of us, anyway) for
disconnecting from all forms of community and interaction, in the interest of
finding our purest, least "performed" self. What do we find in the
quiet of a space where we're really and truly alone? And for our project here:
What does it mean to construct a performance around the idea of people trying
to be really and truly alone, perhaps to find out who they are when they’re not
performing?
Thanks, Amy. This is stuff I want to think about. I am interested in the ways that one might use a hermit-ish retreat to clarify a sense of self (not an isolated self, but a self that aligns with a very small and particular landscape. But, because we will STAGE these retreats, our actual work will be something more along the lines of creating what Stanislavski calls "public solitude."
ReplyDeleteWhat CS (Stanislavski) has in mind when he talks about "public solitude" is mostly just an actor's capacity to do her job with people watching, to attend to the vagaries of her own internal processes as they image/react, etc. But what this post makes me realize is the clarifying function of various kinds of "public solitude," that is...the self-as-self...in a context in which it knows it will be seen. There's a simultaneous impulse towards living into the self and towards the self-consciousness that all of the manifestations of the self will be witnessed. Actors report feeling "more alive" onstage and are (sometimes) more able to go to deep and frightening places in themselves.
There is a monster difference (in my mind anyway) between a hermitage that is wholly isolated (no one ever sees it) from one that is witnessed. Not a better-worse difference, but a difference of what is going on there.
Happy new year everyone.
I wonder if that difference is connected somehow to the presence/necessity of speech in those circumstances? I tend to associate loneliness with silence; "companionship" with speech; and speech with performance. Also speech in loneliness is often associated with insanity. When is it appropriate/necessary to speak when alone, to remain silent among others? What do those moments say about your "true self?" What do you say when there is no one to hear, what do you leave unsaid when there are those will might listen?
DeleteMark, yeah--this struck me particularly, "There's a simultaneous impulse towards living into the self and towards the self-consciousness that all of the manifestations of the self will be witnessed. Actors report feeling 'more alive' onstage and are (sometimes) more able to go to deep and frightening places in themselves."
DeleteRight--the need to just set self consciousness aside in order to go deeper/be more vulnerable/be your truest self/make the work, even knowing that other people are going to witness the work you do in that state. I wonder if a lack of self consciousness isn't actually what's essential about a life spent in solitude? Getting out of your own way so that something else can happen, so you can stop performing your self for long enough to find something true--whether that's a spiritual truth or the truth that's accessed through actual performance (or the creation of anything you know will be seen by others)? Interesting.
And Erin, I really love this question: "When is it appropriate/necessary to speak when alone, to remain silent among others?"
In performance, it's a particularly weird thing: you need to lose your self-consciousness, but the crucible in which you do it is decidedly and inescapably (and maybe even thrillingly) public.
ReplyDeleteIndeed. There is a good reason I do not perform. ;-)
Delete