So... being a new daddy and somewhat sleep deprived, my long-standing intention to do a recap of my OTHER AGDC presentation has not only been a bigger quarry than I seem to have been able to bring down, but also has kept me from writing about a bunch of other fun stuff.
The solution: I'm going to do a quick recap here of some notions I think are fun, and that point to some fo the really exciting things going on in online social interaction... then onward!! into a new year, or something.
The basic premise, which I still think is really exciting, is that the ability to interact online, in general but especially in virtual worlds, creates both a freedom to play with cultural norms as well as a visibility into those of others that have hitherto been much harder to experience first hand. We get to play with our social identity in new venues, as it were, and some of those venues, at least, are also home to people with different cultural backgrounds. And yes, of course, the exclusionary and predatory social dynamics of adolescence still persist, but also other things are happening... as we saw at There, once upon a time, some teens coming in welcomed the chance to be percieved as adults, and to play with that social role. It enabled them to interact without immediately being identified as a teen... and thus to learn about the role of an adult, of their future options and potential as an adult in a social situation. Being able to play in this sense means being able to experiment with new roles, new personas, to try to be a leader or a joker, to experiment and learn, and have that affect your perception of your self and your life.
There's also the embedded notion in all this that our previous assumptions about the immutability of our cultural identity get more or less upset: ie., we (almost all) grow up believing our cultural identity is our identity, as my friend David Stanley and I used to say. It used to be a lot harder to understand how you were more than your upbringing... but now, we're able to enter a variety of social spaces easily, and the core understanding of social identity as mutable, as, ultimately, a choice, implicitly grows with each new world we enter.
So you get, theoretically at least, world-wide access to common cultural symbols, combined with the notion that cultural symbols can be chosen by the participant: ie., whoever I am, the cultural symbols I display are much more something I choose for whatever reason than something I blindly believe to be the only reality. Ie., Web 2.0 in terms of social, and as a result, personal identity. What we fundamentally understand ourselves to be is changing in more than one way: we are able to access more cultures freely, and adopt them, and we're learning that that cultural identity is a choice, not a requirement.
This might sound sort of obvious... in some ways it is, and that's really the point. But it used not to be. An "ironic" cultural identity used to be much more rare... we all used to be muuuuuch more serious about it.
And speaking of serious, delightful culture jams like this, well, didn't used to be (and note, he mentions his Christian faith at the end...I lose track of how many memes are in play here, or just what the implications and resonances are. In part the point, I suppose...)
The CM won't need to step in, the community will do it, appropriately enforcing what are seen as core tenets of a positive social experience.
Posted by: hairy pussy | May 21, 2010 at 12:55 PM
This might sound sort of obvious... in some ways it is, and that's really the point. But it used not to be. An "ironic" cultural identity used to be much more rare... we all used to be muuuuuch more serious about it.
Posted by: hairy pussy | May 21, 2010 at 12:55 PM