The New Identity: Law of Association

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Okay, here we go.

Typical Facebook profile photo. The “I’m a cutsie, casually fashioned girl,”-type picture designed to not be provocative but she knows exactly where you’re looking. A whole bunch of NYU-related pages plaster her “Recent Activities.” Don’t tell me, she’s the annoying, must-be-president-of-anything, Student Counsel girl, isn’t she? Music likes for Hillsong United and... Lil Wayne. That’s quite a contradiction. A humanitarian, I see, with interest in the national debt, bullying, and the American Cancer Society, however all those likes for pages like Michael Kors, Sherri Hill, and Britney Spears are a little concerning. No more than a couple sentences for her biography; no more than a couple sporadic statuses per day.

I see she’s not exactly an artist herself, although she’s got an eye for the latest and the trendiest tags, posts, or tweets. Of course she’s a Chicago-raised girl in NYC, just look at these constant instagram photos of West Village, Brooklyn Bridge, or Manhattan. I get it, it’s a city. Big whoop. Jesus, I can’t tell if that’s Central Park or heaven with all those filters. The joys of twitter: sexual pick-up lines. She must have a good humor, I’d love to hop on that myelin sheath. Unfortunately, following Steve Martin and Shane Dawson is a mistake and I don’t understand why she’s following Forbes and Jim Carrey. Someone is clearly trying too hard.

Unfollow.

No matter how cynically and stereotypically I try to decipher my own online identity, the only concrete labels I can paste to my own being is “Hi, My Name Is: Susan Lee, born June 12^th, 1994, student, daughter, and sister.” I mean, what does the genre “typical” even constitute in this random, disjointed cyberworld? There is no such thing. We’ve moved on from the traditional rationality-seeking, thoroughly analyzed identity of the past, starting with the Cartesian ego. Bolter writes, “the notion that writing unifies the mind was shared explicitly by the classicists and historians... the [notion], associated with Descartes, that what makes each of us human is our ability to function as a reasoning agent.” Descartes, a world renown philosopher of the Enlightenment Era, denied his senses, his body, and his physical, secular world with all of its institutions but he held fast to his mind-- the only real, secure authority he believed in because his thoughts were his own. 

In my world, as deconstructionist as I may seem, I find it difficult to deny that much of wonder left in the world. Humans are an intelligent species that have recorded every definition, every vision, and every experience to the best of their linguistically descriptive abilities. There are infinite fragments of information out there, somewhere, in text just waiting to be used. C.S. Peirce, quoted by Bolter, ascribed the modern man a more modern definition: “People are like words. The man-sign aquires information, and comes to mean more than he did before. But so do words. Does not electricity mean more now than it did in the days of Franklin?... In fact, therefore, men and words reciprocally educate each other; each increase of a man’s information involves and is involved by, a corresponding increase of a word’s information.” Ironically, we know a lot more than we think. As a result, one long rational analysis doesn’t do an individual justice anymore. We can now be everything and anything, we just need the right description, the right Facebook page to like, or even the right trending hashtag to follow because words hold incredibly expansive connotations now, deep enough to justify every piece of ourselves-- The text comes first and we associate decisively.

In the end, I still sound cynical. Just because who we are is what’s already out there doesn’t mean we can’t still be independent, individualistic. I’m proud knowing that we’ve nearly exhausted our mental resources and we still create masterpieces.

An Ironic Profession

Author: the composer of a literary work; someone who writes as a profession

At least that’s how an author is defined in a dictionary; however, the title of “author” is now being challenged in the midst of our digital era. What once was a noble profession is now a profession for any common man and print, the preserver of text for the past five centuries, fails to keep up in competition with the Internet. A new kind of revolution arises, challenging the value placed by authors on permanence by readers. In a digital world where the essence of writing is changing, being created, revised, and deleted constantly, can distinctions between readers and authors truly exist?

Much like Art, Writing indubitably requires talent; Writing definitely is an innate skill. Having acknowledged this, it only makes sense that the author profession should remain exclusive. For example, the ancient Western literary canon has been challenged many times, but who can deny the genius of those books? As the Foundation of our culture, the very fabric of our morals and ethics, it’s become nearly impossible to extract Plato, Shakespeare, and Homer from today’s home, education, and government. Print awards these books a prestigious merit and timeless recognition that, when achieved, completely separates the author and the reader. By being printed, these texts have maintained permanence for generations and endured the test of time. To share authorship with the unqualified naturally seems... wrong.

On the other hand, these authors must have started somewhere. To obtain literacy, you must study literature. So someone who was once a reader is now an author, and anyone who is an author is/has been/will always be a reader. Also, one must remember that time is both a virtue and a vice. As applaudable as it is that Gilgamesh’s brilliance never diminished since about 2700 BC, times have changed and the fact that it’s bound in a book won’t affect its value, positively nor negatively. While we complain about printing converting to typing, we fail to remember that even Gilgamesh converted from cuneiform clay tablets to translations on pieces of paper. Finally, author Jay David Bolter argues in his book Writing Space: Computers, Hypertext, and the Remediation of Print, that “the shift to the computer may make writing more flexible, but it also threatens the definitions of good writing and careful reading that have developed in association with the technique of printing.” To that, I must reference my belief in the essence of writing. As long as it conveys thought, emotion, plot, imagination or even experience, writing has been achieved. The only debate lies with “quality” yet what makes Mr. Bolter so certain that text develops reading skills better than typing? Being on the screen doesn’t mean the words appear any differently. In fact, by allotting multiple edits or annotations, don’t readers prove to be more than competent in close reading? Additionally, with an endless world of information and the ability to hypertext with a click of a mouse, the notion of reading in a linear fashion has disappeared but hasn’t that sort of access to resources created authors with all different kinds of cultural glasses?

Categorization is vital in our process of self-evaluation. We need a category that’s original and a perfect embodiment of what makes us unique, confident, and beautiful. Authorship, in my opinion, belongs to everyone. Recognition comes with true talent, which will always be distinguishable. Unfortunately for arguments like Bolter’s, a reader cannot be without an author; an author cannot be without a reader. Writing cannot be bound to a set of conventions and finally, the Internet has proved that. Therefore, instead of focusing on such shallow, narrow forms of organization, we must remember that writing exists without a doubt. All these clay tablets, printing machines, and computers are nothing but mere mediums. With changing times, all we need to do is change mediums and preserve writing that way. Why can't both be an I     D     E     N     T     I     T     Y  ?