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.