Friends of Davey Jones (me...it's just me really...so very alone) has amassed their media together in a central and accessible place. Myspace. Ever heard of it? Ever heard of the single biggest social cancer the world has seen since roller disco? Well, here's the URL:
myspace.com/fodj
Not all of the video bits are up there yet, but it's a painstaking process that leaves those wishing to promote themselves and their material wondering why anyone would fucking bother ever. Editing a Mypace Comedy page is like fingering a barely legal East Asian: frustrating with occasional exclamations of "Why are you doing that?!"
Which brings me to identity and its construction in a post Myspace world. It seems to me that the biggest irony at work today is that our very ability to fabricate our own custom identities using available technology is exactly what makes individuality almost completely unachievable and, in turn, nearly extinct. The role that the internet plays in the construction of one's identity has long been studied since its advent. Online, we can be whomever or whatever we want to be. It's, in a way, hyperexistentialism, in that not only are we essentially amorphous voids defining ourselves by association with external traits (I like baseball, I like mashed potatoes, I like deep anal penetration), but we are no longer bound to the physical world and can actively manipulate our identity online. But the irony is thickest when we consider that, honestly, the choices available to the construction of this identity are actually very limited. For the most part, the common man, unless well studied in HTML and the like, creates his online persona from what's already floating around out there, the common pool of popular culture. I can be an Elvis Costello loving, Dane Cook hating, quasi-pedophile with a Hello Kitty chat avatar, but that's just a crude combination of the bits of the popular culture with which I've chosen to associate myself. In the end, the building of one's identity becomes no more than a trite illusion. Nothing more than Disney icons and iTunes song lists.
I guess what I'm saying is that in trying to be so different from each other, we've made it impossible to be anything but woefully identical.
Like having your best friend berate you.
3 comments:
Wait. You were able to post "Robot" online, so that anyone in the world can watch it, and you have los cojones to complain that "identity becomes no more than a trite illusion"? Without so much as a Domo Arigato?
This is awesome, sir. Just admit that it's awesome.
Well, had I been the one who wrote Robot, I would agree. Josh Vasquez is the original thinker. I just make all the rape jokes.
don't forget your rape sonnets. they don't write themselves, gabe.
is thirty creeping up on you like varicose veins, too? you're not dead yet.
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