Saturday, November 10, 2007

whose acting when I'm acting?


Wendy saw the shadow on the floor, looking so draggled, and she was frightfully sorry for Peter. "How awful!" she said...
Fortunately she knew at once what to do. "It must be sewn on," she said, just a little patronisingly.
... and sewed the shadow on to Peter's foot.

"I daresay it will hurt a little," she warned him.
"Oh, I shan't cry," said Peter, who was already of the opinion that he had never cried in his life. And he clenched his teeth and did not cry, and soon his shadow was behaving properly, though still a little creased.

...Peter, boylike, was indifferent to appearances, and he was now jumping about in the wildest glee. Alas, he had already forgotten that he owed his bliss to Wendy. He thought he had attached the shadow himself. "How clever I am!" he crowed rapturously, "oh, the cleverness of me!"
It is humiliating to have to confess this conceit ...



Just like Peter, my dark side gets left behind, and it takes effort to restore my shadow.
Creating the online persona takes active work, whether in 2nd life where self creation is overt, or on a blog space. There is still work in constructing as well as in deleting and hiding the unintended.
So in my blog I have blogs that never see the light of day, but saved as drafts they maintain thoughts, and chronology for me.
The shadow.
The stuff that would be unwise to shout in a lecture room, the stuff that would be stupid to have in a cv.
While tripping through delicious blogs I tripped up on thoughts on the less intentional profile

The unintended profile can publicly display my predilection for what I save, whether its music or websites or articles or my reading (self conscious and belatedly I note the trashy murder mystery is not listed in what I'm reading)....delicious puts some of me out there, but is it a part i want?
I find myself thinking twice (or more) about do i put this in endnote or in delicious... such as revolting articles involving a darker side of text or social media...
The intimate feeling created between myself and my laptop is deceptive, if i choose to hit post, a part of me is in the public domain.
I found myself surprized by the updated bubbl.us mindmapping tool, a work in progress. But a visible one. A widget so I should have known it would remain current...I embedded it in a blog, now i need to be careful about what's in; whats out.
I was surprized by my weather pixie dressing herself with logos in my blog, but i also found myself editing out names of logos that i have a problem with...
So, do I deidentify myself? or create myself deliberately without a shadow?
The foucodian panoptican is fully functioning here.

2 comments:

  1. Anonymous9:39 PM

    "So in my blog I have blogs that never see the light of day, but saved as drafts they maintain thoughts, and chronology for me.
    The shadow."


    Ahh Ailsa - The majority of the things that capture my thinking are not suitable for the blog ... I think of them as the kind of ideas that “you don't take home to mother”.

    Those Sidorkian three wine dialogue ideas that posted online would compromise the day job ....and cause the few members of family and friends who still talk to me to stop.

    Now I know what to call them -

    In a different way I value the randomness in my del.icio.us tags for artichoke blog posts - I keep hoping that patterns of self identity will emerge - tag clouds that identify me - if I keep at it long enough ...that was until I read Taleb's The Black Swan and realised that the eclecticism in the posts means the identity in the tag cloud will always be blurred

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  2. Thanks for this Arti, have enjoyed reading Taleb today, the roots of unfairness: the black swans of art and literatures reminds me that hindsight explains more than is reasonable; that there is a fragility of moments constructed per chance. I think there's an overlap here with Latours reassembling the social. I suspect that chance occurrences arent always recognized at the time, even when of meteoric proportions. Does a pricing war between vodafone and telecom create the circumstances whereby counsellors to psychotherapists entertain the possiblities of txt based therapies...
    And my shadow is growing, she reads trashy novels!

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