William Gibson restates David Weinberger's observation that we are writing ourselves into existence on the web:
A mediated persona just sort of accumulates, of its own accord, the way balls of dust build up under a bed. It isn't as though there's any entity ("the media") controlling this process; it just happens. If there was something, no matter what, that you didn't do, and you kept meeting strangers who were convinced you did do that, because they had received, from the dust-ball of your mediated persona, the idea that you did, it might eventually start to bug you too. [...]
While I'm on the topic of mediated personae, something that came up during that CBC taping, last night (for me, anyway) was the idea that blogging (or even posting to fora) represents the democratization of the mediated persona. Literally anyone can have one, now, or several. I am an exception to this, because I have mine via the printed word, the oldest mass medium on the planet, and this website is maintained by a publishing company that belongs to an even larger corporation owned in turn by shapeshifting reptiles from Beta Reticuli, but the rest of you, today, are free to mass-mediate your own personae. Which was formerly, hugely, not the case. Choose a handle, post: you're mediating a persona.
Tuesday 11 March 2003
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment