the "official" Ryan Taylor
I stumbled across the above linked site (go ahead, click on it - you know you want to) this morning whilst engaged in some coffee-fueled self-googling. I'm not sure how I should feel about it. In my mind, I am the official Ryan Taylor, and this site gives us very little - actually, no information about who this pretender is. What if [s]he's a pimp or a crackhead? A wingnut Republican? A Southeast Asian organ thief? In the absence of information, the mind reels with the most depraved of possibilities.
Increasingly, our identities are established and maintained far from our physical selves. Our legal personhood has more to do with a complex mesh of linked accounts, hosted images, linked files, phone records, transaction logs, and security camera snapshots than with anything we do or say in Meatspace on a given day. Bank of America doesn't know or care that I helped somebody with a design project yesterday; Equifax has no record of the handful of quarters I gave to a homeless man on the exit ramp near my house. The random person that reviewed one of my songs on GarageBand last week has no idea that I have a daughter.
I wonder if we aren't learning to see ourselves as the mediated web of tracings, see also entries and MX records that represents us to the world at large. I think that's why people get so hooked on MySpace and Flickr and Facebook - I'm sure there's a whole new sociological discipline focusing on just this phenomenon that's been building since the dawn of networked computing. From The Well and the earliest bulletin boards right up through to Second Life and any number of online gaming clans, people with the means and the know-how have been outsourcing their identities so that they can observe and interact with themselves in the second person, and allow others to do the same on a global scale.
Like so many others, I've created an alter ego that exists almost exclusively online as a musician, artist, and occasional commentator. If I do a search for "tay0," the first two hits are my MySpace and GarageBand sites (this blog is a few hits down the list). If I do a search for "Ryan Taylor," however, I get this other person, this "official" Ryan Taylor. Who's not me. Online, where it matters, I guess tay0 is me.
Pleased to meet me.
The intersection of carbon-based Me and bit-based Me, taken while this post was in progress.
Increasingly, our identities are established and maintained far from our physical selves. Our legal personhood has more to do with a complex mesh of linked accounts, hosted images, linked files, phone records, transaction logs, and security camera snapshots than with anything we do or say in Meatspace on a given day. Bank of America doesn't know or care that I helped somebody with a design project yesterday; Equifax has no record of the handful of quarters I gave to a homeless man on the exit ramp near my house. The random person that reviewed one of my songs on GarageBand last week has no idea that I have a daughter.
I wonder if we aren't learning to see ourselves as the mediated web of tracings, see also entries and MX records that represents us to the world at large. I think that's why people get so hooked on MySpace and Flickr and Facebook - I'm sure there's a whole new sociological discipline focusing on just this phenomenon that's been building since the dawn of networked computing. From The Well and the earliest bulletin boards right up through to Second Life and any number of online gaming clans, people with the means and the know-how have been outsourcing their identities so that they can observe and interact with themselves in the second person, and allow others to do the same on a global scale.
Like so many others, I've created an alter ego that exists almost exclusively online as a musician, artist, and occasional commentator. If I do a search for "tay0," the first two hits are my MySpace and GarageBand sites (this blog is a few hits down the list). If I do a search for "Ryan Taylor," however, I get this other person, this "official" Ryan Taylor. Who's not me. Online, where it matters, I guess tay0 is me.
Pleased to meet me.
The intersection of carbon-based Me and bit-based Me, taken while this post was in progress.
posted by tay0 at 09:04
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