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I’m doing a creative thesis, in the form of a long story, with an accompanying exegesis. I’ll start with an outline of the creative component first since that provides the basis for the theory.
The piece is centred around twenty year old Phoenix Nesser, who is something of an inadvertent celebrity. With the seeming omnipresence of the media as well as the advent of mobile technology and social networking, every moment of her life is accounted for and followed by someone, somewhere. The narrative will focus on the moment she simply drops off the radar, with no one seemingly having any idea of where she went or what has happened to her. Phoenix undertakes a personal journey when her grandmother passes away, unexpectedly. As she’s travelling to London for the funeral, she is completely disconnected. Of course since no one knows this, there’s immediate speculation around why she would just suddenly disappear and leave this void where there was previously so much information. It would so become apparent that while the speculation caused by this sudden disappearance would be expected of Phoenix’s public identity, it is in fact completely at odds with her real self. This, along with a number of incidents that occur along the way, makes it clear that Phee has crafted a particular persona for herself, as much as she has had one created for her by society.
The project is thus in part a story of a young woman’s search for individual identity as well as a reflection on some of the major characteristics of modern society. It will be written mainly in first person following the jumbled, often fixated, musings of Phoenix’s mind, while being juxtaposed with rumours and conversations of strangers as they puzzle over the supposed mystery of her disappearance. There might however also be other bits and pieces interspersed through the piece, such as photos, articles, interviews, reviews and quotes, as well as poetry and creative work. This is intended to illustrate various factors impacting on the perception of self.
Considering this, my research question is concerned with how identity is constructed online and how it is "read", drawing parallels between how it is conveyed and received in literature itself.
That is to say, while the creative piece will look at pertinent issues such as social networking and saturation of technology, media and celebrity, the exegesis will focus on the construction and subsequent reception of identity within a textual framework with the creative piece as an illustration of this.
I originally chose this topic more out of an interest to explore the impact modern society had on the notion of individual identity. I wanted to do it in a way that re-created the very issue I was considering, so something of an experimental narrative form for a more direct impact, while the accompanying exegesis could interrogate the theory informing the narrative more directly. So as an examination of identity in textual form, I wanted to bring into play elements of post-modern fiction and even creative non-fiction, in order to create a narrative reflective of the networked consciousness of modern society.
Theoretically, I think the project is very much founded in a longstanding basis concerning truth, reality, and identity, from Kierkegaard’s “truth is subjectivity” [stressing the importance of experience and relativity over absolute, concrete thoughts] to Nietzsche’s no fixed values, Lyotard’s ‘truth’ and ‘perception’ to even Baudrillard’s media created perceived reality.
I will however specifically be considering the notion of framing in terms of Erving Goffman [presentation of self in everyday life] in order to place these issues. That is, if framing is the notion of interpretations [stereotypes] that individuals rely on to understand and respond to event, can this be explored in terms of how individuals frame their specific experiences in text, with the increase interest in blogging.
In a way I want to relate this to reader-response and reception theory as pioneered by Hans Robert Jauss, and furthered by Wolfgang Iser amongst others. This is something I’d definitely just like to consider in terms of how malleable text is, and so in an online world where identity is construed in a mostly textual form, it stands to reason that it would be equally malleable and open to interpretation. As Stephen Bygrave notes: What an author planned to do, or thought they were doing in producing a text is one kind of information we can gather, but is it often unreliable, and it is only one kind of information amongst other. We make our own judgments about people, and do not simply accept that they are what they think themselves to be. [Romantic Writings, Open University Press, p.13] It is precisely this sort of thinking that I want to apply to social networking because social networking allows users to frame life in text, just as literture frames questions of identity in text which can then be further subverted by a reader.
In terms of online culture and identity, I will begin with theorists such as Manuel Castells who has done a lot of work on the influence of networked forms of organisation. In The Rise of Network Society, for example, he suggests that the network has to be seen as part of a bipolar opposition between “the Net and the self,” in which individuals relentlessly try to affirm their identities in a rapidly changing world. This identity formation increasingly happens within networks that are both physical and virtual, filled with individuals who both produce and consume, taking advantage of new kinds of online cultural production.
There’s also, Kazys Varnelis, who in work such as Network Culture considers the development of a new societal condition spurred by the maturing of the Internet and mobile technology; and the change this has on the notion of ‘self’. Networked Place on the other hand considers the pervasiveness of the network, on how the always-on, always-accessible network produces a broad set of changes to the concept of place, transforming the sense of proximity and distance, and the impact this has on relationships.
I’m fairly hazy on my methodology. I mostly concerned with just a comparative study of different approaches to the notion of identity in text. I will also be doing some empirical research in just observing the way individuals engage with identity online, as well as chatting to them about how they feel they’re represented and how they perceive others in that context. I’m also considering whether a content analysis of a particular site might be useful, just in terms of inferring the characteristics of the site and its effects, but never having done a lot of work on anything like that before, I’m not sure if it would be worth pursuing.
Finally, my time line for the project is fairly straightforward. I aim to have the first draft of the narrative done by the end of July, so I can focus on where that has taken my theoretical concerns. I can then re-draft while I’m completing my research, hopefully around end of August. Everything will then be, at the very least, in first draft form around September.
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Music: Last night on earth - Green Day
Mood: Relieved
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