Introduction
In the digital age, the self remains a primal subject of interest with our increasing immersion into a pervasive screen culture. Today we have an incestuous bind with the screen as a cultural artefact that has been domesticated into our everyday lives over time and invoked as a medium for voyeurism and pleasure-seeking. Where the screen once stood for the construction of a wider world beyond us, today it is a theatre for assembling ourselves and narrating our lived moments to others. By premising the notions of mirror and screen in this introductory chapter, I examine how the mirror and screen coalesce in the construction of the self in the digital self. This digital-screen self is a self that is made vulnerable through its screening yet a self that is constantly mesmerised by its own image online. It represents a potent moment in the digital age. Where the mirror and screen become one is the project of the self in its journey of self-discovery.
Historically, the mirror has been intimately linked to the composition of the self. In the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in Florence, Italy, there was a proliferation of texts that discussed the mirror with painting, including self-portraits (see Yiu 2005). More specifically, as Yiu (2005: 189â209) points out, the âtwo earliest references to the mirror and painting in Renaissance texts both date from the fourteenth century and mention the mirror in conjunction with self-portraiture. In fact, the mirror was intimately associated with major innovations such as naturalistic representation particularly the realistic self-portraitâ.
In this age of the screen, our notions of what is private and public become redefined, as we offer ourselves as commodities for the consumption of others. With the convergence of technologies, we are able constantly to record and capture ourselves on the move, making the self both a subject and an object of production and consumption online. These seamless interplays between production, commodification and consumption mean that the self is not just endlessly constructed but curated through the screen. The banality of the everyday, and equally the mix of life experiences of the self, bind the ordinary with the perfunctory, entwining both the ordinary and extraordinary into narrations of the self online. As such, the digital architecture performs to the politics of the self where the convergence of technologies, the shifting realms of private and public, and also our engagement with an image-laden world anchor self-curation as a vital part of digital living. The self as a complex entity that can be performed, curated, produced and consumed makes the self an open-ended project in the digital age. Unfinished, non-unitary and absorbed through a digital architecture as bits and bytes.
While there is certainly an intense fascination with the self and its modes of visibility online (see Ibrahim 2011), it would be reductionist to consign self-curation solely into the ambit of narcissistic tendencies. New media technologies and their appropriation into our everyday lives has created an intimacy with technologies where these have become an extension of our senses, slowly integrating into our bodily bio-rhythms as sensory organs. The self performed and visualised through the screen, and equally coded as data through tracking technologies, metrics and algorithms, reveals the complexity of identity creation and performance in this cyber culture. Our everyday interactions recoded as data online can be about the creation of both social capital and new forms of vulnerabilities. The ubiquitous regeneration of the self through the new data economy and image-capture technologies means the self is reconfigured and redistributed through digital bytes. This can be interpreted as the loss âauraâ (Benjamin 1995) with the self being reassembled and recirculated through new media platforms. The transference of the physical body into digital modes of representation means that something is compromised through this digital resurrection where the flesh is transformed into bytes and where it is amenable to a politics of âviralityâ. This commodification of the self is a resonant part of digital living and self-representation today and as such it is less preoccupied with the loss of aura or the compromise of its corporeal matter, instead yielding to the accumulation of social capital online where it offers itself as a commodity through the gaze of unknown others.
The screen predates this digital age both historically and culturally in terms of our fascination and obsession with it. Most societies have a deep resonance with the screen for the modes of escape and fantasies it offers. The screen is symbolic of worlds beyond us and equally for locating us within it. We recognise its ability to be unceasing in the production of the spectacle and its unbounded imagination. The celluloid screen is pregnant with desire and the unattainable, delivering distance and transporting us back and forth in time. The screen in modernity is made manifest through television, cinema, theatre, advertising billboards, smartphones and mobile devices that thwart the reality of our immediate environments. When broadcasting as a form of mass mediation entered our homes, it sought to domesticate our senses: our notions of proximity and distance. Locating itself in the heart of our habitat, television claimed our sense of reality and representation, offering a sensorium into the outer world, transporting us into distant realms without us leaving the confines of our homes. With the passage of time, mobile and ambient technologies targeted the body, seeking to colonise its senses and functions by locating these onto the corporeal body. The corporealisation of mobile technologies lay siege to not just our sense of self but our innate desires to be part of the screen and to be re-birthed through these. Mass mediated technologies gave way to mobile gadgets, which sought to personalise pleasure, to carve out a solitary state while thrusting us into new modes of interactively without de-centring the self. The transcendence from the domestication of technologies to their corporealisation meant that the self became initiated into a culture of the âself watching the selfâ where we could be projected onto the screen as well as inserted into the screen. Like the mirror, the screen acquired an autoscopic device immersed in the politics of self-identification and objectification through the gaze of others.
In the age of convergence and digital culture, the self transacted as a commodity online is a controversial entity, seeking to build and consolidate its presence while bound through the workings of capital online. The complicit nature of this self-commodification through commercial platforms and social networking sites means that the economy of self-production online is one that works to a capitalist agenda where every form of creative, artistic and voluntary endeavour can be monetised by a data economy for filling vast swathes of the digital realm with user-generated content (UGC). Everything becomes touched by capital without foreclosing anything as sacred or private. The commodification of the self in this era of extreme self-curation and its co-mingling with capital symbolises exploitation of the human self and spirit while asserting a rhetoric of empowerment where the screen is presented as a democratising force for all. Critical readings on the exploitation of capital online point to the new media environment seducing and extracting new forms of labour, which yield value for marketers and commercial advertisers by leveraging on the creative agency of the consumer (see Bonsu and Darmody 2008: 365; Terranova 2000). The extraction of surplus immaterial labour from user-generated platforms through notions of co-creation rebirths the self as a material and cultural artefact in the new media economy. The self in the digital age is a complicit entity in terms of self-objectification, value creation and exploitation meandering through social networking sites that claim it as content and data. With the self as a cultural artefact in these new and emergent forms of consumerism online, capital inscribes the âdigital selfâ as part of its imperative to release value and data relentlessly. The self as a material artefact online is part of the violence that capital unleashes as it constantly draws on our fascination with our mirror and screen image as human flaws that can be exploited (Ibrahim 2008a, 2009). If the internet seduced us into recasting our pets as performing animals for the pleasure of others, the self is no exception in this performance and monetisation economy.
The proliferation of profile culture and the âselfieâ generation that underpin these practices of self-curation and aestheticization is increasingly viewed as part of an emergent narcissistic culture in postmodernity. The ancient tragic tale of Narcissus provides a moral caution for humanity. It reveals the mortal flaw of our primal fascinations with ourselves. Narcissusâ insatiable obsession with his own reflection is seen as Western civilisationâs madness of self-obsession unleashed in our quest for self-knowledge (Davies 1989: 265). The unrelenting quest for uniqueness and individuation can be self-destructive for humanity if left unchecked. The screen as the mirror in the online environment brings the tale of Narcissus into renewed focus, showcasing human frailties in the digital age where we constantly consume and monitor our digital selves online.
The virtual world and the attendant technologies to construct and project the self are then associated with new forms of vulnerabilities and anxieties, making the âproject of the selfâ an unstable and exacting enterprise online. Self-love is seen as inducing self-destruction and madness, highlighting the fatal flaw in the human condition. The digital economy then straddles the destructive and exploitative where new forms of expressions of the self rekindle our obsession with our own reflection. While discourses of UGC have been closely associated with empowerment and agency, what is less theorised is how capital exploits our self-love as an intrinsic logic to elicit content and interactions, thrusting the self into new ambits of self-consumerism and voyeurism. Capitalâs enterprise with self-fetishisation and the interplay between the two in the digital economy is an important aspect of digital living but one that has not received adequate scholarship in the fie...