I know, I know – I’m about as sick as you are of this blog becoming a fawning paean to Rex Sorgatz. I just find that, for better or for worse, I end up thinking about similar things (well, that or I just steal my ideas from Fimoculous) and I’m intrigued by Rex’s recent piece in NYMag on what he has labelled ‘microfame’. As I see it, Sorgatz is essentially arguing that the internet’s ease-of-entry as a medium has changed the dynamics of fame, creating a more provisional, microscopic version of what constitutes ‘the public’ and success. The closest you could get to crystallising the piece is when he suggests that blogging/twittering/YouTube etc. “eliminate the difference between communication and publishing” – which isn’t a bad way to think about things.

This is something I’ve been struggling to articulate lately: how will the individual, identity and the public need to be reconceptualised in response to the internet? So I thought I’d use this article as a springboard for thinking through some of the issues I’ve been trying to wrap my head around lately. This may be rehash, but I’m hoping to work toward something resembling clarity.

What is Public Space on the Internet?

In the pre-internet age, fame operated through fixed distribution networks: magazines, newspapers, televisions, films and the radio etc. The technological and economic centralisation of dissemination meant that an individual had to reach a critical mass in order to attain fame – i.e. there had to be a reason a person was appearing on those screens and pages. Public attention was focused upon a relatively few number of people because the thing called ‘public space’ – i.e. that virtual projection that people often refer to as ‘culture’ – was constrained by economics, technology and those who had influence.

The internet changes this in that what constitutes the public space begins to move from an ethereal, abstract projection that exists figuratively ‘out there’ to the collection of culture than one finds on the screen. Naturally, we are still talking about an abstract construction (think of the multiplicity of answers to the question “What is the internet?”) but the public space is no longer about passive, one-way dissemination – the media out there that we then react to – but is a participatory arena, the sort the early Greeks could have dreamed of. While hardly a groundbreaking idea, I’d argue this is an important point to reiterate because when entry into the public space is no longer determined solely by economics or cultural capital, the dynamics of the situation change.

The Public Space is a Screen on which to Project One’s Identity

So, if as Rex argues, that communication and publishing are becoming conflated, then the public space needs to be reconceptualised as a blank canvas rather than a locus of mass culture that operates in a top-down manner. Culture in a rather literal sense becomes virtual and is a constantly morphing point of reference that exists in dynamic relation to the individuals that comprise that cultural context. This is a radical shift from even television where ‘individual interests’ were as determined as they were expressed.

So if the location of public discourse and cultural activity has shifted from the physical to the virtual, then this abstract space that is culture becomes a space for the articulation of identity. While this previously had to happen in face-to-face interaction, the (kinda’) universalisation of a publishing network means that there is a virtual space that exists so that I might construct “who I am”. It is important to note that the two-way back and forth of the new public space means that the internet is not a repository for identities or like a grand version of Second Life. Rather, it is both social prosthesis and an entirely new social arena in which identities can be created, morphed and reflected back into ‘real life’. Why, you ask? Because…

Identities are No Longer Attached to Bodies

Finally, as an extension, the issue of ‘who I am’ needs to be rethought. Let me, in a stunning move for a blogger, use myself as an example. On the internet I am even more of a no-one than I am in real life; yet even I am quickly becoming a conflation of my physical self and my virtual projection that exists through this blog, the comments I leave on others, Twitter and my Facebook profile. I can no longer seem to interact with my peers without this other aspect of who I am coming up. So what I am experiencing is a reconfiguration of what you might call the simultaneity of identity: previously, I was who I was in the here and now as centred upon my physical body. I am now, in a very real sense, living both here and there, in my body and online, and to engage in a bit of Kevin Kelly-esque pontification, the contextual relationship between space, time and identity will have to be thought through differently. If social interaction is always about the move into the public – why speak if not to be heard? – then one cannot assert the superiority of one aspect of one’s identity over another, if and when the ‘outside’ public face of identity becomes as important as the ‘inside’. What the internet will lead to is an inversion of the Cartesian cogito in which the self will exist only in as much as it exists in the public space. To put it mildy, the cultural and philosophical ramifications of this shift will be fucking huge.