Is Oversharing The New Art?

Why yes, I am injecting myself into this debate again…

Over at Geekcentric, blogger Michael Duff has about the most interesting take I’ve seen so far [via] on both Rex Sorgatz’s Microfame thing (which I wrote about here) and the idea of ‘oversharing’ in general. Duff’s post is marvellously ambiguous. He picks up Sorgatz’s analogy between the novel and blogging and, at one point, argues that it is editing and framing that distinguish literary writing and blogging. At another point, he argues this: “I think the people who complain about oversharing are snobs. They want their art filtered, processed, sanitized and read-only. They don’t object to emotion per se, they just want it managed and packaged for them.” But most interesting of all is the structure of the thing.

Look at the way the argument progresses. First, it establishes a relationship between oversharing, emotion and a connection with the person or artist who expresses something, suggesting that the relationship between reader and novelist is akin to that between reader and blogger. So that odd feeling you get while sitting alone reading a moving piece of literature and ‘feeling connected’ to something also works in the connection between bloggers and their audience (and I did feel something like that upon reading this). By doing so, Duff makes a kind of equivalence between blogger and artist – not so much that they are one and the same, but that they perform a similar cultural function. Finally, there is an implicit comparison made between the space of art and the internet.

Put in a slightly more theoretical way, the equivalence here is between the aesthetic and the space for the aestheticisation of the self. Right? Duff is essentially arguing that the world of art, the projective space of the aesthetic and its effect on humans is similar/analagous/maybe even the same as the blogosphere, or what you could also call the projective space for the aesthetic self. Or why make the comparison in the first place?

To which I say: fucking fascinating. Seriously. There’s so much there and it’s so indicative of so much, it’s insane. What’s particularly great about it is the writer’s ambivalence, his attempt to defend something that he doesn’t agree with. But I’m especially drawn to it because that ‘conflation’ of the aesthetic and the blogosphere speaks exactly to what I’ve been arguing recently – namely, that the internet and the new public space it engenders (or is) provides a place for identities to become something aesthetic, to be turned into ‘texts’.

But, like post-whatever theory, you are left with a person who is themselves an amalgam of texts – of markers of identities like race, sex, class etc. and histories (i.e. histoires or stories) – producing a text of identity online that is divorced from the body, from the very thing that pins it down as a singular entity: the body. So you only have multiple texts – of bodies and online personas – existing in a sort of weird parallax relationship to each other, particularly because the online persona is constantly modified in relation to other online personas, bodies and texts, while at the same time the identity located at the body is being morphed in relation to the projection(s) that exists in the new public space. I think I’d be about to have a theory-gasm if I weren’t concerned about getting my keyboard sticky.

So, is oversharing the new art? I dunno’. I can see arguments for both yes and no. Whaddya’ think?