Scrawled in Wax

A while ago, I was walking home at around midnight. Across the road, a woman was also walking, perhaps a few steps behind me. I had to cross the street to get to my apartment and, despite normally avoiding walking straight into someone’s path, I just couldn’t avoid coming rather close to my fellow late-night perambulator – maybe about 3 or 4 meters. She looked up, stopped, and turned the other way.

I was, though totally sympathetic, a bit wigged out by it. So naturally, I twittered the experience.

Though it was something that someone with my personality would have usually ruminated on for a while, by ‘putting it out there’, that slightly manic mental activity that I might usually go through disappeared quite quickly. Cleansed by Twitter, I guess.

It was Lisan Jutras’s great recent column in the Globe that got me thinking about this again. In it, Jutras outlines that thing that we all do – confess online:

This wasn’t the first time I’d felt the need to go public with some personal shame, and where better than the Internet? When I found myself weeping at everything on Glee one day, with neither alcohol nor hormones to blame, I tweeted it, not without misgivings.

“Happens to the best of us,” someone tweeted back. It was nice to hear: a little absolution. But – bonus – the solace goes both ways. I’ve read touching things about friends’ “bad” taste in movies and music that have warmed me to them. I’ve read soul-searching revelations about mental health, love lives, family. It’s always comforting to discover you’re not the first person to have doubts, weaknesses or problems of a specific shape.

[...]

Tweeting can make you feel closer to someone, less alone. If someone is put off by your disclosure, you don’t have to risk seeing their discomfited facial expression, or hear them say, “Ew, really?” You may notice you’ve dropped a follower, but you don’t have to know who.

There’s something interesting here. In a sense, the web is functioning as what I’m starting to call social prosthesis (Many have used the phrase, but I came it across it from Bill Buxton).

Like comparing an artificial leg to a flesh and bone one, it’s missing some obvious benefits: feeling, for one, not to mention the immediacy of being connected to the body and being around other bodies. Lacking both the immanence of a face-to-face interaction, its intimate one-to-oneness, online social interaction can be distanced and strangely textual – as if you were acting out a play in which you were the main character.

But, as Jutras describes, you also cathartically purge particular emotions by making them public. Inscribing oneself in the public sphere – and then receiving absolution in the form of sympathy or empathy – is like the online version of getting a reassuring hug from someone. What’s more, it’s precisely the image of oneself (exterior, looked-at) that produces shame – so why not Twitter it to get rid of it?

[Half-assed theory: "web 2.0" functions in part through and because of the desire to write oneself into the social fabric (to inscribe oneself as text into the public text-ile?). Foursquare, Last.fm, Foodspotting, Yelp, Flickr - they all share this in common. The description of this trend as narcissism - which stems from the desire to see only oneself reflected - is, I think, a mistake, as it misses the exterior constitution of our 'inside selves'. Publicising your activity is a way of not only making it concrete through a form of writing, it is a way of connecting individual action with the social.]

But if something like Twitter as a social prosthetic has its limits – the reduction of the self to a ‘corrupted, lesser image’ – like more advanced prosthetics, the web as social prosthesis can also be superior in some ways. As I once said, the online self is “not touched with the same extravagances or the same tortuous, bodily limitations – of cheeks that blush too quickly, or a mouth that moves a hair faster than the brain”. To engage with others online is to be social through (and not just as) an online representation of oneself – one that, while created by you, is not and can not be entirely you.

So, there’s another type of prosthetic here too that, rather than subbing in for some aspect of sociality, is instead producing a substitute version of experiencing selfhood. It’s the online persona or avatar as a prosthetic for subjectivity.

The prosthetic limb is one attached to regain function. It’s utilitarian. If one could one run with a flesh leg, it is replaced with a prosthetic limb so one can do the same. Similarly, if one cannot in a bodily, social way – i.e. sitting at a bar – engage in heated, controversial discussion, talk about touchy subjects, flirt, be funny, whatever – one turns to the avatar to perform these tasks in a still-social, if differently framed, environment.

This, I think, is where the warning bells about “using the web as a substitute for real life” go off. But key here is that one performs these things ‘prosthetically’ in order to reconfigure the bodily self – i.e. “the real self” (In 2010, I still feel comfortable prioritising the bodily self over its projection). To put it another way, the ‘outsourced’, prosthetic subjectivity is a way of testing out things online that one can then do in real life. Like the social prosthetic, is a way of inscribing a new vision of oneself ‘out there’, which also redefines the vision of oneself out here. But unlike the social, the subjective prosthesis is not an object – a text or image – but a process and experience. (Those distinctions can be broken down – but all in good time).

I think this is why I am constantly talking about the temporal aspect of the web: these interactions that take place in text carry some of the temporal demands of face-to-face interaction. But that slight delay is, in a very practical, basic way, a chance to gather oneself. It’s a cushion. You have a minute to gather your thoughts – so you test out how to express controversial beliefs politely. And next time you’re at a bar or a party…

Of course, the important question is that if one’s Twitter stream is the peg leg – then what part of online life is the parrot?