Blog 6

This class has been helpful in discussing my own personal worldview in that it points out how knowledge has been communicated to me, and what is most helpful about this is it allows me to then identify which kinds of rhetoric I haven’t responded to, and have overlooked and excluded when forming my worldview. For example, in the Information-Argument section, I looked closely at the field of Music Scholarship, and found that musicians often overlook the opinion of the composer of music in favor of the opinions of commentators and historians. While to me personally I found this unfair, the realization could be applied to my own life: if my life could be understood as a work of art of my own creation, then I most often look to the opinions of others to determine who I am, who I should be, and how I will “create” myself. My personal worldview is often much more constructed by the views of those around me whom I respect, as opposed to constructions based on my own experience. However, my experience is closely tied to those around me, because I tend to surround myself with people whose experience is relatively similar to my own (for example, male college-aged students who own computers and cars and share my religious views). This in itself is another formative mechanism which heavily influences my worldview, but leaves massive gaps in experience, information, and therefore knowledge.

Website Selfy

Follow this link to check out this #selfy:

http://paulschirmer5.wix.com/selfy

Poetics:

In my website, I attempted to convey my screen self portrait and digital identity through different abstract feelings rather than directly. The home page exists as a starting point, and really conveys a belief about how I see myself – I identified trees and snow, and fire, and music, to attempt to convey a distance and separation between my identity and my “digital identity”. Most of how I perceive myself has nothing to do with my digital interactions, and the use of darkness, trees, and fire were a reference to things deep and carnal in our nature that have nothing to do with the digital age and are difficult to express even through media. I also designed the mood of the page to be somewhat mysterious, because i felt that it was in some ways meant to represent the core of who I was, which I myself am in many ways foreign to and still discovering. Thus the link in the word “escape”, which takes you to my second page, a “facebook” page which is not really my own but represents something about how I relate to others through media. I designed this page to be particularly hectic, with two videos playing immediately and gifs everywhere. The videos were chosen specifically because I’m hyper-aware of how Facebook tends to be a platform for displaying one’s best qualities, in particular one’s friends and social life. Clicking on the “Friends” button takes you to a page with an epic gif of Marvel’s Avengers entering battle; this is both how I like to perceive my friends (and myself among them) and how I want others to perceive my friends. Back at the facebook page, the “about” button takes you to a particularly gross page with the words, “messes that I haven’t tried to clean up in awhile” overlaid over photos of friends and me, usually awkwardly among them. These photos were representative of the mess of my current life. In many ways, I simply feel like I’ve made a host of mistakes which I don’t have time to clean up, and so they enter into the history of photos and are forgotten, except for when I see photos of them and memories come back to life. The song in the background contains the text which is overlaid, and I have special and somewhat depressing associations with it. The entire page was designed to be unappealing and “loud” in many senses. The “history” button of the facebook page takes you to a simple page with a picture of my sister. I have many siblings, and this is a photo of my youngest sister. Of any photo on earth, this one perhaps moves me the most, because it reminds me of my own ability to love, and the beauty of our existence. It reminds me of my whole family. It is representative of what is most important. And interestingly, it’s one of the only photos I’ve ever posted on my facebook wall. If you click this photo, you will be taken to another simple page, with a video of “All Glory Be to Christ”, a song by King’s Kaleidoscope. This is the extent of what is most important in my life, as it is represented digitally: my belief in God. Although it takes such a massive precedence in most of my life, I do not make it obvious in my internet presence, except for which youtube videos I watch, because I watch so many videos of worship music. This song, however, does convey some of my most fundamental beliefs. This page has no other links because I want whoever finds themselves there to watch the entire video.

 

Reflection:

While creating and then browsing my own website, many insights came to me regarding my own digital identity and mediated experience. One of the most significant was, I created a representation of my own distance from the digital community, and did this through a digital mode, and then found that this digital creation helped me understand things about myself, such that in the end my reflexive understanding of identity was influenced by and in some ways reliant on this digital self portrait. Regarding my identity, I realized that I have a tendency to divorce ideas of identity completely from any form of digital representation, simply because of a bias against it, and forget that it is a legitimate form of art and expression. Put in those words, I realize that I regard “art” with great respect, and giving digital media the same respect greatly changes my view of it. In many ways, I realize that my bias is sourced in a simple problem, which is that I am generally unskilled in anything related to computers or digital media. Another source of this bias is my hatred for the misuse of digital media in the form of pornography, which existed well before digital media and thus cannot be attributed to it. This recognition of bias has led me to further appreciate both my own work as well as that of others, and allowed me to continue to find value in reflection as I moved forward with my exploration of my own site.

Through my site I realized that although I have stopped updating my own facebook over the last years, my identity is still formed somewhat by other people when they view it. This shared identity is unavoidable; indeed, even if I were to delete my facebook entirely, those who know me would search for me online and not find me, and this is itself would inform their opinion of me. Similarly, my conscious decision to “shun” the facebook world would reinforce my own opinion of my identity; I would regard myself as “above” the social media world, and thus form further bias toward those who do have facebook accounts. This all points to a further conclusion: in this day and age, digital media and identity is generally unavoidable, and if one is unfamiliar with or purposefully distant from a given form of media, especially related to an online community, they are distancing themselves in some way from a very real community. communities no longer exist apart from their presence online; whether it be through a facebook event, instagram post, or tweet, social media and online discussion is how they present themselves, discuss and plan events, and codify views on the purpose of their own existence which in many cases would not otherwise exist. To separate from our digital identity would in many ways be separating from real people – or at least, their digital identity, which they consider to be themselves.

What is most concerning about all of this, to me, is that the nature of online mediated experience is just that – mediation. We all have the ability to mediate our own portrayal of ourselves. Certainly, we as a human race have always been able to do that to an extent, even if that is just choosing what to wear in the morning and how to style our hair; but just as the placing of mirrors in our homes has made us self-conscious to our own appearance, the introduction of the digital into our social lives provides both a place for us to perceive ourselves as others see us and make an attempt to control it. This control of the opinion of others is a disease which many have identified as such, and it is a result of the nature of mankind and our lives that we should care what others perceive us to be. It is negative because it gives us yet another reason to think more constantly about ourselves and less about the needs of others, which we need no more encouragement or occasion to carry out.

It was relieving to create a page which I had no intent to show to others (besides Dr. Hink of course) and the result was a page I actually wanted to show to others. I wanted others to view it and ask what it meant. I suppose this is what it feels like to create art that you’re proud of; you want others to see it, perceive it, experience it, and ask, “why” simply because they felt something they could not explain or describe. I’m not suggesting that my art necessarily does that; but I have recognized it as art, which is a big step. I wonder how much the idea that we are artists applies to this idea of digital identity, where it seems as if we create ourselves. Perhaps that is really where the addiction lies: at last, we have a form of media and art that both describes us and creates us at the same time; we can create ourselves. I don’t know if that’s good, or even really possible, but if we are convinced that it’s true, then it certainly has power.