Davos, Identity and Aristotle
'We are what we make. Our YouTubed videos, Technoratied blogs, Flickred photos etc – our creations express us,' wrote Jeff Jarvis while summing up his impressions blogging from Davos. He was struck by how identity seemed to be a recurring issue in all the media talk there, and I thought, just to step back a few thousand years in history, how Aristotelian: We are what we do, the sum of our choices and actions – and yes, why not also our creations.
To quote from this post: "Blogs, start with identity, not with the audience. They give a blogger the ability to define identity on his or her own terms – unmediated." I think that's an important point to remember when talking about social media, especially seeing how the more popular a phenomena gets, the more widespread the more or less informed efforts to analyse and explain its popularity.
The less convincing attempts at explaining social media I've come across recently range from narcissism to group pressure, and include this academic analysis (via Undercurrent) which draws heavily on a number of post-modern thinkers, carries a distinct echo of Freudian notions and argues that blogs lead to decay by eroding 'belief in the message'. Now I must admit I've only had time to skim through this quickly, but to think that Derrida, who seemed unable to understand 9/11 because people used the actual date to refer to it, would acknowledge the existence of, and attribute meaning to, the blogosphere, is intriguing. Add a bit of Foucault and a dose of penis envy: fascinating (I know, I should go back and read / analyse this in-depth, but it's loong and as always I've got another crazy workweek ahead of me - maybe over the weekend).
