FEB 4 - DIGITAL IDENTITY

Jay Bolter & Richard Grusin. 1999. “Part Three: Self: Remediated; Virtual; Networked,” in Remediation: Understanding New Media. MIT Press, pp. 230-265.


http://monoskop.org/images/a/ae/Bolter_Jay_David_Grusin_Richard_Remediation_Understanding_New_Media_low_quality.pdf


The Remediated Self

- Cavell goes on to point out, the strategy for achieving this unmed~ relationship shifted with romanticism from an emphasis on the world as object (mimesis) to the viewer as subject (expression): "To speak our subjectivity as the route back to our conviction in reality is to speak of romanticism" (22)" - (234)


- She is defined as a succession of relationships with various applications or media. She oscillates between media-moves from window to window, from application to application-and her identity is constituted by those oscillations. (236)

- The body itself functions as a medium: through traditional means such as choice of clothing and jewelry, as well as more radical ones such as cosmetic surgery, bodybuilding, and body piercing. (237)

- New media are thus fully involved in the contemporary st gle to define the self as both embodied and mediated by the body. the one hand, they contribute new strategies of transparency that would seem to reinforce the dissecting male gaze.... on the other hand, through strategies of hypemediacy, new media refashion the normative gaze and its implied views of male and female identity (240)

The Virtual Self

- New media offer new opportunities for self-definition, for now we can identify with the vivid graphics and digitized videos of computer games as well as the swooping perspective of virtual reality systems and digitally generated film and television logos. (231)


- In a virtual environment, we have the free alter our selves by altering our point of view and to empathize others by occupying their point of view - being immersed (232)

- Unlike the user of virtual reality, the networked self shuts herself off from physical space by putting on a head-mounted display, the networked self may lead simultaneous lives in cyberspace and in her physical office. (232)

- Stanley Cavell (1979) has noted how the desire for expression came out of the desire for the real: "What [traditional] painting wanted, in wanting a connection with reality, was a sense of presentness - not exactly a conviction of the world's presence to us, but of presence to it. At some point the unhinging of our consciousness f the world interposed our subjectivity between us and our present to the world." (234)

> Immediacy
> Hypermedia applications

Lecture notes:
- Media reflecting yourself
- Whenever our identity is mediated, it's always re-mediated
- Re-mediation: always evolving media, fluidity of identity through media
- Digital identity
- Consumer &Public (citizenship) identities
- Interactive options aren't neutral