Mental wanderings about "The Remediated Self"

Bolter and Grusin's chapter on the remediated self carried me back a few weeks to our in-class discussion of Facebook and the possibility of a disembodied existence online. The authors liken the remediated self to William James’ empirical self, “the sum total of all that [a man] CAN call his” (qtd. 233). In this way, the disembodied self on a social networking site is not a disembodied self at all, nor is it its own entity. Rather, this projection belongs to a corpus of facets and objects that together comprise the self. The authors note that while James acknowledges the existences of a material self, a social self, and a spiritual self, none is more representative of the actual self than another. I am Jasmine, the clothes in my closet, the car I come to school in, the roof I sleep under, the knowledge I accumulate, the friends I have in “real life” and online, the body that carries me around and facilitates the vocalization of my thoughts, the computer I use and the IP address from which I post this blog. (Why do I keep coming back to this free-floating signifier thing?!) As we continue to mediate, we accumulate new aspects of ourselves. While it may seem that we have some control over the self that we choose to present or promote online, we do not; this image, this identity, simply tacks itself on to the people we already are (not in essentialist terms, but rather in the present, existentialist sense). My Facebook profile does not define me or redefine me or stake out a cyberspace claim for me to occupy; rather, it is now [part of] me, not a projection but a component, no more or less essential to my self than any other singular element of my existence, not representative but constitutive.

Video games: Advertisements for hegemony

Bolter and Grusin observe in their chapter on computer games that “ideologically, the player [of a video game] is asked to defend or reestablish the status quo, so that even though the violence of the games appears to be antisocial, the ultimate message is not.” In this way, “action games have played out the most aggressive form of televisual monitoring” (93). This idea intrigued me, particularly because of the greatly heated debates I’ve witnessed in my own lifetime about the danger of video games, both in public and personal spheres. While immediacy and transparency of the game play is made possible by the technology, the same opportunities are afforded to hegemonic ideals through the same mechanisms. That is, the plot and world of a game encompass a player who is marveled by the first person perspective and increasingly realistic graphics, and these game features simultaneously imbue in him/her a specific political/moral/cultural agenda. As we’ve noted before this quarter, new technologies are not wholly new. They share much with older technologies, and this notion of articulating and reselling dominant ideology through media is not new to video games. However, the interactivity of video games and the repetition of game play, I think, may make them more pervasive.