The Overexamined Life: Finding Bits of Ourselves in Digital Ghost Towns
I lol-ed when I read Emily Gould’s post a few months ago about dreams:
The symbolism in my dreams is usually so obvious and hackneyed it’s ridiculous. Like, if my subconscious was enrolled in a creative writing class its classmates would constantly be making “Oh my god, not again” eye contact with each other behind its back. Example: when I used to (over)work at a publishing house, I had a recurring dream that I was preparing to leave the house in the morning by picking up various of those canvas totebags full of manuscripts by which we can identify low-to-midlevel publishing staffers on the subway. I tried to pick up two ordinary-looking bags and found that I couldn’t — they were so heavy I was unable to lift them. Whoa! Like, what’s that about?
The other evening, after mulling over the music career that never quite happened, I had a dream that I was watching a guitar fall from the back of a pick-up truck from the side of a highway. Cars kept driving over it until it was a wreck of wood and strings.
I’ve been having too many cars-running-over-a-guitar dreams, which is why I haven’t bothered updating my “dream journal” much this month. Well, actually, no, last night I had a dream about that mall in China that is all stores of counterfeit items. But it was a dream I had and lost in the hypnagogic state between the first alarm and snooze reminder.
I never hear people talk about Dream Journal, although it could be catergorized with Mint, Month.ly.info, and Dopplr (which I just joined), as a useful social-stat tracker. (I wish it had an iPhone app.) You enter your dream and the program scans for keywords. Here are some of mine: DOOR – 5 MALE – 5 GIRL – 4 HOUSE – 4 WALKING – 4 WOMAN – 4 TOWN – 3 FRIEND – 3 RUNNING – 3 STAIRCASE – 2 SUN – 2 BASEMENT – 2. Five of the 17 dreams I’ve made public had men in them and four took place in houses, and five involved opening a door. So a typical dream of mine involves walking upstairs in an unidentified house, in an unidentified city, opening the front door, and seeing an unidentified man. On the site, I can click on my frequent key words to see what they may signify:
DOOR The door often represents opportunities, the openings life offers. It can be an opening or realisation of new parts of you, new feelings, or new ideas. It can be a barrier put between yourself and others, yourself and life, yourself and God. The opening or closing of this door represents the movement of your feelings and attitudes. Death is sometimes spoken of as the other door, birth being the first.In some dreams the door, or passing through it indicates the shifting from one situation or perception of life to another.
MALE If the man is someone you know look at what you feel about that person, how you see them and what sort of qualities or weaknesses they have, because they depict your feelings about that person. For instance if I see a male friend as very loving or sexual, then they depict those feelings or qualities in myself.
In a woman’s dream – your dream male depicts the feelings or pains you have about relating to men in general, and about that person in particular. If it is a man you are in relationship with, or want to be, then he illustrates all the difficulties or ease of your feelings and your response to him. In general a man represents your positive outgoing and capable qualities.
In a man’s dream, he will depict some aspect of your own character. What aspect he depicts depends upon how you see him. So define how you would describe his qualities or weaknesses to someone else.
Last year, the Wall Street Journal had an article, The New Examined Life, interviewing people who obsessively document their lives in spreadsheets, graphs, lists, and maps. Nicholas Felton, a graphic designer interviewed for the story, tracked every “New York street he walked and sorted the 632 beers he consumed by country of origin” and included it in his “Feltron Annual Report.”
On this subject, I also recommend This American Life Episode 88: Numbers (which is worth listening to if just to hear the opera singer rap about cowboys,)
But, I haven’t even come to the interesting part of my history with Dream Journal yet (and I’ve had a few too many glasses of wine, so apologies if this is a totally weak transition from one idea to the other. Or for the spelling errors.)
The Dream Journal is something I happened upon while googling my most frequent handle: jomc. Filtering out everything related to UNC’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication, I found a whole bunch of bits of my personal history. There’s a gap of four entire years — from May 2004 — until I found it again in September last year. But the themes and concepts of my dreams are still the same.
Perhaps I’m at a similar stage in my life. I know why I gave up the dream journal before — I was moving from four different cities in four months before landing in Chicago. I forgot all about it, but now I’m entering in it again, fairly regularly.
Dreams are typically about fears and insecurities. No one ever has a dream that clearly communicates to oneself: hey, you’re doing an awesome job at life! And to record it is to acknowledge that the fear exists rather than continuing to hide from it.
But, odd about the site, is how many pageviews my dreams receive. Something I entered a week again has about 60 views. Who are they and why do they care? Not that I mind…it’s public. But I type all the information bleary-eyed as soon as I wake up so I won’t forget. And it’s pretty incomprehensible anyway.
I haven’t spent enough time exploring the site or using it for anything other than narcissistic purposes, but i get a hunch it is a thriving community still for those on livejournal (another digital ghost town for some of us.)
There is that process of packing your bags from Friendster to Myspace to Facebook and never looking back, because whatever purpose the previous site had is now exceeded by the newer one. There’s no brand loyalty in social media. When one network gets crowded with too many people too unlike the early developers, they will flock elsewhere.
If I were to log into Friendster today I would see a perfectly preserved document of my life in 2003. The people I was friends with then (most of them, sadly, I’m no longer in touch with) and the inside jokes we shared, not to mention the photos of me at that age. It makes me really want to not log in or log in and destroy it all. That’s almost too many memories worth keeping and for someone who prefers to think about life in the present rather than relive past experiences in my mind, it’s just baggage.
One day I’ll likely look at my Twitter page with the same sense sense. Like that moment in Back to the Future 2 when teenage Elisabeth Shue sees herself as an old married Elisabeth Shue and they say in unison “I’m Old!”/”I’m young!” and they both faint.
But a vague internet memory doesn’t doesn’t even have to be from that long ago. You might to be look around on the web one day, narci-searching and you’ll find you had filled out a profile a few months back.
I can’t find any sort of neuro-scientific study phrased exactly this way, but my theory is, (and I’m sure science already proves it) that online media almost always processes in one’s short term memory. It’s not experienced enough to kick in the cerebellum and the striatum. Your five senses aren’t all at work. I have trouble retaining information I get from books, but it’s nowhere near as difficult as it is for me to remember what I read or saw online. Turning pages slows me down and maybe makes me think about the knowledge I’m acquiring as a stage in a process.
To give another example. Everytime I check some “social media expert” homepage (which isn’t often, and when it happens is usually a mistake) I always see my name right there in the side bar as a “MyBlogLog” visitor: “Joanne McNeil has visited just now!”
One day I actually clicked on my profile to see if I actually filed anything out. I did, and I even joined a group — a group of fans of Coudal Partners. I have no memory of filing out the profile or signing up as a fan of their blog at all. I mean, I read Coudal and I like it–a lot!– but if i were to join a community of blog readers for a certain blog, I can’t say it would crack even my top ten.
But apparently, I did. At some point. One some evening. Maybe drinking alone at my laptop and ignoring a major sporting event like I am now.
Dreamlike art by Anette Harboe Flensburg
From Mashable: “a 19-year-old user of the online live-streaming video service Justin.TV has apparently commit suicide in front of an audience of fellow forum dwellers egging him on during the process.” Tragic. Most disturbing are the screen captures of a cop entering his room that morning while the chat forum participants are still incapable of taking the situation seriously (”Zomg!” “Lol!”) If anyone can be a celebrity, everyone has an opportunity to be Christine Chubbuck.
We Live in Public
The girls in this video by Brad Troemel (it almost exclusively happens to females) have had someone steal their photographs and create fake accounts with their names (via.) To prove their account is the right one, they take pictures or videos with their myspace number and send it to the community managers. None is any kind of celebrity, except in the very micro-sense — everyone that goes to punk rock shows in her hometown knows who she is.
The Internet has heard enough about Emily Gould this week, still, I found the passage where she showed her therapist (who insisted “It’s important to remember that you’re not a celebrity”) the New York magazine article that nearly everyone in the media world read last fall, was a great anecdote about the strangeness of modern microcelebrity. Although Clive Thompson said it much better in Wired last year:
You could regard this as a sad development — the whole Brand Called You meme brought to its grim apotheosis. But haven’t our lives always been a little bit public and stage-managed? Small-town living is a hotbed of bloglike gossip. Every time we get dressed — in power suits, nerdy casual wear, or goth-chick piercings — we’re broadcasting a message about ourselves. Microcelebrity simply makes the social engineering we’ve always done a little more overt — and maybe a little more honest
Naomi Campbell will never know or care if you blog smack about her, but writers and editors, even of the highest prominence, do. When I was just started out, I wrote a flippantly dismissive post about a writer I respected but found excessively self-promoting. The writer came across my website (by googling her name and the word “brilliant,” as I saw in my referral log,) and sent me an angry note. Since then I’ve curbed every impulse to best anyone else.
What made Gould’s experience unique is, with obvious repercussions on her personal and professional life, she was paid to write about her immediate circle — the creative underclass, the people who thrive on attention, but also survive on their reputations. That’s you and me and everyone else who receives the New Yorker in her studio apartment. We’re all within reach of each other, even if some of us have more google hits — I even sat behind a friend of Gould’s discussing her relationship on his cellphone, while riding on the Chinatown bus the other night.
Blogging took off because of the dot-com crash. The media types — marketing, conference planning, pr, or something else — were the first to go when the tech bubble burst. Out of work and bitter, blog software meant they could finally go back to their roots in journalism. The World Trade Center disaster only sharpened their focus, giving a sense of purpose to their writing.
The web would look a lot different without those two historic — if unfortunate — events. We might have skipped blogging and moved straight to vlogging. The end result would be fewer citizen journalists and more Julia Allisons, and we’d be all the worse for it.
New York magazine called him the “The Warhol of Web TV,” in 1999, but Josh Harris “thinks Andy Warhol was his ‘advance man,’ a John the Baptist to his dot-com Jesus,” wrote Jim Hanas in a Radar feature last winter. Harris got rich (80 million rich) off a would-be TV replacing dot-com “Pseudo,” but he’s better know for his We Live in Public experiment, soon to be revisited in a feature documentary by Ondi Timoner (director of Dig!)
We live in public trailer from RADAR on Vimeo.
You can’t buy your way into the art world, but with enough money you can create a spectacle. Footage of his previous experiment Quiet, plays out like a classic Ballardian tale, but it is We Live in Public that startup-types still reference.
In 2000, his website Pseudo (screenshot) offered 60 hours of original programming a week. Streaming video “channels” skewed toward emerging subcultures, the post-indie rock, post-Liquid Television, post-Alleged Gallery art landscape waiting for the next new thing. Each channel, not unlike like Gawker Media sites, had its own web address, for the prescient purpose of specialized advertising. (Much more on this at the fascinating blog Ghost Sites of the Web.)
Richard Metzger had a show and Gary Baddeley, publisher of Disinfo remembers the site fondly, “If you were in New York in the late ’90s and you had anything to do with that first wave of dotcom madness, [the documentary clip will] really take you back … and realize that not only did Josh throw a great party, he really was a visionary.”
He definitely made a mark on the art world. Among other things, Harris funded a 2000 prank by Austrian-collective Gelitin, ”The B-Thing,” creating a fake balcony on the 91st floor of the World Trade Center (later “woven into the complex tapestry” of WTC conspiracy theories.) And even Alana Heiss of PS.1 and MoMA came by to inspect his experimental art project/millenium party “Quiet,” eventually calling it “one of the most extraordinary activities I’ve ever attended anywhere in the world.”
“The image I have in my mind is a concentration camp,” he says about the bunker built for the experiment. Staged on six floors of two buildings on lower Broadway, it was, “part rave, part Stanford Prison Experiment,” as Hanas writes. A hundred “pod people” were recorded from their Japanese capsule hotel beds (each equip with a video camera,) to the dining room, to the dance floor. There was a machine gun firing range, chess tournaments. Sex was filmed, even showers and toilets were set against the wall with no partitions. Participants were interrogated in a stark white room by a team of artists known as the Bureau.
Head interrogator Ashkan Sahini, an artist in real life, would do things like pull people out of their sleep capsules and grill them about their preference for white wine over red. “I am the asshole of this event,” Sahini said with considerable pleasure. “This is a society, and we will flip the rules around.” Sahini was accompanied by someone who introduced himself as Zero Boy, his platinum-haired “bodyguard,” who was dressed in a tight-fitting Soviet colonel’s uniform and carried a megaphone. What was that all about? “I’m a mercenary,” Zero Boy explained through his megaphone. “I have my own trip.”
They’d reveal their suicide attempts and heroin addictions. A “neo-fascist temple,” Harris calls it, but it was also a party. “The innocence and fun of New York pre-9/11 is recorded there in a way that’s really poignant to look at now,” documentary director Timoner told Radar.
Nearly 100 people checked in for the 10 days leading up to the New Year—but only after completing detailed background questionnaires, enduring intense interrogations, and donning orange and gray prisoner-style uniforms.
Everything was free, as long as you gave up rights to your image, which was constantly being captured. “Some people cried, but that was Josh’s thing,” says one so-called Podwellian, photographer Donna Ferrato. “He wanted to make people hurt, and get embarrassed and scared, and fight.” By New Year’s Eve, the scene was devolving into a lethargic mélange of sex, drugs, and interpersonal conflict, and on January 1, with no end in sight, the FDNY, NYPD, and FEMA arrived to shut it down.
It’s been said FEMA mistook it for a “suicide cult.”
The next project was WeLiveinPublic.com (the dot-com address now long gone,) by his production company “Panopticon,” collaborating with video artists The Verbal Group, including influential new media artist, Yael Kanarek. Cameras were constantly surveilling he and his girlfriend, and briefly Will Leitch, now editor of Deadspin. His girlfriend broke up with him and left, making her the Emily Gould of February 2001, (although her personal essay ran in the New York Observer, not NYT magazine.) Comparisons to The Truman Show were then inevitable, because it and some Twilight Zone episodes (and the first few seasons of the Real World) were all the references we had to go on. Survivor also premiered in 2000. Remarkable when you think about it … we’ve had an almost decade-long conversation about the ethics of reality television.
Then 9/11 happened, then the blogs, and now we are going back to Pseudo-style web programming, taking the We Live in Public idea past absurdity. You can see aspects of YouTube and Second Life in Pseudo, even micro-celebrity, “People want fame in a day-to-day basis, not over a lifetime,” Harris says in the Vimeo clip. Some of his ideas the Internet has yet to incorporate — for one thing, we’ve yet to make it easy to meet people through the ether without some degree of creepiness. Chat rooms are all but forgotten (unless we can think of Twitter as a time-delayed chat room.) I remember in high school, MTV would occasionally stream chat room discussions underneath video (yes, that was when MTV played music,) and seeing my comments on my television renewed my angsty life with a sense of purpose. I definitely wish there were a chat room to discuss the We Live in Public documentary clip as I was watching it.
It’s interesting how blogging technology now is tilting toward private applications. The blog and web 2.0 marriage is an uneasy one. Facebook was the first to gate us in communities with people we already know (it’s no surprise it started at Harvard — to keep out the plebes.) A cynical answer is Tumblr (where your friends list is actually hidden from view,) Twitter, and Vox are all to promote insider connections. But I think the move is as much for privacy. We haven’t quite figured out what to do with all the information swimming around out there.
As you can see in the clip (and do watch it!) one of the “Bureau” interrogators remarks — with the bustering confidence typical of everyone involved in the project — that some of the pod people will one day be famous and Josh Harris will have a file on them, revealing, who has “had anal sex…which of their parents they love more.” That was a little too lofty a vision. There are so many micro-celebrities no one really cares about you no matter how many personal details you confess.
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