I wanted to write about the narcissism I read an article in RollingStone magazine this morning about a website called LASTNIGHTSPARTY (not safe for work)the website is made by Merlin Bronques who goes out on the town photographing women and rock n roll bands ( posing as a 21st andy warhol) partying. Think GIRLS GONE WILD minus the bitchy sorority girls. Sounds great right. I think that the site interests me primarily after reading McLuhan he says that only a Narcissistic culture could we view Narcissus as falling in love with his own image. McLuhan takes the point of view that Narcissus falls in love with the content of his reflection. This is what has happened with the Internet. We can look at social groups like myspace.com or friendster or live journal or even this blog that you are reading right now as a means to statisfy the individual perspective. The Internet gives a voice to the before unheard masses. The unheard masses are now the new Celebrities having liberated themselves from the grips of giant media to become the media themselves.
The power of the written word has transformed to include both the IMAGE and the WORD. If we look at intertextuality, introduced by Julia Kristeva she refers to intertextuality in two axes a horizontal axe connecting the reader and the text and the vertical connecting multiple texts. It is this vertical axe connecting the text with multiple texts that gives the Digital Literate their vanity. This process ties builds the individual ID. The Indivudal point of view is the view that supercedes truth in our digital environment. As McLuhan says in Understanding Media “ as we begin to react in depth to the social life and problems of our global village we become reactionaries. Involvement that goes with our instant technologies transforms the most “socially conscious” person into conservatives.” This communication can be anywhere at anytime it allows each of us to exercise ourselves in this media. No longer is the required participation in mass media wealth, fame, crime or personal acheivments, the only requirement now is the desire to participate. Mcluhan goes on to say “in this age commodity assumes more and more the character of information” Now the individual as commodity is morphing into the individual as information. This information about the persons wants and desires and hatreds has been codified into DATA MINING to be bought and sold for valuable marketing, creating another layer of intertextuality to draw the user into more and more of WHAT THEY WANT. An entire system built on Narcissism.
