The Arcadias of the eighteenth-century Romantics or the sixties counterculture are not a viable option for the vast majority in cyberculture, who have no desire to return to a pretechnological life of backbreaking labor, chronic scarcity, and unchecked disease. Simultaneously, the gleaming futures of technophilic fantasy à look increasingly like so much unreal estate.
-- Mark Dery
The street finds its own uses for things.
-- William Gibson

     While everyone is arguing about what WILL BE, a number of individuals have taken up the cause of using existing technology in order to shape the new reality. Not willing to wait for the limitless possibilities of virtual this or virtual that, and certainly more afraid of the implications of a nostalgic return than of the technological doomsday prophecies of the techno-stallers, they embrace that Baudrillardian return to "lived experience," and couple it with the Ballardian notion of the reversal of inside/outside and imagination/reality. Then, they put it all out there on the Web.

In the postmodern world, not only is it ok to be fragmented and multiple, but it's pretty much required. These Web diarists construct their "selves" through their Web pages by regularly (or, in some cases, semi-regularly) posting diary entries, displaying pictures of themselves, etc. -- pretty much taking the simple tools of HTML and the QuickCam, and asserting who they are or who they want to be. 


Of course, things weren't always this way, where access to relatively simple
technology like the Web could allow you to put forth whatever side of yourself
you wanted to, and in whatever fashion. A hundred years ago, you had to be
committed to parading your multiple selves about, not being able to hide behind
the screen, as it were.

Alfred Jarry was committed (or should have been).
So was Egon Schiele.
 


























On the Internet, "people are able to build a self by cycling through many
selves... In the past, such rapid cycling through different identities
was not an easy experience to come by... Of course, people assumed different
social roles and masks, but for most people, their lifelong involvement
with families and communities kept such cycling through under fairly
stringent control... Now, in postmodern times, multiple identities are no
longer so much at the margins of things... The Internet has become a
significant social laboratory for experimenting with the constructions
and reconstructions of self that characterize postmodern life. 

-- Sherry Turkle






Social and scientific trends are converging to shape a new
conception of the self, a new construction of what it means to
be a human being. The matter-of-fact acceptance of one's "natural"
looks and one's "natural" personality is being replaced by a growing
sense that it is normal to reinvent oneself.

-- Jeffrey Deitch