Thursday, October 20, 2022

Your digital identity is only sorta kinda you

Since just before Covid hit I've been working as an advisor to a startup called koodos. Perhaps the simplest way to describe it is this: They're building both an app (that's what you, the user, interacts with) and a protocol (that's what developers interact with) that enable crowdsourced sentiment around any piece of digital media.

So, working alongside koodos co-founder Jad Esber, I recently contributed to a fairly metaphysical piece on what this new approach to digital life signals. The full original post, entitled "From Shelf to Self: Identity Construction in the Digital World" was published on Substack and can be found here.

What follows here is an excerpted version.

Opening up your wallet


When the team was thinking about the ways to describe its flagship app, koodos — a media ‘wallet’, they often found ourselves using the analogy of things tacked up on bedroom walls. Or record collections. Or the books on one’s shelf. All of these represent a physical manifestation of who we are, what we are, and how we want those closest to us to perceive us.


Using this framing, of the shelf as a proxy for the self, it’s an interesting coincidence that the words self and shelf are only one letter apart. Because to self-chronicle is to self-construct. The journey of identity construction is intertwined with our active collecting and chronicling of things and ideas. It isn’t that fixed self that we have to actualize or memorialize, it’s the changing and evolving one.


But there's got to be more to life online than just a series of swipes, right?


Life online can move so quickly it often feels like a blur. Swipe left, swipe right, swipe up, swipe down. Dings and pings for update notifications. The rabbit holes that algorithms send us down, some of which end up being too good for our own good. And the next thing we know, three hours have passed. 


What if we could slow things down, so that each digital moment doesn’t merely ‘autoplay’ into the next one? A place where things that truly resonate with us can be captured and serve as extensions of ourselves. Where our online actions are more intentional, more contemplative, and more deliberately non-swipey.


The people already using koodos come to it during what the team is calling a “koodos moment” — that recognition of “I love this”, that this thing I have encountered online really meant something to me, has reminded me of someone, has really resonated with me. If we wanted to get big-brainy about it, collecting on koodos lifts that moment to the level of consciousness. Of going from just one more nanosecond of life online to something of significance for us.


But simply collecting digital things, and moments, isn’t enough.


To produce is to real-ize


In French, the word for producer is ‘réalisateur’ —  or the one who realizes. To produce is to realize. It’s the idea of making something ‘real’, of taking a jumble of ideas and turning them into something understandable and appealing. That’s what good producers do. They make things that don’t yet exist ‘real’. And this applies beyond the context of identity construction. If we think about the process of navigating ideas, we strengthen our understanding of the problem or get clarity on the idea by producing, by shipping, by putting something out there. The act of producing helps you realize the idea and take it from abstract to concrete.


On the internet today, consumption is generally considered the main way to establish one’s particular identity (i.e. we are what we consume), and production is usually ignored in the discourse around identity-forming. But what happens if we reframe things so that more of what we do is also seen as productive, and constitutive.


The more we realize, the more we become ourselves


The unity of one’s life consists in the coherence of the story one can tell about oneself. 

                                                                                Philosopher Simon Critchley


As life plays out, we’re constantly re-writing our one-page autobiography. And the story that we tell about ourselves might be different in different contexts, around different audiences or in different points in time.


Alice in Wonderland knows this phenomenon well, as illustrated in her interactions with that Caterpillar character.


“Who are you?” said the Caterpillar.  

Alice replied, rather shyly, “I — I hardly know, Sir, just at present — at least I know who I was when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then.” 

“What do you mean by that?” said the Caterpillar, sternly. “Explain yourself!” 

“I can’t explain myself, I’m afraid, Sir,” said Alice, “because I am not myself, you see.”

 


So, like Alice, we’re constantly writing a rough draft of our autobiography. From a cultural theory perspective, we find ourselves in a  metamodern phase of both self and society, or what comes after the postmodernist view of a rejection of grand, all-encompassing narratives and performances of the self.


Delineation of the self as part of our story


And as we chronicle our lives online, we are forced to distinguish between our role as reader and our role as protagonist. In the process we separate the self from the things that influence the self in the story we tell ourselves and the story we in turn tell the world about ourselves. The reluctance of most user-generated content platforms to come to terms with their status as not just a social network but also a personal resource is rooted in this tension. 


Therefore any effort to understand the nature and origins of the self is an interpretive effort largely done elsewhere, in parallel somewhat to our life online. Where koodos sees a big opportunity is applying a constructivist lens, in which the self is something always evolving, to our digital identities.

Sunday, October 9, 2022

Found Object: Godard essay from the 80s

I tend to think in what could be thought of as 'circuitous' ways. If there's a straight line way to come at something, I probably won't take it.  Not because I don't value efficiency, but because I can 'what about this, what about that' myself to death. And depending on your own style of thinking and store of patience, you might be happy to play along, or, alternately, it might drive you nuts. I know it has driven some nuts in the past. 

Welcome to my head.
Not always this bad, though it can be

What brought this to mind was recently coming across a paper I wrote many moons ago, during undergrad days actually. Like so many people the Covid close-in meant having the occasion to go through piles of things I hadn't looked at in ages. 

Which is when I found this, an essay called "The cubistic element in Jean-Luc Godard's "Breathless"(1960), written by me in a previous life, also known as the 1980s. 

                 

And this is where the non-linear stuff starts to comes in. Looking back at this paper, and the image of the protagonist Patricia character alongside a Picasso, both presented in profile, I was reminded that it forced a very young me to think in literally figurative ways. In this case how a cubist approach to composition in film. Angular and fragmented. Highly realistic in some ways. Stylized and distancing in others. Here, arguably, the most interesting path from point A to point B is showcased. And even though I was an art history major at the time, until that point I really hadn't thought very much about the philosophy of a particular artistic style residing in more than just one medium.

So why am I thinking/writing about this now? Because coming across this paper coincided with the recent passing of filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard, who moved on to the big naturalistic set in the sky in mid September 2022. For those who don't know, a quick Godard primer: He was a leading proponent of the Nouvelle Vague, or  French New Wave, a 1960s artistic movement which was all about rule-breaking, norm-shattering, and a DiY approach to making movies. Godard and his filmic counterparts believed the way features were being made had become too set in the ways of studios and stars and structure. Who needs those, after all, when you can just explode all that came before.

My exposure to Godard came before the paper on "Breathless" though. A year or two earlier I remember having my even younger mind blown in another film class, where they had us watch Godard's "Weekend", from 1967. 

That long traffic jam tracking shot in particular stuck with me. WTF was that? Whatever it was, I had never seen anything like it on a big screen. And then, a couple of years later came the class where we watched "Breathless" aka "A Bout de Souffle", Effortlessly beautiful Jean Seberg. Suave Euro bad boy Jean Paul Belmondo. The streets of Paris in 1960. What could be cooler.

Actually, I have an answer: The imperfection of a roving handheld camera, the abruptness of jump cuts that at first seem like mistakes. There's that non-linear thing again. All these visual shards forcing our brains to fill in the spaces between, as is the case with so many cubist works.

Or as 4 decades ago me put it, in prose that was clunkier that it should have been:

                 

But why rely only on words written on an IBM Selectric typewriter when you can use other state of the art technology of the time --  a photocopier and a glue stick -- to augment your point about the connection between cubist works of art and Godard's "Breathless".

The passing of the decades has definitely led to a certain amount of cringe as I revisited this paper from decades ago. On top of noticing the more tactile experience of reading typewriter keystrokes on paper, and my little arts and crafts project on the back pages that preceded the bibliography, what struck me is how much better this paper would have been without the superfluous adjectives.


Maybe even using 'superfluous' above is itself superfluous. But I can let that one go. The bigger insight for me in revisiting this stuff has been realizing the lasting effects of being exposed to a suite of so many cool and radical ideas at such an impressionable age. 

Tuesday, September 13, 2022

My Britpop Boomerang (or how a Radiohead interview I did in 1996 came back to me as a Facebook recommendation 26 years later)

During a brief bout of sleeplessness last night I opened my phone and went into Facebook. Not the best antidote to temporary insomnia, I know I know. Nevertheless...swipe, swipe, swipe I did. 

Hmmm, nothing much of interest here. 

Then *this* story pops up, from a source I don't even follow. Meaning it came to me through the recommendation algorithm. Okay, it's from Far Out Magazine and it's about Britpop, a genre I was very partial to in the 1990s. I get why it was pushed. 

Then I look at the pull quote - "It's always good to make fun of Oasis" - and I thought to myself "that sounds awfully familiar." So I click and dig into the article. It's all about a Gallagher brother, Noel in this case, slamming Radiohead. If you weren't particularly interested in music in the mid 1990s or maybe you weren't even born yet, you need to know that the Gallagher brothers of Oasis were endless sources of caustic quips about other musicians. Always salty, always amusing. 

See exhibit A below, from the Far Out article, for an example of the kind of thing I'm referring to.

The back and forth battled behind Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke and the Oasis guys seems to have spanned decades. Who knew that in 2015 Noel Gallagher was still dumping on Radiohead in the press, but apparently he was. Anyway, then we get to the part of the article that talks about an event that occurred in early 1996. 

And this is where things start to get very self-referential, and why the "It's always good to make fun of Oasis" line jumped out at me. 

It's because the event referenced below, in what we'll call Exhibit B, happened during a recording for a radio show I hosted at CBC in the mid 1990s. And now it's coming back to me as a recommendation in my Facebook feed in September 2022? Now we know how long it takes for the cycle to complete itself. Though why this appeared on the radar of the UK's Far Out at this point in time remains a mystery to me.

And here's the Oasis-piss-taking-by-the-Radiohead-guy, assisted acoustically by 2 members of The Posies. (Note: That's 1996 me saying "Yeah" at 1:10). 


So how did this strange little bit of messing around in a CBC studio in Vancouver in the mid 1990s end up as a story in an online UK publication in 2022, and then pushed to me on Facebook?

It would have all started with somebody, back in 1996, recording the radio show, onto cassette, and then dubbing copies for friends. I remember doing so much of that kind of thing myself I even had a dedicated dubbing cassette deck. This era coincided with the rise of the commercial consumer internet, where people organized themselves into interest groups, using BBSs (online bulletin boards), Usenet, and sites like Geocities. The cassette distribution would have gone from known person to known person to a not personally known individual as recipient. And then from that person to people s/he knew and also potentially other online pals. Yes, kids, this was the world before the viral videos of YouTube and TikTok.

Once we hit the end of the 1990s, we got into the file-sharing world of Napster and later the likes of Kazaa, Limewire, and several other peer-to-peer music sites where MP3s were uploaded and downloaded, and copyright enforcement became too big to take on.

From the same session in which the Oasis Wonderwall bit appeared, the following full song was also recorded. And in between the mid 1990s and the early 2000s Radiohead became one of the biggest bands in the world and the internet as a mainstream technology for global connection had taken hold.

Thus we get the full song featuring Thom Yorke of Radiohead with Jon Auer and Ken Stringfellow of The Posies making the rounds first through cassette sharing and trading, then on file-sharing sites, and finally onto YouTube, as confirmed in the comments section.





And because there are few mysteries unsolved on the internet, 11 years ago someone who came across the YouTube video had the provenance information for the recording, even though at that time about 20 years had elapsed between the recording and its posting on YouTube.



And there's little old me, chiming in on the comment stream. If you make it to the end of the YouTube video above you'll hear 1996 me in some kind of Nostradamus mode, predicting the likelihood of a bootleg of the recording showing up one day.

It sure is nice to be right once in a while.