The Ghost in the Feed: Reflection on COMM 555
I think that there is loss in permanence.
I've talked about where I'm from, live performance and theatre. It is where a story is told and lived, and then it vanishes. I've never been particularly sentimental towards things. To me, it's the experience. When something does vanish, there's space for memory. That's what makes it heavy. But on the internet? Nothing ever really vanishes. It just lingers. Everything's saved. This course made me feel the gravity of that.
COMM 555 made me think about how I perform myself in online spaces, and how it's different on different platforms. I didn't just think about my identity, I thought about performing it. One of the things I most appreciated was how the class kept looping back to the idea of truth. What does it mean to be true when you're building yourself for an audience?
The Digital Literacy Snapshot reminded me how long I've been performing online, even unknowingly. Each platform was a stage. Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, and even Club Penguin all had a different iteration of me. I was building myself.
The Theory of the Selfie blog post was along those lines. I imagined by creating AI selfies of me, I would learn more about myself. Ironically, I didn't. The more realistic the picture became, the less I connected with it. But when I played the absurdity game (the toy figurine, the Ghibli-formatted one) I sensed something that seemed to me to be more accurate. I wasn't striving for truth anymore, I was creating something that expressed emotion. And in some weird way, that seemed more truthful to me.
It's all performance. That's something I have already discovered from theatre, but it's amplified online. We choose what we project. We adapt, we filter, we frame. The virtual world just makes that performance seamless. It's exhausting at times, but it's interesting.
The assignment on fleeting narratives really spoke to me. In theatre, beauty is fleeting, it's there, and then it disappears. Online, however, it isn't. Even with those particular posts that only ever last 24 hours, there are avenues through which they can be saved, screen-captured, and reposted. It made me question what makes something permanent. If all things remain, then what do we have?
And yet, still, things feel like they are moving too fast. AI is evolving daily. Platforms evolve. Yesterday's news today is new. That did not make that any less overwhelming, but it allowed me to put it into words better. It gave me language, tools, and slightly more comprehension.
There's a strength in being able to think about these things and make things simultaneously, the images, reflections, and stories. I found the making to be centering. Even when I was unsure, to keep going.
But I do know this: you don't have to love the wave, you just have to ride it!
Thanks, professor Laccetti and class!
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