In the April issue of Internet Underground, musician Todd Rundgren says he is "the poster boy for interactivity." In that guise, I suppose, he describes the World Wide Web as being "like a strip mall." Expanding on this image, he continues, "It's like riding along a Dallas freeway where there's nothing but fucking billboards."
At first I thought: He's just jealous because he doesn't have a cute web site. But then I read the cover story of the April WIRED; boy, did it give me second thoughts. It's an in-depth profile by Pamela McCorduck of Sherry Turkle, "cyberspace explorer and professor of the sociology of science at MIT," author of "Life on the Screen." Turkle's thesis, based on the theories of the major French dude Jacques Lacan, seems to be that the notion of Self has become outmoded (upgraded?) in the computer age. She offers the computer itself, or networking anyway, as the very model of postmodernism.
Oh, okay, what is meant by postmodernism? McCorduck explains, "Modernist birthday parties had cakes, candles, presents, and games; the main game at postmodern birthday parties is watching and commenting on the videos just shot.... " All video, no cake: that's postmodernism!
And what differentiates Lacan from, say, Freud is that he "presented himself as analyst and analysand simultaneously, often declining to distinguish between material and its interpretation. "
So when aging boy wonder Todd Rundgren looks out from his poster at the World Wide Web billboards, he is both doer and watcher, commentator and comment, container and thing contained, cruiser and cruised, clicked and clicker, dragger and dropped.... I get it! Getting it is modern, confusion is postmodern!
I'd thought postmodernism had bit the dust around 1989, much like camp did in the 60s, but now the Web has given it new life. Thanks to e-mail, we can still ponder (as Turkle puts it) "the precedence of surface over depth, of simulation over the real, of play over seriousness." Or, as McCorduck puts it, "In the culture of simulation, we aren't alone with the self but with many others -- some of whom are our own avatars."
So post-modernism is a slow ideological spin that allows each of us (and avatars too!) to justify not having an attention span. Get a handful of adjectives, like "permeable," "liminal," or "decentered," add a double latte, and you can amuse your various selves for hours, looking for cultural echoes on "Baywatch," or simply skimming in-depth articles in Wired.
Here's more: "People use the Internet as a significant social laboratory for experimenting with the constructions and reconstructions of self that characterize postmodern life. In its virtual reality, we consciously construct ourselves," Turkle writes. Players in a MUD are authors too, hundreds of them at a time. "When each player can create many characters and participate in many games, the self is not only decentered but multiplied without limit."
See, back when you played Risk or Monopoly on a rainy Saturday, you were just pretending to take over the world; when you role-play on the Internet, you actually are taking over the world, one decenter at a time. As a result when you play solitaire now, you aren't just trying vainly to amuse yourself, you are creating a self to be amused. And when you play poker, well... try to find a poker game in Las Vegas today, just try. See what I'm saying?
Turkle continues, "The goal of healthy personality development is not... to become a unitary core, it's to have a flexible ability to negotiate the many -- cycle through multiple identities." So not only do I have to read Wired to keep up with what's going down, I have to create in myself the kind of reader who gives a flying fuck. It's not easy.
Nothing is easy. Even agreeing to do the interview with Ms. McCorduck, Ms. Turkle had to wonder, "am I going to be the authoress, am I going to be the mom, the colleague?" I know where she's coming from. Just the other night, I was working on this column, watching "Politically Incorrect," popping popcorn, drinking a cold beverage, and arguing with my girlfriend on the telephone, all at the same time. I was very anxious, until I suddenly realized that I was multi-tasking, and found a measure of peace, just before my girlfriend hung up on me.
What can be done? Fortunately, Turkle tells us, "We have only one body, and for the foreseeable future will only have one body." What a relief! And she concludes, "We stipulate several selves, but they attach to that immune system called Me."
So, what did the immune system called Ian get from this profile? Well, we play solitaire differently than we play poker. We can yell at the dog but never the boss. The emperor can be naked and well-dressed at the same time, depending on which avatar we use to look at him. We can't be in two places at once, but a boy can be on a poster and look at a web site. And an inflated sense of self-importance is very important in these postmodern times; a dinky little self would just get lost in the billboards.