Comments on: Dresden dolls tonight

By: BradyDale

BradyDale — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 11:35:46 +0000

Karen,
I think we are more than willing to engage in this whole philosophical discussion.
A lot of people get really weird about documenting things. I have no photos of one of my favorite girlfriends because she’d get nutty if I pulled my camera out (not good nutty).
Though, in my mind, this discussion is a little less philosophical and a little more pragmatic. I often find it’s a question of the mood people are in and whether or not they are willing to be documented. If I wait until the mood is up and good, people don’t care. They might even get excited and play along… but if I pull the camera out too early it can ruin the camera for me all night.
I think one of the contrasts that’s hard for people like us, who like the camera, generally (posed pictures aside… they are less cool generally), is that we have less of an aversion to photos and having cameras around.
I get really frustrated when I get my camera out and I try to shoot, for example, a couple friends talking, but one of them sees the camera and tries to move or pose. When, in truth, I just want them to keep going as is so I can get it that way. Those are the shots I like best.
Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle is way, way more true with people, though. The camera changes things.
OK, I think I really got off-topic here.

By: fugitivepeas

fugitivepeas — Mon, 16 Oct 2006 16:28:19 +0000

yea! It seems as if you always have a list of interesting things to read about so many subjects.

By: ephermata

ephermata — Fri, 13 Oct 2006 18:33:59 +0000

I’m sorry to miss the concert. Blow a kiss to Amanda for me!

As for personality editing displayed on camera, there seem to be at least two issues here. One is the authenticity issue, related to the question of how to understand people responding to lonelygirl15 being a “fake.” For me, the basic issue is that of being lied to. In contrast, when we read fiction, we are willing participants in building a story that is pre-declared to be not real. When we believe a story is real, however, as when we view news or talk to a person on a date, and then find out it isn’t, there’s a feeling of betrayal. That seems to overshadow the issue of whether it’s meaningful to talk about that story as ‘real’ or not.

A second issue is that of selective editing. One place to start here might be to look at Erving Goffman’s _The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life_. He gives examples of such selective editing that have nothing to do with video — one of my favorites is when he talks about how people living in a cabin can see their visitors put a smile on before knocking on the door. The linked text also talks about exclusive clubs in London as a marker of status.

The question then is how to explain the fact that different settings bring out different behaviors from the same person. A second question, which I think you’re getting at here, is how the medium (e.g. video) impacts the answer to that first question. Goffman has a theory for the first question based on the idea of “performance” from the same unitary person, but I don’t know what he had to say about the second.

Sherry Turkle made a splash in the mid-90s by looking at case studies of MUDs and claiming that things, were, in fact quite different now. Not everyone was convinced; I remember some friends of mine and I liked the article “Hyperbole over Cyberspace : Self-Presentation in Internet Home Pages and Discourse” by Wynn and Katz. That was back in 1997, though, and I’m sure a lot has been done since then. More recently, danah boyd has looked at social network software and how people use that.

This is all a long-winded way of saying that yes, these are interesting questions. and that there’s probably a lot more to find about them.

By: krypticnight

krypticnight — Fri, 13 Oct 2006 16:32:00 +0000

When I go on vacation, I tend to have the same problem. I seem so focused on ‘capturing’ the experience that I forget to actually do the experiencing. It’s like you throw away the present in hopes that the posterity, as remembered through the media remnants of it, will be exciting.

But yayyyy, dresden dolls. =)