It begins like an autobiography. The day to day of this and that. Quickly transforming into an exploration of post-industrial information culture. We are become like gods. Sadly we watered down the idea so much that by the time we finally made it, the whole thing just felt like more of the same.
She says “We have begun wearing the behaviour of miniature celebrities, even when we’re not aware of it. Our journals are quietly expanding their borders, leaking out into full scale multimedia presentations that saturate our real life social interactions, as if our constant connection to the network is warping us from observers into the content itself. We The Public learning to manage Being Public.” And it feels close, but something is missing from the equation.
Because in the end it is a mask, as she says. A performance. I start to understand when he says “Persona means the actor’s mask through which his dramatic tale is sounded. Since man is the percipient who perceives what is, we can think of him as the persona, the mask, of being.” Because, I am interested not so much in what is the mask or what is the play, but who wrote the script? What is the “being” that dons the mask we call Human experience?
As he says a little earlier, “Script easily smothers the scream, especially if the script exhausts itself in description, and aims to keep men’s imagination busy by supplying it constantly with new matter. The burden of thought is swallowed up in the written script, unless the writing is capable of remaining, even in the script itself, a progress of thinking, a way.” His script, in this instance comes surprisingly close to her feeling that “Our personal narratives have become individual expression painted entirely by collective context.”
This is what I say with “A Subject can not exist without a context whereby there are Objects. Thus, the Subject, whole within its own subjective experience, must also always already exist as Object to another . . . and the negotiation continues.”
The question inherent in that is to what degree does the individual act as an agent of change within the system. That is, how much of the character is script, and how much performance? We may well be the lead character in the story of our lives, but how much is written and how much do we write?
Culture can shape your view of the world, the saying goes. And it might be more than just a saying: a new study suggests that culture may shape the way our brains process visual information.Researchers found that the brains of older East Asian people respond less strongly to changes in the foreground of images than those of their Western counterparts. They suggest this difference is due to an increased emphasis on the background, or context, of images in some Asian cultures. But other experts think the study does not firmly establish culture as the cause for this divergence.
And like an autobiography it ends, although no longer for an individual. The collective human voice as contextual rendering for the expression of the perception of individual thought. One sheep rising above the flock.
