In our current tumultuous media
climate, secrets hold a greater significance and simultaneous displacement than
ever before. In the era of information, we are surrounded by the need for
instantaneous decisions about what to keep private and what to keep public at
every turn, particularly in terms of constructing our online presence. The
dissemination of the internet has seen a renewed attention to identity politics
in terms of its potential to empower individuals, shape and polish identities,
and further interactions between people who may or may not ever meet and
exchange ideas in person.
However,
this fascinating dichotomy of the need to maintain a public, easily accessible
persona that hides within it a private, ‘authentic’ persona is not so easily
drawn or preserved. My paper aims to explore the slippages between public and
private that occur in the construction of online personas through a variety of
social media outlets in order to dissect the way in which secrets are protected
and disseminated in the digital age.
Firstly,
I aim to examine the notion of secrecy and privacy itself within the context of
online privacy practices and the control that social media sites like Facebook
and Twitter maintain in terms of the privacy settings they construct for their
users. The notion that we can control who has access to what on our profile,
the ways in which we can block other users, and the general politics of privacy
as determined by internet magnates will be studied particularly in terms of the
context of neoliberalism and the way in which its corporate market strategies
have facilitated the prevalence of the internet and its gestation of social
media worldwide. The case study of ‘Katie’s party’ will serve as one core
example about the effects of privacy, secrets, and the notion of containing
information that is publicly posted on the internet.
Secondly,
I will examine the notion of online identity construction and secrets in terms
of personal relationships and how online presences have increased self-surveillance
and pushed users to carefully put together their online personas. Case studies
from dating websites, facebook, linked in, and Lulu will be examined in this
context, as well as the film Disconnect,
which provides several examples of the complicated interplay of secrets and
control in their dissemination which permeates online visibility. Facebook’s
uses and its differences with the professionally-oriented Linked In will particularly
be probed in terms of the aspects of identity that can be publicized
professionally versus those that need to be kept personal and secret, and the
gaps and slippages that can occur between the two. Lulu provides a particularly
fascinating case study as an app that works to ‘review’ men whom women have
previously dated in order to warn others about their negative traits and inform
them of their positive characteristics. The site and app recently altered its
privacy policy so that only men who sign up to the site are allowed to be
reviewed, whereas previously the website set up connections to users’ facebook
profiles and allowed the reviewing of any male friend. This shift marks an
interesting change in Lulu’s self-branding and places into question its ties to
post-feminism and the logic of ‘choice’. The app, along with others such as
Grinder and Tinder, compresses identity and secrets into a process of selection
and commodification whereby identities are propagated, revealed, and integrated
into a system of mass exchange.
Essentially,
the paper aims to examine these issues through a cultural studies lens that will
enable a closer look at particularly how Derrida’s notion of the ever-deferred truth
has come to life through the digital age, where layers of private and public
intersect to such an indiscernible degree that the search for authenticity grows
ever more elusive.
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