I recently read Philip Dawdy's entry "Love American Style: Web 2.0 And Narcissism" over at his blog Furious Seasons. I suppose that many of my differences with his thoughts on the issue stem from our different theoretical backgrounds, but I did have a few.

To begin, I strongly agree with him that much of what we've grown accustomed to calling Web 2.0 is fueled by a particular narcissism. Another term that I've used in the past for this is spectacle - of ourselves for the viewing of others - in something of a modification of the implicit power relations described by Laura Mulvey in relation to cinema in "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" (excerpt). We make ourselves, knowingly and unknowingly through our web-based, inherently archival interactions. Yet in these Web 2.0 media (I'll use social networks as the central example here) the process of interaction has become a process of developing explicit representations of identity - and in most circumstances, many. This could definitely be described as a narcissistic act on some level. It requires hard thought how one wants to be perceived and delicate negotiations of complex social relations.

Yet I diverge from Dawdy somewhere around this sentence:

"This state of affairs cannot be especially healthy for our souls, our psychology and, hell, our brains because none of it is real."

He presumes that we, as a networked society, are becoming increasingly isolated from "real" interaction and that the end result of this narcissistic endeavor is ultimately meaningless. First of all, to claim that interaction, as expressed through a constructed identity (which, it's important to note, is not a closed process and involves the participation of others if only though comments and imitation) is less "real" than a conversation on the street is to place flesh-and-blood in the position of determining reality. To extend that, clothing itself impedes reality - nude conversations being the fullest exposure of this key to reality. While this is supported in metaphor ("Tom Cruise bares it all in this revealing interview"), we have to recognize that any interaction takes place through the specific cultural, social, political, etc, contexts in which it is happening. When good friends meet on the street unexpectedly, the identities through which they interact is quite different than those they would use for a stranger in a coffee shop. "Reality" is not a term that can be comfortably applied to identity. Teens may indeed be more comfortable and "themselves" over IM than in person. So we cannot fault these new media for watering down human interaction.

Secondly, while I agree that participation in these media often require a hefty dose of narcissism, this does not mean that this leads to socially detrimental ends. There are two sides to the narcissistic equation, which is why I prefer spectacle: the seen and the one seeing. No self-respecting narcissist would use a social-network that didn't let users see his profile. And instead of seeing a class of seen and another of those seeing, every participant plays both roles. They see and are seen. We enact both ends of spectacle - though not always simultaneously. And it is in these roles that we primarily interact through these media. It may be very light-weight interaction to merely view a profile, but that is what makes it worth it for anyone to participate in the first place.

Now we can start to imagine all these singular interactions adding up to a multiple whole, in an essentially emergent process. Millions of otherwise insignificant local interactions add up to a greater, global effect. On very concrete terms we see this expressed through collaborative filtering, but more importantly it allows for the creation of a multiple, networked subjectivity. The singularities continue to exist and interact, yet at the same time contribute to and shape this global effect, very close to what Hardt and Negri term the Multitude. This is a biopolitical conception that is exciting in its potentiality. What Dawdy may see as insignificant interactions and a frivolous use of time, turns out to be - on the scale of the multiple - of quite some interest indeed.

Dawdy writes largely on psychopharmacological topics, where as I was eager to drop that reference to the Multitude in the last paragraph (even if it meant doing so awkwardly). We're approaching this topic from different perspectives. We did have one further point of agreement though in his entry. This came when he recounted an argument at a bar with a cocky Google employee over how his company was helping content creators or merely greedily grabbing at cash:

"I asked him how much he made. He declined to tell me. At that point, a Web 2.0 creature would crumple and link to some report on the Net—which they have no way of knowing the validity of—purporting to show how much one of these algorithm assholes actually makes. Within five minutes, I had cracked the genius and he 'fessed up that he made $210,000 a year. At the time, I made one-fifth of that. ... I told him that he either needed to buy me a shot of Remy (he could afford to upgrade my Maker's Mark) or he could get the hell away from my table. He didn't come back."

As someone who is in a pay-grade probably even lower than Dawdy's and still working in the web business like the cocky Googler, I too would like a whisky - neat.