In this facebook and google years your existence is dependent upon two conditions, and two spaces: your body needs to be tagged and taggeable, and your essence googled and googleable. We are post post marxist ideas of “commoditized identities.” We are one step further, because the cyber space does not necessarily depend any longer upon our ability to acquire a computer, but on our ability and agency to locate (transfer) ourselves within that unphysical unlimited space. (I KNOW I SOUND A LOT LIKE THE MATRIX, I just realized that.) Materiality (as in commodity) is NOT The Key Factor for the construction of identities anymore.
As I write this I also acknowledge that I am locating myself in a very specific time frame that could limit the possibility of this text to be universal. However, our universal ideas are now cyber ideas, which actually would then insert my argument into The History of Cyber Culture (s) –YES, I am bringing back grand narratives, cause I also believe these have never left or disappeared from “the realm,” these have just been strategically and academically overlooked –that lie you repeat until you start believing it, in other words: "a myth."
The existence of ideas has been conditioned as well. Their circulation is no longer dependent upon publication, but on blogs. In order to be contemporary, popular, and critical, ideas need to be blogged, youtubbed, and as an extension… googleable.
You may then ask yourself (or actually ask me) “Why am I then attempting to publish this in print?," cause’ it may seem contradictory. (AND INDEED I INFORM YOU I AM TRYING TO DO SO) The answer takes us back to a universal theme: time, and the Backtinian chronotope. (unit of space and time). Cyber ideas, blogged ideas are as real as they are ephemeral, as ephemeral as a comment in a blog that may not be seen anymore, buried by 20 other comments on the same blog entry. Popularity and popular response from viewers and readers contributes to circulation, but at the same time, buries and covers other’s ideas and responses, and deviates attention from the main posting to comments themselves. A “popular idea,” the cyber culture of knowledge, is measured in number of commentaries and views. I do not wish to be buried by my own blog entries. This is not an issue of accessibility, but of sometimes random exposition.
This exposition is a perfect sample of “the real’s imaginary,” where subject taxonomies are evidently petrified: THE VISIBLE PROOF THAT MEASURES THE DISTANCE BETWEEN ACADEMIA AND POPULAR CULTURE.
Remember, the “new academia” is cool, and popular. We are pseudo post elitist knowledge; Boundaries have been blurred (.) (?)
However, my arguments are not detached from medieval, colonial, romantic, modern, avant guarde and pos(t)modern conditions. Subjects continue to be located and mapped. From such constructions, these subjects (not individuals at all times) then conform, deconstruct, reorganize or decompose norms and patterns for nationality, race, class, gender, and other many tags (classifications).
Our ability to be tagged, depends on our ability to be classified as well. We need to be in similar networks. Otherwise, these taggeability is no longer common, or becomes less possible.
Taggeability is also the condition of being identified, located, covered and constrained by the boundaries of a name, a group and a network, the importance of a name (….yes yes…pure Foucault right here), ornamented and complemented by our selection of groups and other items from application to application.
For the academia (most academics) this is an era in which subjects have more freedom. But…how “real” is this in our cyber world? Are subjects still dependent on classifications, check marks in order to be read as “X,” “Y” or “Z.” Have we (who’s we?), and the “realm of people,” stopped believing in taxonomies that academia has attempted to question and deconstruct for so long?
Are we now cyber objects?
I INSIST, We still need to be untagged.
