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Wednesday, March 19, 2003
posted 11:30 AM
MEDIATED PERSONA OR PUBLIC SELF?
Someone asks whether there’s any point to the new-fangled formulation “mediated persona”, when the concept of “public self” is readily available?
The public self (or persona) has, arguably, been around as long as we’ve had selves and groups, but media are technologies. Monuments or other symbolic representations of rulers look to me like the earliest mediation of individual humans, and, while a ruler would have a public (as well as a private) self, this technological “broadcasting” of the individual constitutes something else, something fundamentally different.
Prior to the past century or so, with the exception of print, no mass media existed. When we listen today to the earliest recorded music, we are listening to musicians who themselves had never heard recorded music. I would argue that the experience of life in a world in which there was no recorded music was a fundamentally different (and, for us, perhaps literally unimaginable) experience. In such a world, a minimum of daily life-experience would be mediated.
Consider Madonna.
Madonna’s public self is nothing at all like your public self, though you definitely do have a public self. And it isn’t simply that hers is “larger”. That which exists in the human infosphere as “Madonna” is of a different order entirely. (I chose Madonna because her mediation seems to have surpassed any need for specific product; she’s in some sort of later stage, in which what she does, to the extent she does anything, is be Madonna.) There is woman who calls herself Madonna, who has a private self, and who may even be said (this gets tricky) to have a public self separate from her mediated persona, but “Madonna” is a mediated persona.
“Madonna” will survive the woman called Madonna in ways our ancestors would have regarded as purely supernatural.
HOW EVERYTHING DOESN'T WORK
"i wonder how things would have been if w.g. had been born 10 years later... with the tech, the music, the supermodels, everything."
"PHARMACOM" IN BOTH PR AND JM
Pharmacom is the Big Sinister Corporation lurking in the background of the plot of the film (though not in the short story). Weirdly, while studying detailed web-listings of shops on the Moscow streets Cayce was traversing, I ran across...Pharmacom! And giggled.
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