What ever happened to...: Considering Neurons, Social Networking, Bodies & Selves

So, what happened to me? I guess I have been out since the recipe post a week and a half ago. Even without midterms, I seemed to have made last week stressful and this week has been nice, but still full of homework. Friends, music, drink and so on were definitely part of the past week or so, but it wasn't exactly Cancun around here. So I vanished for a spell and now I have returned.

A comrade from camp, Miss Stephanie, came across some update on her newsfeed on the Facebook and "looked me up," so to speak. Not really, she simply posted on my own wall. I have not heard from her in years and in a way, it is satisfying to hear that sort of echo come out of the past and catch up to me. As a well-loved album ends, "We were always coming back." Social networking allows space for this, but it also suggests that - which is what I said to Miss Stephanie - we can pass one another by so easily we often don't see them at all. (I posted a recent Cat and Girl comic on the tumblr which speaks to this.)

Meanwhile, I am reading Iacoboni, a neuropsychologist, describe how we copy one another, and Hannah Arendt describe action and word as the claiming of the self in the world. (These are excellent reads for one of my core classes.) What connects this? Well, if we can appreciate that speech is significant, that voice is about positing the self into the political (read: socially human) world, then does social media affirm or degrade this? We live in a world burdened by so many people speaking at once, but how do we encourage speech that is also action?

This touches on what I will likely write about for my class, and that is: Are speech and action distinct, or are they of one "body"? In a significant way, they are clearly distinct: One can speak an idea or tell a story without committing to it an any embodied way. But only recently has storytelling been divorced from action. Stories have traditionally been an embodied, lived act. This is still the case in theatre, but oral storytelling is such a rich experience because it is not simply oral in the telling. It is embodied and lived and, well, theatrical and dramatic.

Storytelling in this way incorporates ceremony, mysticism, and good old fashioned magic. It does so by incorporating the audience in the experience of the narrator-actor through, as Iacoboni explains, mirror neurons. The embodied act and the explicit detail of the story (narrative and intention are made explicit through embodiment) allows the audience to be with and in the story itself. They are not far from the story as one often is when reading a book, but one is close or even taken into a particular character of the story.

The written word is successful when, through language, the reader is incorporated in this way. This may happen through the seduction of diction and style, or through rich and identifiable characters, or through the dynamic and engrossing plot or scheme of the story. Each of these is a matter of reconnecting to the embodied tradition. The connection of language is inevitably a connection with voice, a teller of tales who we want to accept and explore; but we are taken in by the visceral, sensual power of that voice because in its clarity the narrator of the person is made clear to us. Characters allow us to embody others within the story, to not just connect but to place ourselves within the skins of others. (Iacoboni argues that this capacity makes empathy and ethical thinking possible, referencing Merleau-Ponty among others.) And the successful spinning of yarns, of rich plots are almost necessarily about world-creation and world-explanation in a mythical capacity, even if it is limited to the explanation of a particular person.

I speak in grander terms than I am prone to first because I think that these are generally the case, and second because I want to emphasize the transformative potential that results from this sort of thinking. This sort of thinking also problematizes social networking just as it empowers it. How do we contain or recreate identities behind the internet identities we craft and that are shown to us? One success of the Facebook, unlike MySpace, was that real college friends were expected to hold one another accountable for their claims on their profiles. That is, the value was on an authentic recreation of your word and action in digital space. This authenticity is voluntary and often extraordinarily superficial. The latter is also the common gripe against Twitter, though I have heard strong counterarguments as that digital space matures.

I am not one to read through my newsfeed, check in on all my friends, or see all their new photos on the Facebook. Most of the time it is superficial and other times it is inauthentic or strictly boring. (Trey Graham of NPR Monkey See and Pop Culture Happy Hour has remarked that photos on the Facebook are essentially the new slideshows families used to subject one another to.) That said, there is a way - one that is not always positive - in which the timeline of one's life is flattened into the realm of the digital through social networking; that is, one can no longer really leave anyone behind. Despite my own preferences - and I am not wasting time on the groups and visibility on the Facebook besides changing to protect my privacy from strangers - a classmate from elementary school is somehow on par with an old coworker, my best friends, my sister-in-law, and the new acquaintances that work with my roommate I hardly know.

We are all in this together. But are we closer or are we further apart?

My answer is that to be further apart, we can do the bland, the inauthentic, and the superficial. But if we are to continue to be embody in digital spaces, then we ought to expect I higher caliber from one another in terms of projecting that voice. I do not mean out-speaking (for which there is a time and a place) so much as harmonizing or creative discord with one another. We have greater questions than ever about ourselves, our voice, and our actions. How do we produce and act honestly? How do we project that and protect ourselves?

I have been thoroughly entertained by The Moth for the past several months. I think that, even in the audio podcasts, The Moth provides a vibrant example of honest and authentic projection of personal voice. Similarly, my work with writing haiku has been a practice in succinct clarity, in tempering my own voice in, hopefully, rich and entertaining ways. As far as action, I see a great many people using the Facebook as a means to project action; I receive invitation to house shows and senior recitals, to protests (not just e-signatures or virtual "days of action") and teach-ins, to community meals and awareness raising events. That said, events that happen "anywhere" or "everywhere" are not, in any honest way, events. If we are to project our voices, we have to compliment that with our bodies; without that, who and what have we become?