"I'm Bart Simpson, who the hell are you?"
This fascinating article by Brian Ott from The Journal of Modern Culture 2003 addresses the various ways that characters - us and Bart, Homer, and Lisa - create and present identity. Bart, who appropriates elements of culture to project an oppositional attitude that is more more than appearance; Homer who "merely" consumes culture and has no core identity beyond that; Lisa, who creates identity through a narrative toward meaning "Lisa, the Vegetarian" etc. Blogging meets, matches, and transcends these three modes of identity formation / presentation. The links a blogger chooses can be indicative of Bart's appropriation of pieces from the culture industries; the narrative of a blog entry, or the evolving narrative of a blog over time does appear to lead toward the creation of meaning and purpose, with narrative's traditional expectations of trajectory cause and effect (though as Ott points out hypertext is deconstructing narrative); and the pure pleasure of consuming and producing text is Homeric, in Ott's view.
[Image from www.allposters.com 11 January 2007]
posted by Sara Jameson at 12:26 PM
2 Comments:
Thanks for sharing this article with me, Sara. I really enjoyed it.
I would add that blogs, too, deconstruct the causality of narratives. Sure, a single blog post might be narrative in nature, but over time, a blog reveals tangents, false starts, new information that does not seem to fit with regards to cause and effect, and with links out to other websites/blogs, a blog tends to be more networked than narratalogical.
Oh, and I might add that Homer is defined more that he finds pleasure in consuming all texts. I don't know about producing?
I liked Ott's conclusion that postmodern identities are formed through a variation of these three tropes of identity (re)presentation.
Thanks for sharing this article with me, Sara. I really enjoyed it.
I would add that blogs, too, deconstruct the causality of narratives. Sure, a single blog post might be narrative in nature, but over time, a blog reveals tangents, false starts, new information that does not seem to fit with regards to cause and effect, and with links out to other websites/blogs, a blog tends to be more networked than narratalogical.
Oh, and I might add that Homer is defined more that he finds pleasure in consuming all texts. I don't know about producing?
I liked Ott's conclusion that postmodern identities are formed through a variation of these three tropes of identity (re)presentation.
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