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Thomas de Zengotita on Time's 'Person of the Year'

Thomas de Zengotita's 'Mediated' is one of the more useful books I've read on the media recently. It seems to me his theorisation of 'the flattered self', the performance of self and 'virtual revolution' are indispensible when it comes to properly understanding personal media.

So it's no surprise to see him using Time Mag's nomination of 'You' as 'Person of the Year' to plug his ideas on the HuffPo. As he says:

This goes beyond trend-mongering, escapism, narcissism and trashy posts. Time Magazine's choice was a symptom of a massive social phenomenon--call it the centralization of self in a mediated environment.

I must have a look at his various HuffPo blog posts, most of which seem to be more about politics than media theory.

All about you

More links to check - Time Mag's end of year special nominates 'you' as its person of the year - a way to cover the whole Web 2.0 hype (again), obviously, and there's been a lot of rumbling about how it should be 'us' rather than 'you' that should be in the frame. But there's plenty to check and read in the issue - e.g. James Poniewozik's piece about the spread of cameras and Steven Johnson on the 'us' theme, Jaron Lanier reprising his Digital Maoism critique - along with some stuff linking back to Warhol.

More Big Media on personal media

Last bit of late night link dumping - I need to read this John Pareles piece from the NYT, '2006, Brought to You  by You'. Found it via Nicholas Carr, who, unsuprisingly goes for, and extends the critical take on user generated content and the self-expression explosion. 

Music recommendations without music journalists?

The Guardian Tech section has a useful look at the role social networking sites like MySpace play in music recommendation and how the record industry is trying to take advantage. Could be useful for my dissertation students who are interested in the way the net is changing music journalism.

JPG Magazine

Yet more stuff to keep up with - and perhaps kick over to the photojournalism students. JPG has been going for a while as a showcase for the new wave of digital photography.

Basically, if you want to get your pics in the mag, you upload them to the site, submit them to one of the themes for the next issue, then everyone votes on which images should make the print magazine.

If your pic makes the magazine, then you get a free year's subscription and a hundred bucks. Can't be bad. I think there are some more innovations re the publishing model and how it works - Derek Powazek is behind it - he's been involved in various user-driven publishing projects since the days of HotWired.

The current issue of JPG is devoted, in part, to self-portraiture. That seems unsurprising - I think I need to get hold of it for my researches. Or maybe download the pdf.

Another YouTube face

OK - a quick test to see if it works - watch this guy age 6 years over 5 minutes.

YouTubers

A montage of YouTube faces, doing their thing - given added pathos by the music - I wonder whether the music makes it all bearable or whether it would still be so fascinating without the strings. Lots of comment about this online - found it via The Chutry Experiment. Note to self - figure out how to embed video on this page. Also - one more to add to my Henry  Jenkins' reading list - his post on the 'vaudevillian aesthetics' of YouTube.

More about personal identity online

Here's some more links, mostly found via Nicholas Carr - he points to an essay on Edge, 'How People See Themselves', by Hubert Burda - which looks at the history of portraiture and then tries to draw some links to blogs, MySpaces etc. As Carr says, Burda never really develops his argument - which is kind of frustrating. So he does it instead, arguing that:

"What they (MySpace/Flickr/blog self-portraits/self representations) seem to express, more than anything, is a desire to turn oneself into a product, a commodity to be consumed. And since, as I wrote earlier, "self-commoditization is in the end indistinguishable from self-consumption," the new portraiture seems at its core narcissistic. The portraits are advertisements for a commoditized self, though they're presented without Warhol's cruel and clarifying irony."

A few years ago, I would have gone with this whole-heartedly - now I'm not so sure - I need to think about why.