Alright. I still feel like I am all over the place with my research so Monday should really help me out with feedback from all of you. Help me focus a little bit. I've also been reading bits and pieces of books so it has been difficult to find whole articles or chapters for you all to read.
It might help for me to explain again what it is exactly that I'm trying to study. I am interested in looking at how we perform our identities online by looking at Freud and Lacan's ideas on psychoanalysis (the self and the other), a bit of communication theory, and perspectivism. I need to draw on how our lives have changed with new media technologies so I'm looking at McLuhan for that, as well as a few other scholars, but you get the idea with McLuhan. With performing our identities online, iterations of ourselves are created. Past selves, which would normally be collected in a tangible photo album or handwritten journal, are now a lot of times online in the form of a social networking site such as facebook and blogs. Jacques Derrida has the idea that these iterations are ghosts. I want to go further and look at how online profiles of the deceased become real ghosts and often "living" memorials/archives. Freud, Derrida, and Lacan touch on the idea of archiving, I see facebook and the internet in general as a huge archive, facebook being more like the old shoe box under your bed with photos, letters, etc. Louise Kaplan touches on the fetishism of archiving.
So basically, I want to look at identity online, the ghosts and the fetishism of those online identities using Freud, Lacan, Derrida, and Nietzsche.
Here's a video of Derrida talking about the science of ghosts. It's old school and a bit odd being that it was also a film of him playing himself without a script.
The Science of Ghosts
Check out this NY Times article about how lives are being changed through living online. You might need to have a user name and profile, but it's free. Virtual Estates Lead to Real-World Headaches
Cultures of Fetishism - Kaplan
Read chapter one, Fetishism and the Fetishism Strategy, then pages 93 to top of 95, p 107, the last paragraph of 170 to 173. You can find this online through Penrose. You need to sign in with your DU info.
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