Saying "I" on the the internet

All of the readings this week return, in one way or another, to the complications new technologies present to the definitions, limits, and stability of an inside/outside binary or “blurring” –as Mei noted in her post—of the private/public dichotomy. In Colomina’s “Domesticity at War,” the militarization of the domestic space (which finds its roots in presentations from past World’s Fairs and contemporary permutations in modern architecture and televisual spectacles) represents “…a public [that] has invaded the interior, it is already inside.” Here, the establishment of the domestic is based on a “counterdomesticy,” an extension of the state into the home, a home that we call and realize, as such. Yet the exterior is not just imposed on the interior, we also “…send the private into the public domain.” Through a fear of an unbridled external, we attempt to privatize and filter these forces by establishing screens and buildings: edifices and technologies allow us to control, sterilize and mediate the exterior into palatable, comforting forms.

Morse pushes the idea of increasing privatization of presupposed public realms by exploring the virtual mobility of the television, shopping mall, and freeway. In particular, the nonspaces of the mall and freeway illustrate “a dreamlike displacement or separation from [their] surroundings;” they are at once seemingly outside of the physical sphere of the domestic, in a way eerily public, yet also extensions of a type of mobile exclusion. In the mall, bodies are monitored and controlled (security cameras, temperature, etc.), as patrons and consumers attempt to reenact what it once must of felt like to be in public. The modern mall becomes a simulacra of “the street” in Baudrillard’s sense—a copy that no longer has an original, a copy that never had one.

In Tara’s “Reload,” the experience of navigating the web presents a spatiotemporal disorientation that frames the private/public distinction (or question of “subject,” the establishment of “private”) in a different way than the previous articles. Instead of focusing exclusively on how new technologies blend private and public, the illusion of liveness and mobility combined with the promises of active participation (scan-and-search) and personalized transformation all seem to be utilized in an effort to re-establish a singular self. A return to wholeness of the subject, perhaps the Cogito reconstructed: I surf, therefore I am. By diffusing and collocating our actions online while traversing the endless amalgamations of private and public spaces, do we seek the euphoria in finding ourselves over there, through the next link? Is the fear of “…missing the next experience or the next piece of data…” actually a fear of FINALLY finding/losing our “self”?

Questions about the blurring of the private and public (also notably, education and entertainment) are found throughout the practice of and rhetoric surrounding Alex Juhasz’s class about Youtube on Youtube as well, yet I hope by returning to the this idea of subjectivity on the web we can consider the constitution and division of private and public critically. Although I agree that new technologies do indeed sully and obscure the dissimilarity interior/exterior space, I wonder, by following Derrida, if we are perhaps assuming the stability of that binary to begin with. If we are guilty in a way of supposing there ever was a clear enough division between the interior/exterior to establish a “private vs. public” dichotomy, to demarcate the domestic before, to say “I.” Do new technologies completely upend the private/public or do they rather re-inscribe the struggle of the subject to be, as such? Will some one please tell me where can I find myself online? Over there?