2nd
Ze Frank Wuzz Inside My Internetzz...!
Yeah well EYE still think LOLcat jokes are funny, so you can suuuck it. As some of you probz know, my favorite internet joker-hunk (junk?), Ze Frank, took over my facebook profile for a week to… well I’m not really sure, but I think just fuck around. I came upon several revelations as a result of his experiment - chiefly, that i was clinically addicted to the internet (more specifically, my facebook newsfeed and virtual navel-gazing) and that i have little to no commitment to the concept of willpower. i wanted to share my experience with (all 3 of) you readers but chose to wait until the experiment was over so as to try to keep the whole thing as contained and untainted as possible - though i screwed that up by telling more friends than i needed to about it and making it a little less fun for everybody. Awww, sorry I’m lame guys.
anyways, Ze asked me to react to his week “inside” virtual christine (my creepy way of putting it, but it’s totes TRUE!), and this monstrous email is (95% of) what I wrote him, poorly constructed sentences and all (… I edited out some, errm, sensitive details/perviness):
HI ZE
Sorry this took a minute; been waiting until i had a fair amount of time to devote to it…
ok so first, i want to say ‘thanks again!” for choosing my profile as your one of two to take over. i bragged about it (obliquely), on every possible medium, every moment I could. i really did derive an absurd amount of pleasure from having you be me, and me be…not on facebook, imagining you being me. gross?!
So, i took a look at the things you did whilst being in my internetzz and i have to say, you were a lot tamer than i thought you were going to be! i expected major profile overhauls, random pokes, compromising photo uploads, inflammatory messages… but you were were pretty low-key, it seems. i was almost hoping you would completely annihilate ‘old christine’ on facebook and start me from scratch. i wanted some hybrid ze/christine identity to emerge, made up of the real-life physical representation of ‘christine’ but combined with some wacky third-person conceptual rendering of me - ideated by ZE. yep, pretty narcissistic/blatantly fangirl, but hey, i wanted something to show off (this is ZE’S version of ME!), and i was also curious about how one would depict me based on knowledge only gleaned from my internet persona. but anyhow, you kept me pretty much intact! and judging by your updates, profile pic choices, and messaging, you had a good sense of how to act like me. Differences/interesting bits i observed:
- you were a lot more suggestively understated in both your updates and messages than i usually am. i tend to overshare, reveal too much, leave little to wonder about… i liked seeing you give me a bit more mystery and hold back a tad. it makes me want to be more like that.
- you revived old friendships with people that i let fall off the radar, though i shouldn’t have - and i really appreciated that! i’m actually going to be meeting one of them (kim from london) this week because of it… you totally ‘quantam leap’-ed the sitch and now we’re pals again! rad.
- you also interacted with a long lost friend (sorta) named erik berger who is kind of insane. it was an interesting interaction and im sure he appreciated it…i think he’s lonely somewhere in the middle of southern china, so i think he liked the attention. it made me feel like i should try to offer it to him more. seems like he needs it?…
…My most serious observation about the whole experiment: while i eagerly offered you free reign over my profile and identity, i was, pretty disrespectfully, deceiving almost all of my ‘friends’ by not disclosing what was going on (some of my closest pals knew about it, but most didnt). the fucked up thing is that i didnt feel very guilty about it. something about the nature of the deceit - it being all digital, on some ‘silly’ SNS, and that the person playing me was someone i ‘trusted’ - you. and that brings me to a whole ‘nother set of questions: why did i trust you, a complete stranger, with my virtual identity - so excitedly and blindly? because i am familiar with who (i think) you are? and does that make the trick I played on my buddies any less wrong? lots of questions!
and finally, you should know that the week i had off from facebook was probably one of my best weeks in recent memory. i know it sounds absurd, but not being able to spend hours trolling facebook (during work, on my iphone, at home while watching a movie/tv show/talking to my roommates, before i dozed off to bed) left me with so much time to… read. think. run. write. do nothing. etc. in that week, i realized the extent to which i was addicted to this thing - my virtual world of friends and updates and identity molding… things that, during my week off, i didn’t MISS, but felt relieved to not have to deal with. when taken away from me, this thing i spent so much time with - my facebook reality (it pains me to have to write thos words) - felt so trivial, meaningless and inconsequential. anything you could have done to (virtual) me - changed my entire profile, deleted my friends, wiped me off the face of facebook - would have only been a small blip on any one of my 550 friends/acquaintances/randoms’ radars. if it appeared at all. with so much bullshit being kicked around on that site, and more generally on the internet, anything you could have done to me wouldn’t have mattered at all in two weeks time, or even two days or two hours time. and that was a reality check that helped me realize that i… shouldnt be wasting my brain/time/energy on that goddamn site anymore. atleast not so much of it.
ANYWAYS. now that i’m done rambling, i really really hope you will share your experience with me/your followers. did you get bored being me? sorry i didnt have more random people perving on me or starting shit. i’m wondering what you were hoping to get out of the week… just the experience of being a kind of ridiculous 25 year old girl? or was this an experiment on me… some sort of statement about people being foolish/foolhardy enough to let you rob them of their digital identities? dunno! can’t wait to hear about it though.
thanks again for including me in your experiment! you are welcome back into my internetzz any time - you don’t even have to knock.
xc
YES I really did write that last paragraph. and YES i know i’m a total nerd.
What I didn’t really express to ze was the serious philosophical ramifications this experiment had on me during my week sabbatical from Fbook. questions that were raised: If a facebook identity is overtaken by an internet meme-star, and no one is there to read the news feed update, did it really happen (I mean it’s in your cache obvs but like, does it mean shit)? What is the sound of a facebook member detagging a photo of himself? No but seriously, i did find myself with some tough issues to consider, like: how “real” is your identity online? how much does that matter? how much does the internet, as a whole, care? how about the individuals that make up the unified, collective interwebzz? how do the salience and authenticity (buzzword alert!!!) of your interactions shift when you are moving from one-on-one dialogues to performer/exhibitionist-to-audience interactions?
Thoughts?