Losing ourselves in media

I have been thinking a lot about Berger’s “Ways of Seeing” recently, especially considering I’m teaching it in one of my classes. As I’ve been reading through Defining Visual Rhetorics, perhaps not surprisingly, Berger keeps showing up. Berger points out that the way we see is defined as much by how images are put into relationship with each other, with the world around us, as it is to the construction and the history of the image itself. When images interact with images, with the world, meanings change and adjust to fit our particular environment. The Mona Lisa is a museum gallery is the Mona Lisa; The Mona Lisa in a bedroom is a statement of identity in relationship with everything around it.

The thing is that this makes a lot of sense, especially in relationship to Greg Dickinson’s “Placing Visual Rhetoric: Finding Material Comfort in Wild Oats Market.” The article, while in its own right interesting, most interests me for its conception of peoples relationship to postmodernity, of a world where locating ourselves in time or space is extremely difficult because of the sheer amount of media we insert our identity into. Dickinson points out that “our histories are told and retold across a range of media and from widely divergent points of view. at the same time we have nearly immediate access to an overwhelming number of texts and images from our pasts. All of this [...] undercuts the establishment of a single compelling narrative arc in which we can comfortably place ourselves and which we can secure our identities” (402). He also points out that with globalization, media, and the increasing difficulty in distinguishing one city/culture from another that we are losing a sense of place. The world itself is becoming very similar from one location to the next, and our identities are shifting and changing as we are integrating into media that each identifies us in relationship with a different set of images. No longer are we just our own identity, but we are our identity on Facebook, which might put us in relationship with a particular set of images (whether those images are of key words, or of key friends, or even of key links). We become part of another location, another history, when we interact with media because the image, visual or otherwise, that we create of ourselves, is put in relationship with a literal web of connections, constantly spreading out making our identity either more homogeneous with a larger whole with each successive expansion, or perhaps making us more unique, but still identifying us through the web of connections.

Perhaps even more intriguingly, our identities take on new shapes as we act in roles in the various media we insert ourselves into, or perhaps, lose ourselves in. I know that in each video game I play I have to decide between attempting to maintain something closer to my own identity in the role I play, or assuming a role that the particular game promotes. Movies, to a different degree, similarly change our location and identity depending on how immersed we become with the medium itself (even the interaction with the TV changes us from active communicating beings to information receiving individuals). The identity of a person shifts as they interact with mediums, as they take on roles based on the mediums that they are interacting with. Distinguishing through art, I suppose, becomes almost a way to demonstrate webs that connect us to everyone else at the same bloody time. Wow....that’s actually kinda disturbing....going to have to think about this some more.