Some intriguing connections with some ideas I've had all along (and a post I've been meaning to post, so I will probably link and go look! there! He said it good!!!).
I've always disliked how people want to privilege face/face interactions over internet interactions as more real, or, as you say, something that means we "know" people more (nope, heck, a good part of my family knows zip about me, and probably would freak out like hell if they did know the zip they don't know). I run into that all the time in teaching: people who claim that simply by being in the class and seeing the faces of students, they just know better education is being done (I never did).
I think it might be useful to discuss differences between "normal" and "celebrity" status: if one knows a person as a normal part of daily life, then it's hard to understand the celebrity persona (I was reading some discussion of Stephen Colbert the other day, and was thinking that).
But it's all personas: the idea that there's some core true self that can be meaningfully understood by others (let alone oneself), eh, nope, don't believe it and have never seen any proof.
People you think you know can surprise the hell out of you any day (like my father did when he ran off with that graduate student my first year in college!)!
And I totally don't believe that anything in the media about actors/celebrities is in any way "real" -- it may be a factoid (i.e. outside veritication that they were in X place at Y time doing Z), but it's all a postmodern fiction.
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Date: 2008-01-30 05:13 pm (UTC)I've always disliked how people want to privilege face/face interactions over internet interactions as more real, or, as you say, something that means we "know" people more (nope, heck, a good part of my family knows zip about me, and probably would freak out like hell if they did know the zip they don't know). I run into that all the time in teaching: people who claim that simply by being in the class and seeing the faces of students, they just know better education is being done (I never did).
I think it might be useful to discuss differences between "normal" and "celebrity" status: if one knows a person as a normal part of daily life, then it's hard to understand the celebrity persona (I was reading some discussion of Stephen Colbert the other day, and was thinking that).
But it's all personas: the idea that there's some core true self that can be meaningfully understood by others (let alone oneself), eh, nope, don't believe it and have never seen any proof.
People you think you know can surprise the hell out of you any day (like my father did when he ran off with that graduate student my first year in college!)!
And I totally don't believe that anything in the media about actors/celebrities is in any way "real" -- it may be a factoid (i.e. outside veritication that they were in X place at Y time doing Z), but it's all a postmodern fiction.