Look for my name in bright lights

What can I tell you?

I got interviewed for a student video today because apparently my position in the student union makes me an authoritative, celebrity source. I got to answer questions about the future of Craigslist. "What will Craigslist look like in ten years?" she asked and I said "Craigslist, a Googhoo! company."

Goo goo g'joob.

I'm in the middle of writing a paper about mommyblogging and individual and collective identity and since I've been able to find absolutely no previous research on that specific topic, I've been looking at a lot of sociology, psychology and women's studies stuff. And since I'm just itching to use all those lovely boring as hell research methods I learned in my classes last semester, I've picked myself a random sample of blogs and I'm doing content analysis.

Though the topic fits quite well into the themes of the course and some of the stuff talked about in lecture, I'm finding that none of the assigned readings are particularly applicable. I went to talk to the ta about this which was probably a bad idea, even though he's the one marking it.

He's the sort of person that believes that everyone on the internet is pretending to be someone that they're not and that we are all fakers, hackers and trolls. Because everything is anonymous, there is no accountability and no morality on the internet, so he's morally opposed to it.

"Talk about Turkle," he said. Turkle studied interactions between players of online multiplayer games. In them she found many instances of people playing one or more characters that could be very different from their owners and from each other, and allowed them to experiment with being different genders, races and ages.

But is a middle-aged man who plays a lesbian in a game just pretending, or is he also, in part, a lesbian too? And is a college student who plays a mute rabbit really a rabbit? She cited an example of a cyber 'rape' that happened to a character in a game, where the real life user who owned that character felt hurt and violated. She also talked about people who said that their online identities were quite important and very real to them. If your computer is a window into another world, then real life is just another window.

She related all of this to a bunch of French postmodern philosophers who argued that identity is fluid, decentralized and opaque and decided that these games prove those theories, because some of these game users experience their online made-up lives as if they were another facet of reality.

So what does this have to do with women who post pictures of their children on their blogs? Absolutely nothing. How many women who post pictures of their baby and talk about how well it's getting along with the cat and how colicky it is are actually elderly black men exploring their personalities and stealing someone's photos? Probably none.

I think we're going to have to agree to disagree, and my ta is going to have to give me a good mark anyways, because frankly, I'm awesome.