Elsewhere, USA; Dalton Conley

Pg 7 – “Changes in three areas of our lives – the economy, the family, and technology – have combined to alter the social world and give birth to this new type of American professional. This new breed – the intravidual – has multiple selves competing for attention within his/her own mind, just as, externally, she or he is bombarded by multiple stimuli simultaneously. The necessity of managing these multiple “flows” in a social world where many boundaries have fallen away forms a new ethic for American life. In short, for many of us, intravidualism has displaced – or at least competes with – indvidualism. Whereas in American individualism, the ethical imperative was to first find oneself – that is, one’s authentic inner core – and then to let that authenticity guide our choices in life, intravidualism is an ethic of managing the myriad data streams, impulses, desires, and even consciousnesses that we experience in our heads as we navigate multiple worlds.”

~ So while America was founded on rugged individualism, we now have create rugged intravidualism. In order to compete with all of the various self-representations and possible selves in the real world that have extremely high-ranking cultures and we deal with in extremely various environments we have created multiple selves more diverse than before. While we more than likely always had multiple selves they were not as noticeable as they are now because we have more ways to play out the possible selves and due to more connections and more interactions with different people we are able to generate more and more possible selves that lead us to more and more selves created. So, now, instead of managing one self to be true to we have to manage multiple selves and become intraviduals.

Pg 86 – “The essential character of positional goods in our time is that the satisfaction they provide is not intrinsic to their value to an individual – i.e., their ability to satisfy hunger, thirst, or even to express ourselves. Rather, their utility relies almost entirely on their relative social position. In this way, many of the goods we consume reflect the same interpenetration of the social into the self – colonizing, slicing, and dicing the modern notion of distinct personhood into the multiple selves (each linked to an (87) external reference group) of the intravidualistic era.” Goes on to talk about how the same product can bring different emotions depending on people and environmental issues.

~ This relates to identity-possessions. We relate certain items to certain cultural identities. To fulfill our rich identity we have to have luxurious items. The more things we have the more identities they relate to and try to fulfill. But, at the same time, no one object has an overarching meaning. To me, my tennis racket might symbolize excitement and my identity of a tennis player. To another the racket might symbolize despair and their identity of a failed tennis player.

Pg 156 – “Perhaps the most fundamental line that has been breached is that between the “self” and the “other.” The interpenetration of the social world into our daily consciousness – our orientation to elsewhere – has the ultimate effect of colonizing and fragmenting not just our attentions but our very identities. The result is often a competing cacophony of multiple selves all jostling for pole position in our mind.”

~ So, they are saying that the reason why we are fragmenting into so many multiple selves is because the self and the other no longer stand completely separate. I again relate this back to the idea that communication across the country has opened us into seeing more opportunities, creating more possible selves, and opening us up to more self-representations being created. With more self-representations comes more cultures to rank and more fighting to be ranked highly.

Pg 156 – “…Imply the fragmentation of the individual by instead using the prefix intra, meaning “within.” The irony, of course, is that the intravidual is just as much an “intervidual” (inter meaning “between”), since it is the networked nature of our new, Elsewhere economy and the penetration of others into us that shatters the individual.”

~ So the new individual is working just as much within their various selves as between their various selves. I wonder what indi- means when related to individual.

Pg 157 – “By contrast, modern society is characterized by sets of overlapping affiliations that may be unique to each person. Our town and our family may not coincide, for example, if our sister has moved to another state. Nor might our nation and our religion, if we happen to be part of a of a minority group that got “trapped” in a state that was founded on a single religion model.”

~ This is like personal heritage and culture. Our personal heritage is made of sets of overlapping affiliations that are unique to each individual. The cultures that form the affiliations form the building blocks of the personal heritage.

Pg 159 – “It is only when the groups don’t match up – when we are confronted with difference and when those differences are multifaceted – that the individual emerges. In this way, it is not a choice. It’s not all about voluntary association. It’s also about differences that are noted by others about us. We may feel like a woman inside, for example, but look like a man to everyone else – to take the case of gender. These disjunctures mean that we need to see ourselves as others see us in our social calculations – something that every kid learns to do, with the notable exception of many children on the autistic spectrum. Self-reflectiveness – and thus individualism and the social self – arises from creating an objective view of ourselves when we are forced into the exercise of seeing us as others who don’t share our identities see us.”

~ Only when conflict forms between our cultures and self-representations of these cultures that our individuality emerges. We would all be cookie cutters if it weren’t for the fact that our overlapping affiliations are all different because we all grew up with different personal heritages.

Pg 161 – “The difference is that today there is no need for anyone to reconcile the many facets of their identities. They can just create a new e-mail account for that gay affair, that membership in the online Wicca group, or that Dungeons & Dragons user group that the CEO finds too embarrassing to own up to in the presence of work colleagues.”

~ Part of the reason why no one really understands possible selves, self-representations, etc. is because we do not need to end them or change them, per se. We can have issues working out which one is dominant, but they can all co-exist within ourselves and can work between ourselves (intra and intervidual).

Pg 162 – “…For the most part the boundaries of social groups on these online networks has become so diluted as to lose all exclusivity. And with no exclusivity, there is no meaning to the group. No meaning to the group, then no identity. No identity, then no self. We can look at everyone, but we see right through them to their own “friends,” and so on, ad infinitum, in a hall of one-way social mirrors.”

~ We cannot all be in the same group, because if we were there would be no exclusivity, therefore no group, therefore no identity, therefore no self. We need to have exclusivity to have a culture.

Pg 163 – “As modernists, we don’t take well to the salience of ascriptive cate-(164)gories. They feel reductive and demeaning of our individuality.”

~ We don’t like to be assigned to cultures because then they don’t seem as much of a part of ourselves and those groups we self-identify with. But, at the same point in time, we have to have the ascribed categories to form our personal heritage when we are younger and do not fully comprehend what it means to choose various selves over other various selves.

Pg 164 – “Simmel claimed, after all, that our individuality comes from the unique intersection of groups that we embody. When it doesn’t feel so unique anymore – thanks to Amazon or Woody Allen – our very selfhood is diminished.”

~ We need to feel unique to feel like our selves are working. This is why we need to have so many possible selves, it’s a defense mechanism to make sure that our minds continue to function properly.

Pg 166 – “But I was bringing a modernist conception of privacy to the online world. Privacy as we knew it was predicated on a certain division between “front stage” and “back stage” (to use the phrases of the 1950s sociologist Erving Goffman). The front stage is where we present ourselves according to a certain script and where everyone knows and expects social life to follow a patterned structure. Back stage, in short, is where we can be ourselves, where we may let others peek in once in a while to see the “real” us – the authentic self. However, in a world where identities are not anchored within a single body – at the intersection of those group affiliation – there is no “authenticity” to act as lodestone for a private self. When we can have multiple selves with the click of a mouse and the creation of a new online identity, there is no single core to protect from public view. Self-protection is not achieved by withholding; rather, is accomplished by offering up more and more information and identities until each identity is everywhere in the social house of mirrors and we cannot know from “authentic” anymore. We hide in plain sight.”

~ So the front stage is the working self-concept in action. The back stage is the rest of the self thinking and reflecting on all of its various possible selves, self-representations, self-conceptions, etc. The front stage is just the tip of the iceberg to the back stage. Those who get to hear us verbalize our “back stage” are those who get to see more of the authentication of our selves. Ultimate protection for our selves that are back stage emerges when we bring forth all of our back-stage selves and use them all so that we no longer have to juggle which self to use or not use, we can use them all. But this really wouldn’t work in every situation.

Pg 169 – “In “The Strength of Weak Ties,” Granovetter argued that, ironically, it is often relatively weak ties – connections to folks you don’t know all that well and that are no reinforced by other indirect pathway – that turn out to be quite valuable because they bring new information. The strength of weak ties has been found to be especially useful for job (and romantic) searches. In a densely connected network, the individuals probably know the same people, hear of the same job openings, have the same contacts, and so on. By contrast, once in a while when you go home to visit your parents aren’t close friends with buy think is generally a nice person, probably has a completely different set of connections. The irony is that this weak tie provides the most opportunities.”

~ We gather information from those we connect with. It is easy to gather from strong ties because we see them so often. It is much more difficult to gather from weak ties because we see them so rarely. But, what we gain from weak ties is more variety in information that keeps us creating possible selves and self-representations that keeps us constantly regenerating and reconfiguring the self. This work the self does to regulate itself keeps the rest of the individual from becoming overly passive and losing it’s individuality.