Death of the Author and the web identity crisis
Zachary Colbert spins a story of power and deceit brought to you via your computer.
Talk about a godawful “intellectual contraption”!
No, seriously, in regard to your “truth”, “identity” and “power”, how would you translate that into a description of your own interactions with others?
And wouldn’t it still come down to challenges from others? They don’t accept or respect your definition of those things so how do you go about demonstrating to them that as rational people they are obligated to? The part about being online just makes it more difficult because here by and large we are only exchanging words. Or, occasionally, videos or links that are better able to get our point across.
Yes, but, “in reality” what still counts is our capacity to translate our world of words knowledge into actual rules of behavior able to be enforced legally and politically. Thus, you may subscribe to a particular assessment of your “identity”, but the knowledge you convey about it to others may or may not be accepted by them. And, here, even to the extent you are able to demonstrate that this knowledge does in fact comport with the objective truth, you still need to be able to act it out without others preventing it. “I” here is no less embedded out in a particular world where the powerful prevail, no matter the truth.
Yes, power as an action word rather than as a thing is an important distinction. But either way the components of my own moral philosophy don’t go away. The existential ramifications of dasein are no less marbled throughout the actual rules of behavior that are able to be enforced.
Yes, if the “public” is ignorant and naive and gullible enough to be duped by all of this, it generally means that they have allowed others to create and then to sustain a “sense of self” able to be deceived and hoodwinked and used for the benefit of the others.
At the same time though, are those able to lure many – millions sometimes – into accepting one or another objectivist account of the world around us. Theological, philosophical and/or political in nature. Some can be particularly sophisticated. And persuasive. And, in fact, dots are able to be connected between the words and the world.
We see that here time and time again.