Frankenfame

This, from the dailymail:

While soaking in the Pacific, Ireland wrote, 'The sun sets as I prance around in my @beachbunnyswimwear #neoprene fav bikini. #neonlove.'


These swimsuit photos come just one day after the aspiring model pouted provocatively in a topless selfie she uploaded yesterday.

She captioned the racy image: 'Had the greatest dream team yesterday who made it all possible last minute. #dontwannawashitoff #inwearingatowel [sic]'.


While they've been spotted on social media together, Ireland and her boyfriend Slater hit the red carpet at the 50th Anniversary of Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue '50 Years of Beautiful' TV Event in Los Angeles on Tuesday.


The 18-year-old IMG model made quite the entrance as she arrived wearing a revealing low cut white dress to the event.


Dating Ireland since last year, Slater is is a teenage stand-up paddle surfer based in Hawaii.

A life form adapted to surviving over eons of drought, disease, war, famine, freezing, and predation comes to this: surviving anomie in a society flung apart by technology. Here we find a strange form of survival: a teenager making a living on her appearance in a social network organized around the potential for scaling interaction. Here she presents visual cues of her reproductive fitness to an itinerant online throng while dating an equally teenaged man who sells images of his fitness through the competitive form of a leisure activity. And they live in the social network, adding their faces, whereabouts, and ultimately their brand to an economy of body parts and buzz, interchanged as easily as so much DNA in a Monsanto laboratory. Frankenfame is a form of living. Ireland Baldwin and Slater Trout, as we know them, exist in this phantasmagoria of self-produced images, multimedia mash-ups, and dissociated words funneled into a configurable windowed interface, which constitutes the scrolling social mediascape, or the social network, as we know it .

The genre of the tweet puts a fresh new spin on ‘sentenced to death.’ With a peppering of functional hyperlinks tethering activity to watchable trends, the tweet is a hybrid of natural and machine languages, a new cyborg. The mark-up language employed by the tweet is a liminal entity contributing to both human understanding and the tag-sorted database of searchable content. In the tweet our symbolic codes, i.e., "#dontwannawashitoff," are also computer codes. The hash tag adds a contextual reference, operating in the flow of natural speech, as meta-talk, conversation about conversation; in this case, as in many, the hash tag is conversation about a state of mind, the aura of a good time being reflected upon. Contrasted with the tagged topic "#neoprene" we see the flattening potential of the medium that treats both a state of mind and a synthetic polymer used in clothing with the same status. On the machine side of this social network all these hashtagged words, like the "@users" themselves, become data objects that are sorted, searched, measured, analyzed, sold, gamed, and told in order to find marketing potential in even the most ephemeral states of our consciousness. While it may disrupt the flow of conversation at the sentence level, the proficient user of social networking argot, like any of her contemporaries, is accustomed to the conversational trope whereby one disrupts the flow of presentation with an "I was like ...". As I said, nothing new exists in this social network that hasn't already been cultivated by the ardor of the initiate, hungry to fit in, to a presumably larger, presumably cooler, presumably more knowledgeable group or movement. The hash tag, as a searchable entity, gives this somewhat contrived feature of natural language afforded by Twitter some rhetorical impetus. Now, it becomes a watchable trend, a persona fit for public consumption, or the seed for a new meme. The poesis afforded to users of this social networking technology move at its electric pace, and so users take part not only as creators but as participants swept up in a fast moving wave of word-trend hyper-awareness that is itself a central feature of the experience of social networking. As participants in the social network users try to either start trends or to move them along like people trying to make the wave move around the stadium at a baseball game; this level of mass interactivity has its participants playing dual roles as both the originator and its effect. Given the tendency toward the broadcasted interaction, the conspicuous conversation, in social networking the already-famous and the famous-because are closely intertwined as is the case with Ireland Baldwin who is the rich and beautiful off-spring of Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger. In the social network, cache like that rarely goes unused in the always-ground floor potential of fame provided by the medium.

The always-media-present youth of today live through the functional wetware of their databased social lives. They adopt its argot for pre-sorting and searching as a database function. Theirs is a life driven by a public presence and an attempt to stay connected that concedes to the functionality of the tools used to remain public and connected. They dream of being 'followed' and of being 'watched.' They often take pictures and video of themselves and live in that pregnant moment of being 'almost famous.' They strike funny poses and make distorted grimaces as theirs is a life, as it exists in that social network, structured for the sake of public persona management.

New media, the newest media, democratizes fame, making anyone accessible to a public before others, each equally alone in the glow of their computer-phone-camera, trained to a vertically scrolling feed of posts to read, to respond to, to 'like,' to share, and to promote. And the statistics of watching becomes the strategy for assessing one's fame.

"How many views am I getting?"
"How many likes did I get?"
"Did I gain or lose followers?"

The official language chosen to describe social networking is an important place to begin an analysis of its function in a society. For instance, the journalistic metaphor of  "subscribers" hands us a model of readership around the daily feed of news and namely news that supports readers' interests and views. This model describes a plausible world, for lack of a better term, through which individuals imagine and practice their relations. The model provides a cause for action but not the form that this action will take. But this model reveals something about persona management. Because the model structures human relations around a one-to-many model it flattens the distinction one has of symbolic interaction between one-to-one and one-to-many. This gives online relationships a surreal flavor where little is real, everything is wagered, and tangible wealth gets funneled more efficiently to the few while the rest get free entertainment from each other.

On-line is like in-car; each provides a template for mediation around a rectangular viewing screen through which one experiences the world as a detached spectacle punctuated by distracted operation of a machine. Each also furnishes a metaphor for freedom through movement and access to the people from whom you became estranged by the very technology you've just adopted. If you've lost 'touch' with someone by this person's choice to adopt new media use and consumption practices at the expense of technologies and habits of interaction you had in common prior to adoption then you understand just how arbitrary and arbitrarily disruptive these technologies can be. Take note. The wars of the future will be fought like this. 

In some social networks people gain "followers." Before the adoption of this language to describe people who have subscribed to a feed from you the only people judged by their followers were clergy and the occasional cult leader. And that sets a tone for how one is supposed to 'think' about their relationship to others through a notion of popularity deeply embedded into our collective psyche. Unlike its more bureaucratically inspired "subscribers" the use of "followers" suggest that social networking could, in fact, be an occult practice, where the followers are the mind-controlled herd that does the bidding of a central figure. That two practices share the same name doesn't make them the same. Both are about human relations and while the existence of one, the cult leader, gets demonized, the other is simply attached to a clickable icon: "Follow."

Let's be charitable. These words used to describe the ways in which we relate to others are simply words. The baggage contained within any set of them is much harder to pin down so we can only speculate. A more important focal point than the words is to what they are attached, which are software functions.

Software functions are an essential aspect of computer programming. Software translates the raw and mute power of the computer into an interactive metaphor for some worldly activity. Here, software has translated computer power into a miniature (mostly print) media production studio before an audience established through search. Software functions have recently become vogue in mediating how we relate to others. These software functions manage the flow of information that others we know, "like," and "friend" produce into meaningful categories that structure our experience of social networking. From the thumb work of scrolling to the fast-moving pidgin of the multi-media meme, trends not only exist but are highlighted as a feature of passing all interaction through software functions. This is the most clever component of computer-based interaction, that we concede some public form of interaction to a choice built into the software's interface. We register our participation by clicking the available buttons.

The language of social networking can be coarse because the logic operations are primitive. Social networking software encourages users to count and subsequently use numbers to assess online presence. By placing oneself among others as a function of assessing a quantity the interface ties us to the psychological distortions of being a number. We use numbers to assess our fame or popularity. Numbers provide the conditions for this personal assessment, which implies objectivity. Because of this, numbers serve as a 'fact' about our and others' activity in relation to one another. Numbers become a means of relating to others in the social network. Numbers count the activity that others do in relationship to the content that one creates, be it words, image, or video. Bigger numbers of "likes," and "followers" conjure dreams of "going viral." Likewise, the same function can be used to assess that "nobody cares." But a "like" also double dips as a viewer count. One thing that a viewer count provides that a "like" cannot, which is whether or not someone knows that you exist or would have found you through a search term. Being searched and being sought are two uniquely different situations brought about by the social network.
 
Through social networking, the user is no longer cloaked in anonymity but exists as his or herself. And while engaging in the social network, the user exists, in situ, anonymous to his or herself. The 'me' online just like the 'me' shot around the golf course becomes an important measure of who 'I' am in this context, at least for the time being. For those who concede the majority of their time relating to others through the social network that 'me' can be hard to separate from the 'I' prefixed before his or her phone. This role reversal is used to coerce us into selling ourselves as entertainment products for others. The dreams of 'being famous' are quite evident, and this inflates the 'me' to proportions that crowd out the 'I,' specific to how one invests time on-line and off of it. The social network allows one to 'level up' with a cohort in a structured setting that being in 'RL' does not provide. The form that this 'upgrading' takes fits the mass broadcast modes that entice so many to reach out. This form of fame relies on the function of an algorithm that leads from being found, rebroadcast, and subsequently snowballing into 'going viral.'

Now the boys and girls do the work of the advertisers, recommending products through beauty tips, style tips, lifestyle choices, exercise routines, morning routines, food and drink, hauls from various stores, before-school preparation, lip-syncing favorite songs, and 'unboxing' of often lucrative electronics products. They try to be public opinion leaders on the sundry details and choices in one's personal life. And they dream of frankenfame, "making it" online, because the software is programmed expressly to demonstrate this through a numerical abstraction of one's fame. Few if any recognize that this fame is one afforded by a free-to-use and cheap-to-exploit technology of participating in content creation for the sake of being before others along a numerical scale that slides to infinity.

Like the road connecting Baghdad and Kuwait in 1990 this stretch of the information superhighway is littered with corpses, burned out cars, and countless horrific scenes, just before dying, of online fame. And it all unfolds in our heads, a cognitive construct, a misleading belief that being perched upon a mountain of information could make one more visible, more widely recognized, a household name. That dream infecting all communication technologies, from the voice forward, is the dream of scale. To have one's voice heard outside of earshot is to be famous. To have one's voice heard after one is dead is to be immortal. And in social networking we have yet another malignant impulse well outside the practice of everyday communication. In the recesses of our social networking minds we think we could leverage the power of this medium to influence others and sup upon a most exhilarating feeling: being loved, adored, and looked up to by all. In the deep recesses of these social networking minds rests the imprint for such a living superlative: God.