Rambling

Should we consider the internet to be a second order structure overlaying the ordinary structure of society, culture, language and rules? We seem to follow a different set of rules; we create our own personality, image, ‘brand’. We take our ‘selves’ as a structure, locus or centre, the immovable point (although of course, in the context of ‘real life’ these things are the movable parts of top of a different structure) and we create a whole world around ourselves. Social networking sites let us list our interests, activities, what we like and dislike, and quotes which inspire us, all which build up movable layers around the immovable centre which is our real ‘self’ in order to create a personality, or an idea of who we are, in the eyes of other people. Is this just a metaphor for what we do in the real world? Our interests, friends, social class, likes, dislikes and the things we say all layer around our ‘self’ in order to create the personality. What, then, is the centre of the person? In the metaphor of the internet, the person is the core of the internet presence which they create, and this ‘person’, taken as a whole, has movable qualities of its own once taken within the different framework of the person itself. Is there a lower order framework in which the qualities of the core of the ‘person’ are movable around an even lower order centre? Structure of language is ultimately circular, in that language is such that within the system, nothing can be explained without referring to another point within that system. Moving backwards into indefinitely more simple systems would only lead us to be calling the same thing increasingly simplified things, but it would still lead back to language within the system. We can’t accurately portray what the person is outside of the system. So the centre of every personhood (the internet ‘person’ which we create, the ‘person’ who we are, maybe could take internet ‘person’ idea out into the idea of a brand for a company) has a central structure of personhood. This leads to the idea that there is no structure, or the entire thing is structure, or the different types of structure which we create are just useful tools to help us to explain the other types of structure, even if this ultimately makes no sense (see Derrida, Levi-Strauss). So… the internet is our self as much as the person who we are is our self? I don’t even know if that is what follows from all of this? Fuck.