Hybrid Assignment 8
The “whatever”, the internet’s capacity of giving a person, every person, a sense of individuality and anonymity through the same, or very similar, social media platforms is what Jodi Dean is talking about in her essay “Whatever Blogging”. Specifically, being part of the social media whole by participating in surveys, clicking on ads, posting our personal information on our Facebook pages but believing the myth that the individual is not being traced or monitored, that the individual choices of one person won’t make a change is simply not true. This “whatever” attitude, the new personality, the new marker of belonging, through communicativity is people’s use of social media to connect with one another and to belong, not so much to have a meaning interaction but to have and collect connections and promote ourselves to inflate our sense of self worth and have the feeling of individuality while having the same experiences as the masses.
Dean uses two examples in American history to explain this notion of “whatever being” and forms of communicativity. First, she uses Buck-Morss’ discussion of the role of film’s influence in the relationship Americans had with work in the Industrial Era. American’s endured the “drudgery” of factory life for the freedoms of consumption, in which many sought out the escapism of Hollywood films. The time spent in the theater was time in which the viewer did not have to be himself and could be whoever they fantasized about on screen. The collective action of watching a film of a crowded theater of other people having the identical experience does not diminish the individual experience mirrors the communicativity of current internet use.
On another note, Dean connects the fall of idealized domesticity in the United States and the consequential rise of feminism and television as another example of communicativity. The combination of the two movements made personal issues public issues as Dean explained it “eras(ed) the fragile and imaginary boundaries between personal and private, a line that made little sense after the rise of the social.” As the idealized nuclear family was no longer regarded as the norm, and the responsibilities of those traditional roles disappeared it created more room for individual freedoms and creativity, creating new individual identity for personal satisfaction. Countless American families experienced this same transformation, believing their own experience to be unique, during the same era.
