Have Brangelina entered your thoughts this week?

What struck me most from Stuart Hall’s seminal lecture, Representation & the Media, was the issue of “identity claim” and “identification” with the images we are confronted with on a daily basis. While Hall’s focus was more on how we, as the audience to different forms of visual culture, find ourselves increasingly emotionally invested and engaged with the images we are often presented with, I thought more about how much we have come to utilize images in attempts to represent ourselves. With the growth of the internet as a means of communication and connecting to other people (friends, strangers, prospective love matches, etc.) in particular, we are increasingly dependent upon the use of digital pixels as stand-ins for our material selves.

Facebook, MySpace, Lavalife and even good ol’ Blogger allow users to pick out a ‘profile’ picture as a means of visually representing yourself. Why is it so important for us to visually depict ourselves? Or perhaps more importantly, why is it so important we visually differentiate ourselves from one another? After just barely grasping the ideas of Jean Baudrillard last semester, my guess would be the fact that humanity is becoming more and more homogeneous largely because of mass media. Baudrillard argues we consume because our identities depend on it. We purchase CDs, clothes, and Hannah Montana gear to differentiate ourselves from certain groups of people, while also aligning ourselves with others. And we need to make these identity claims because mass media (among other factors such as urbanization) have left us all wondering where Brangelina are going to adopt from next and what kind of dog the Obama’s have settled on (Have they already settled that?). In other words, we’re all becoming the same because we read, see and absorb a lot of the same stories.

Though Brangelina is probably not the best example, I see evidence of the local becoming more and more global everyday. Those ‘Daily’ newspapers for instance—despite our complaints about the poor quality of local news, are we really better off absorbing the same headlines as the rest of Canada? And as we become more and more saturated into the World Wide Web, where we’re all stuck with the same standard white and ‘IKEA blue’ Facebook layout, it becomes harder and harder to distinguish ourselves as individual human beings. Perhaps we are just as dependent upon consumption as we are on visuals to help satisfy the need to be unique and individual. Mass media is making us so self-conscious!

PS – It was a poor choice on my part to bring in Baudrillard into my first blog post.