Social Media: Autobiographies Without a Subject

When I was in my mid-twenties and living in London, I often used to plan an alternative autobiography in my head as I was walking to work. In this autobiography, there would have been no personal narrative - no dates, no sequence of life events or achievements. Instead, each chapter would have given an objective description of a particular strong influence on my life.

I already had outlines in my head for sections on my family history, the local geography and social history of Tilburg, my education, my relationships, the books I had read and loved, and the ups and downs of Willem II football club. Somehow, the reader would get an impression of the person that was sitting, hiding, at the centre of all these things, gradually being revealed as more pieces of the jigsaw fell into place.

Needless to say, this idea for a subjectless autobiography just stayed in my head and never saw the light of day. Real life takes over, and the reimagination of your own life slowly dissolves.

Thirty years later, there are thousands of such anti-autobiographies out on the web, as people publish fragments of their lives through social media: each Facebook, Twitter or blog posting reveals the likes and dislikes of their authors, what they are doing at that very moment, who they relate to and how they relate to them. And yet, they remain shadowy fleeting presences in cyberspace, evading any attempt to grasp who they really are.

If you were to follow a web author's every internet posting for a few years, you would be able to create one of many possible biographies of that person as you make a collage of their random texts, messages and photographs as they communicate their existence to the universe - as they piece together their own organic subjectless autobiographies.

9/11: A Fearful Symmetry

On 11th September 2001, the Islamist militant group Al Qaeda launched a concerted attack on the United States by hijacking four passenger planes and crashing two of them into the Twin Towers in New York and one into the Pentagon in Washington. The fourth passenger plane was forced down by its passengers before it reached its intended destination. The total death toll resulting from these events exceeded 2,750. The Al Qaeda attacks were portrayed as an assault on Western democracy.

On 11th September 1973, the Chilean army staged a military coup to oust the democratically elected Marxist president Salvador Allende, with the support and endorsement of the United States. This led to the brutal regime of Augusto Pinochet, during which at least 3,190 people were killed or 'disappeared'. The military coup was portrayed as an attempt to save the country from economic ruin and safeguard its future development and prosperity.

Isn't it strange how one 9/11 was commemorated at great length last week, whilst the other 9/11 has almost been consigned to oblivion?

Riots and Uprisings - Spot The Difference

I have been struck by the uncomfortable parallels between the way Arab despotic governments and our own oh so much more enlightened government have responded to unrest on their city streets in recent months. Replace the word 'riot' with 'uprising', as I heard one speaker do on Radio Five Live last week, and you may get a different perspective on Britain AD 2011.

What was the first official reaction to the discovery that the British anti-government protesters used social media to mobilise? We must block them from using Twitter - maybe even suspend the networks altogether for a while... Now where have we heard that one before?

Next we must 'criminalise' the perpetrators and stamp hard on the suggestion that these protests may have been political in origin. Maybe the ultimate political protest in a hypercapitalist society like Britain is to have a consumerist riot...

Then, the way to crack down on these insurgents is to indisciminately dish out summary justice to avoid any repeat in the future. Attack the syptoms of the problem, ignore the causes. Stifle all reasoned debate. Create a climate of hysterical overreaction through state-sponsored media propaganda (avoid any objective news coverage and make sure every news report adopts a moralising tone). Introduce martial law by suspending any separation of powers between the legislative (the government) and the judiciarly (the judges), and by directing police operations agains the intifadists. And then hope against hope that everything will die back and that all this unpleasantness will simply go away, and everything can continue as before.

One final comment on British justice in the world at large today. If you brutalise, torture and kill an unarmed, defenceless civilian in a far-off middle Eastern country, you will serve one year in prison. If you make an innocuous comment on social media about a British riot that doesn't even happen, you get sentenced to four years.

Are we heading for a British Spring?

On the road with the not-so-flying Dutchman

Welcome to my blog!

In this blog, I aim to explore how to lead a good life and to share a record of this journey of discovery with others. I don't know where this journey will take us, but in a way that is the very point. What can we learn about ourselves as we are voyaging along, as we look back on where we have come from, as we look forward to the distant horizon, but, most importantly, as we look around us every day and try to make sense of the amazing, confusing, beautiful and challenging world around us.

Best to think of this blog as a kind of existential road movie, a random set of thoughts and observations that may (or may not) yield some kind of meaning and understanding over time. Join me on my journey as we rev the engine, release the handbrake and set off into the unknown...!