Mobile Media Me

Judith Butler says that identity- gendered, sexed, raced, and otherwise- is “the repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame that congeal over time to produce the appearance of substance, of a natural sort of being”. In other words, our identities are effects of ('contoured' and 'constituted' by) how we engage with people, interact with objects, and otherwise act in the world. Identity is not a unique, unified, fixed entity, but rather a creation composed of the manners in which we talk, walk and sit, what we wear, what we tell ourselves and others we like, and so on. These personal characteristics are imported from culture.

In light of yesterday's lecture, it seems that the technology we use and how we use it should be added to this list of identity-making conventions. If you work from Butler's conception of identity, one must conclude that those of us who are integrating mobile media devices into our lives are indeed becoming cyborgs. Not only are such technologies becoming physical and emotional appendages to our selves, they are also playing an increasingly significant role in the very constitution of who we are as individuals!