Film 20C essay [29 Nov 2006|08:29pm]
Zachary Williams
11-29-06 Film 20C
Myspace Final Essay
Identity Representation and Sexual Piracy
Through social networking sites such as myspace, the ambiguity of identities or their representations can lead to an easy way for pirating all forms of media whether they are legal or not. The narrative developed through my myspace character’s online fictional interactions with the other group’s characters illustrated the ease at which copyrighted material could be pirated, shared and exchanged through myspace. The synergy of sexual superficiality and piracy creates new realms of cyberspace where the law is difficult to enforce and copyrights loose their meanings.
Identity representation online had its roots mainly for social interaction between human beings at long distances which is to be expected but what soon developed was a surge of online dating websites. Other networking sites that more or less implied finding mates began to spring up even if dating was not the sales pitch to their users. According to Dana Michele Boyd in her article Friendster and Publicly Articulated Social Networking, these websites became popular due to the comfort in getting to know strangers better through knowing your friends online, “Friendster is built on the assumption that friends-of-friends are more likely to be good dates than strangers. The site was built to compete with Match.com and other online dating sites, with social networks as an additional feature” (1 Boyd). Friendster ended up failing compared to myspace due to its overbearing administrators and the polices against fake identities that were apparently heavily enforced. The ultimate goal of most human mating interactions is sex itself, even online, and these social networking sites began to simply resemble online auction houses for potential real life intercourse.
Although an Ebay for sex would be banned by the proper authorities due to its blatant illegality, many such illegal occurrences that many perceive as unethical, such as media piracy, do in fact operate every day within the busy online world of today. Identities may become untraceable in the metaphysically urbanized Internet of today where hunting for illegal activity may be as difficult as winning a battle in a real life urban warfare setting where the enforcers of the law are the invaders. The character my pod developed started to resemble a real person’s profile I believe due to its lack of detail and the evidence can be seen in the dozen or so friend requests from real people that had to be rejected for the sake of the project. Interactions with real life myspace profiles however would have been an interesting and rhizomorphic side project.
The reason these people had the desire to add this random girl, our character, is a mystery and depends upon those people’s personal interests but it may have something to do with their need to accumulate friends online that appear cool or fit a certain trend to impress their real life friends, “This often means that people are indicated as Friends even though the user does not particularly know or trust the person. In some cases, it is necessary to publicly be-Friend someone simply for political reasons. Sometimes, people connect broadly so that they may see a larger percentage of the network” (2 Boyd). The visual appearance of our character might have had something to do with the way in which complete strangers interacted with our character. Since humans are very visual animals and most of what you see on myspace is graphical, attractiveness begins to take hold as a prominent reason for adding friends on these social networking websites.
By simply composting an attractive photograph of a girl from multiple photographs and using it to represent an imaginary person on myspace, the profile received multiple friend requests from mostly males presumably looking for online contacts for their friend rosters and also requests from myspace music profiles desiring cool or fashionable people for a fan base to gain popularity. The composite technique in the piece Beauty Composite by Nancy Burson described in Digital Art by Christine Paul illustrates how a combination of many different faces begins to average out to make an almost guaranteed stable attractive form. This technique, which depends deeply on symmetry, was utilized in the myspace profiles and at least for our fictional character proved successful in developing the elaborate fabula and foundation for the characters and their narratives. Without the visual aspect there would be no motivation for a textual contribution and for the text to have meaning the graphic counterpart must represent socially and ascetically pleasing standards, “The face literally becomes a topographical record of human aesthetics, a document and history of standards of beauty that at the same time suppresses individuality” (29 Paul). Myspace is great examples of just how superficial people truly are and how pictures of imaginary people can motivate people in probably sexual ways resulting in a lack of authentic online identity formation.
As three-dimensional media becomes more and more realistic visually and more interactive, the line between real life and virtual reality becomes blurred and the notions of money, advertising, sex, culture, and society as a whole begin to rapidly change into new forms. People must find new ways to sell this new media through movies or websites and make profit to either live or sustain a business. This is necessary in the postmodern world where there is a constant need for new jobs for the increasing amount of human beings worldwide. Generally speaking the world is a place of poverty where if one desires the abundance of media that should be freely available to them, it must be pirated simply for the sake of high prices that most cannot afford. Piracy itself can become a very profitable enterprise as copyrighted information is freely exchanged everyday in mass amounts and is easily accessible to anyone with an Internet connection.
Piracy of copyrighted material is illegal but most would argue it is not unethical, besides the MPAA and RIAA. What can be pirated that is unethical however can be defined as sex and illegal forms of pornography for example. This raises many questions about intellectual property and whether it would even be ethical for one to profit off of the sales of something fundamentally unethical. Would it be better for society to have such unethical media freely accessible, or pirated, so that it can be seen for what it is by as many people as possible and slowly phased out of the realm of information by good Samaritans who choose to ignore it? On online networking sites such as facebook and myspace it is against policy to form an online identity as purely sexual, but it happens regardless. In this sense it is possible to sell oneself online and where there is sale of information there is bound to be piracy. Does this mean that it is possible to pirate the human body?
Through social networking sites with online menus and pictures of attractive but sexually oriented women with videos and ways to communicate with them, this form of piracy may slowly become a reality and probably already does function effortlessly through cyberspace. In this sense people may once again become property not only in the real world where sexual slavery is still a problem, but now online. In Lawrance Lessig’s article Piracy, copyrights are explained in terms of owning information, “However, although copyright is a property right of a very special sort, it is a property right. Like all property rights, the copyright gives the owner the right to decide the terms under which content is shared. If the copyright owner doesn’t want to sell, she doesn’t have to” (Lessig). This begs the question of how people can be merely a product of information or if people are simply turning into a very complicated compilation of information themselves.
DNA is a good example of copyrighting a human being and genetic modifications such as perfect vision for newborn babies may be a trademarked or patented procedure. Biotech companies are able to copyright and patent genomes of DNA that exists within every cell in our bodies, so in a sense whenever we reproduce we may be committing an act of piracy, copying our own DNA. On another level every time each one of our cells undergoes meiosis this can be interpreted as piracy. Although the copying of a cell in two within a human body and the copying of a bootlegged music video over myspace are completely different subject matters, both contain copyrighted material that by law is illegal to copy and redistribute under most circumstances. The ease at which sharing media through our myspace characters gave a good example of how easy it is not to get caught but perhaps in the future myspace will enforce media copyright the same way they enforce the uploading of obscene photographs. If people’s online identities become more superficial and sexually oriented then open online prostitution may become a reality in the future if these hard to define lines of morality are not drawn in the virtual sand of cyberspace.
If our glocalized online capitalist society can teach us anything it is that sex sells fast online and off. Whether it is pornography, dating websites or even actual sex slave trading, professions such as prostitution are among the oldest in the world and in the information age there are many new and troubling questions to be answered. As myspace and the other social networking sites become increasingly commercialized, the black and gray markets will find their places in the new massive multiplayer online role playing game of life where people may choose to be anonymous and identities or pirates may become untraceable. Sex may become a more easily traded and even pirated commodity and people with multiple online identities will give a new meaning to Schizoid personality disorder.
Work Cited
Boyd, Danah. "Friendster and Publicly Articulated Social Networks." Conference on Human Factors and Computing Systems (CHI 2004). Vienna: ACM, April 24-29, 2004.
Lessig, Lawrance. Free Culture: The Nature and Future of Creativity. New York: Penguin, 2005
Paul, Christine. Digital Art. London: Thames and Hudson LTD, 2003