Introduction The iterative nature of any research is a messy business belied by the neat conception of it in its written form.

- Tessa Muncey (2005) I reached a point in my story where I am grappling with the academic worlds perception of proper research. I started to imagine that because my version does not accord with the academic and professional world, I must be a deviant case. When I started my doctoral studies, I set out to do what many researchers do: discover answers to large questions using a variety of methods to satisfy the Ph.D. examiners. At the same time, in pursuit of my personal curiosity into the explanations for mediated lives I took an interest into personal meanings of events and behaviors that are not generated by mainstream research, and this led me into the world of autoethnography. Tessa Muncey and Carolyn Ellis have helped me find a 'safe' place for intrusion into a realm that I thought was hard to find in mainstream research. Feigning the mainstream, autoethnography in Muncey's terms celebrates rather than demonizes the individual story. For outsiders, it might seem as though I sought and needed the shelter of such a 'safe' place because I was too arrogant, hard-headed, shy, pathetic - or some other negative attribution putting more stress on the dangers of exclusion from a selected, tiny scientific community. Whatever I was going to write, it should have to be according to my own standards, and these are surely comparable but never identical to the combined standards of my graduate committee members. What seems so entirely true about doing autoethnography is that the archetype of the ancestor is what we are all becoming, and this is resolved to history and resolved to herself. The realization that life is not real until it has been told like a story (Muncey, 2002), therefore, made the method I used at least as important as the story I had to tell - to see how every experience has to be viewed in its own time and space. The object of research is patterns of relationships beyond the question of age, sex, religion, profession/income and attitudes; these may still be, of course, attributes that the individuals among whom the relations exist use to make sense of their lives (Garton, Haythornthwaite & Wellman, 1997). Relations can also be called strands. Relationships may be unbalanced: one actor may claim a close friendship and the other a weaker friendship, or communication may be initiated more frequently by one actor than the other. Thus, while the relationship is shared, its expression may be asymmetrical. The types of relations that I am interested in, and that surfaced after CMC literature and research review, include based on Heidegger's later work as summarized by Hubert Dreyfuss: 1. professional/DIY: 'flexible global network economy beyond subject-object' is supporting work; ' 2. artist: 'poetic practices are always around' means available emotional support (Fish, Kraut, Root & Rice, 1992; Haythornthwaite, Wellman & Mantei, 1995; Rice & Love, 1987); 3. reflection: 'science producing anomalies that lead to nothing' builds uncertain or equivocal communication (Daft & Lengel, 1986; Van de Ven, Delbecq & Koenig, 1979);

4. hyperreality: 'people as resources, representations fluidity replaces maturity' means that communication is here to generate ideas; 5. design: 'optimizing instead of stabilizing' means one has to create consensus (Kiesler & Sproull, 1992; McGrath, 1984); 6. presence: 'the average person has 12 different jobs in the course of his career' means the exchange of complex or difficult information (Fish, Kraut, Root & Rice, 1992); 7. cosmopolis: 'no more long commitments if not subjects, we are ordered 'lords of the earth' means to foster sociable relations (Haythornthwaite, 1996a; [Haythornthwaite & Wellman, 1996; Garton & Wellman, 1995); 8. emancipation: 'train people not to be adaptable' means to support virtual communities (Wellman & Gulia, 1997). In earlier literature-based research, I concluded that the research into social networking and computer-mediated communication (CMC) has been done using two different ways (or: paradigms, epistemes) of seeing relations in CMC. One comes from an obviously traditional (1970s) Uses and Gratifications dogma: users are active seekers who need gratification through CMC. On the other hand, ever since twenty years there have been more and more researchers who do not seek to address people's presumed needs of gratification, but instead are looking to describe the new human. They become interested in conditionalities of human needs. That is, needs might change due to the use of CMC. In fact, a whole different species could spring from it, a species that recognizes others and themselves in ways that are incomparable to people who still only read newspapers and watch tv (possibly on the Internet) and see their five to ten friends on the weekend. The ones being left out of the potentials of social networking live lives that are differently organized, insured, focused, idealized, managed, enjoyed, suffered, stepped out of, made sense of lived! The major criterion for researchers to remain open about the possibility of sociably networked people thrown into a realm that is utterly incomparable to old ways of living, might form multiplexity: the more relations (or strands) in a tie, the more multiplex (or multistranded) is the tie; multiplex ties are more intimate, voluntary, supportive and durable (Wellman, 1992b).i Even though multiplex ties are assumed to be found throughout the whole of society, not all social networks are formed around such ties. In the auto-ethnographic research I conducted in my home town in the Netherlands with that spare bunch of people that I actually meet and speak to regularly, I expected to find a community with a small, homogeneous network, characteristic of traditional work groups and village communities, good for conserving existing resources (Wellman, 1997). Although some members in this local network of family and friends undoubtedly also feature in larger, more heterogeneous networks (one friend is an international journalist, another has lived all over The Netherlands), these were still all people I have talked with in person at regular intervals for at least the past 10 years. This gave it the character of a more traditional, stable community. One consequence was that I expected to find a less mediated identity compared to networks that are formed around specific CMC features like multiplex ties and topic-orientation. Where traditional networks sometimes have people drop-out and 'eaten' by the potential of living life in multiplex networks, one major stimulation for the drop-outs could be clarity: in such networks single-issue living seems pervasively present. There has to come an end to hunger in the world, now! And that's it. No other issue is as important as this one. But isn't one's own life at least a little bit important compared to this one issue?

People who keep respecting the more traditional ties out of lack of education, inspiration, or mere ignorance find themselves having trouble understanding the drop-outs in the first place: they seem to have forgotten about eternal shared values that the specific upbringing, cultural surroundings and feelings of nostalgia could come with living within that one particular community. The overall clarity and seeming organizing potential of multiplex, single-issue networks can be regarded a sign of our times. It is questionable, however, to what extent members are aware of shifting their actual lives from a more traditionally embedded and oriented, towards an overly complex singularity, overriding all 'long ways home' to living the self. The study that I mentioned before did not distinguish between more traditional and more current networks. It assumed the presence of mediated identities to smaller and larger degree present in any network. In the community that built the scope of this thesis-project, I had no interest in finding a clear-cut type of community that I could set off against more state-of-theart networks. Instead, the main aim of the project was to exemplify for each network which aspects could be pointed out as more, and which as less, 'developed' in terms of mediatized identity construction. Because modern societies are becoming more socially mediatized all time and with every new invention (or multinational business take-overs guiding marketeconomies world-wide), such less clear-cut characterizations for more traditional societies are paramount in answering the issue of harmonizing relationships on a network-, communityand individual level. Chapter I Experiential Dimensions of Mediatization The thesis develops a research instrument that makes patterns visible. It functions as a grid of eight dimensions of social networks, that aim to, as advocated by Bruno Latour (2005) and William James (1980), multiply the connections with the outside, so that there is some chance to grasp how the inside is being furnished (2005:216). The first section explains the theoretical foundation for each category. In the operationalization each dimension has a description of how the proposed method of autoethnography approaches each dimension. The approach combines a view of several generations in time with a synchronic 'now' in which all mediation values oscillate, which follows Flusser's (1991) concept of anthropological development in a two-fold modality. The five media dimensions that Flusser proposed in Writings - going from space-time to architecture to image to text to computing coexist in history with different distributions of power and effectiveness. He constructed his anthropology diachronically as a process of reduction from perceiving the complexity of reality in four dimensions to the zero dimension of the binary code (total of five dimensions, the last one being empty). If the appearance of I-Thou stands for beauty and I-It for responsibility, these categories overlap with what Flusser (1988) calls curiositas, and necessitas (Zielinsky, 2006: 97). Flusser saw reality behind curiosity - which is arguably related with Reflection, Presence and Emancipation - and facticity behind necessity related with DIY, Cosmopolites and Versatility. Hyperpersonality Research on identity in mediated communication has largely been done from two different perspectives: the impersonal and the hyperpersonal perspective (Kim, 2003). The impersonal approach takes on a Uses and Gratifications (U&G) perspective. This forms a broad framework by which to study antecedents, motives and outcomes of communication within interpersonal and mediated contexts (Papacharissi & Rubin, 2000). According to this

approach, people use media to get certain needs met. Social and psychological characteristics affect an individuals motives for using media. A central theory for this approach is Social Presence theory (Short, Williams & Christie, 1976), which argues that social presence is lower in mediated communication because of the lack of non-verbal cues. It is therefore also called the Cue-Filtered-Out approach (Walther, Anderson & Park, 1994). This approach has received criticism for disregarding the quality of communicated content and amount of users concentration (Kim, 2003). The second perspective makes media part of the individual and not tools independent of the individual that he uses to meet certain needs. Only by scrutinizing how media are part of every living moment, one can trace how social phenomena (like social grooming, rapport, rhetoric and introversion) can be differently interpreted in mediated communication (Kim, 2003). Once 'mediatedness' can be traced more focused, it enables one to see Heidegger's 'ready-to-handness' within-the-network (1962: 135). This approach can be related to Social Network theory, Social Motives theory and Deindividuation theory and focuses on identity traits in mediated communication. Relationships with communication partners can for example be idealized, making mediated interaction more intense than face-to-face interaction (Kim, 2000). The second approach leaves a space for constructing an instrument through which media performances can be categorized. The connection between hyperpersonal and impersonal can be related to Bolter and Grusin's remediation theory, as well as to a broader discussion on modernist and postmodernist value systems: the set of social dynamics developed within Enlightenment - in particular class, nation-state, and universal rationality contrast those of a new historical, postmodern, postindustrial epoch, in which identity politics replaces class politics in particular ethnic, gender, religious, and a spectrum of cultural differences (Garnham, 2003: 252). Performances of such cultural differences have certain forms and structure and are things that people have constructed or constituted related to mediated communications, to subsequently exploit them at a performance level (Megarrity, 2005: 107). How autoethnography traces hyperpersonal self Matt Hills (2002: 81) in Fan cultures mentions as a key principle of autoethnography that the researcher continually looks to discover 'imagined subjectivities': identities that researchers observe based on their institutional contexts which disqualify certain ways of speaking and of presenting the self. According to Hills, moral dualisms that make up the 'good self' and 'bad others' are always socially and culturally located: they depend on cultural concepts of the 'good' (the duly trained good subject) rather than on lived experiences of 'goodness' or 'badness' (154). For this reason, moral dualisms and imagined subjectivities are related. These subjectivities are often retained because of the cultural value we can claim as a result, even though we realize that they are not congruent with our lived selves. An autoethnography, through memories and narrative, builds itself an account of how a performer integrates artistically attitudes which are at least partly foreign to his own identity, and which result in different forms of performance that can be interpreted as performativity (the capacity of speech and language to intervene in the course of human events).ii Depersonalization One perceives his or her identity as one would expect to perceive it, yet the awareness that this identity is only one out of many potential identities makes the identification odd,

even eerie. The German writer E.T.A. Hoffmann, whom Freud in his 1919 essay The Uncanny calls the "unrivaled master of the uncanny in literature" (XVII, 230), in his novel Der Sandmann created such uncanny effects through a life-like doll, Olympia. To Freud, the uncanny came closest to "the idea of being robbed of one's eyes." Depersonalization refers to a subjective experience of unreality in one's sense of self. In a positive sense, depersonalization refers to a desired anomaly in self-awareness (through recreational drugs, for instance), while in a more negative approach this causes a feeling of watching oneself act while having no control over a situation. The social psychological approach embeds depersonalization into self-categorization, where depersonalization is the vital process that allows shifts in self-identification in individuals in order for them to turn into group members. The switch from self to group level, in which self and others are seen in terms of their group identities, refers to the fluid transition between self and other. Related to depersonalization, the theory Social Identity of the Deindividuation Effects (SIDE) argues that deindividuation (losing oneself to a group) makes people more responsive to and compliant with social and situational norms (Postmes, Spears and Lea, 1998). Even though participants in mediated communication share limited information about each other, the virtual communities shared interest makes them feel closer to other participants (Walther, 1996). In terms of deindividuation or the formation of a social rather than an individual identity, conscious identification with social groups depends on how strong the aggressor is in the perception of group members. Without this aggressor, there cannot be a meaningful self-reflective group identity. It is this ephemeral character of the aggressor against online self-performance that makes empirical measurement of such group behavior difficult. In recent research by Reeves and Wise (2007: 563), however, humans who clicked to control the picture onset (instead of letting the computer take care of it) were less aroused and had weaker orienting responses compared to humans who did not click. This research follows extensive previous research by Lang and colleagues that demonstrated that numerous structural features can affect the processing of television (e.g., Thorson & Lang, 1992; Lang, Bolls, Potter, & Kawahara, 1999), radio (Potter, Lang, & Bolls, 1998), and computers (Lang, Borse, Wise, & David, 2002). Thus, a case can be made that collective behavior (control lies in the environment) is not unrestrained, as argued by deindividuation theory (Postmes, 1998), but rather restrained by normative processes. Following Reicher, this implies that collective behavior is under conscious control, and far from irrational and unrestrained. Deindividuation theory had accepted, following Le Bon, that collective behavior is always irrational, that "the individual in the crowd loses cognitive control." For example, Diener (1980: 230) argued that crowd members are "similar to the stimulus-response organism of early behaviorism, with reduced conscious mediation". The recent research outcome that control in the environment is unrelated to a loss of self speaks in favor of the assumption that such a loss of self is what is lacking from the complicated environment of mediated social networks. Complex mediated social environments stimulate protection of one's privacy, stereotypical picture-tagging, and, with Weber and Sherry (2008: 4), increased attention for how to shape one's media identities. Positive depersonalization can make attention to the out-group more uncontrolled and stereotypical, while simultaneously affording the experience of decreased control as something desirable. This could constitute a new form of mediated emancipation. Social Network theory (Hampton & Wellman, 1999) proposes that social behavior and communication affected by the patterns of ties among increasingly socially connected

humans. Relationships could become more intense, for instance, because media compress space and rearrange time according to annihilated space (Waters, 1995: 55). The more individuals in organizations are connected, communicate face-to-face, and the more intimate their relationships, the more frequently and intimately they use email and a variety of media to communicate (Haythornthwaite & Wellman, 1998). Thus, the Internet supplements traditional social behavior, without necessarily increasing or decreasing it (Wellman et al., 2001). Birnie and Horvath (2002) found that mediated communication appeared to complement or be an extension of traditional social behavior rather than being a compensatory medium for shy and socially anxious individuals. Social Motives theory (Birnie & Horvath, 2002) focusing more specifically on motives than U&G is regarded a part of this same body of research. Two main motivators behind the tendency to interact online, as mentioned by Kenneth and Bargh (2000), are self-related and social-related motives. As humans reside within the social norm of performing a self, they conform to something ephemeral, as the norm itself is largely absent within the conscious performance; they merely perform because it is the rule. They become part of the group that performs one or more selves online, and form a group that bonds through such identity formations, each in different ways. Depersonalization (experiencing a malfunction or anomaly in one's selfawareness) can make attention to the out-group more stereotypical (Turner et al., 1987). How autoethnography traces depersonalized self Autoethnographers, following Ellis (2004: 37-38), gaze, first through an ethnographic wide angle lens, focusing outward on social and cultural aspects of their personal experience; then, they look inward, exposing a vulnerable self that is moved by and may move through, refract, and resist cultural interpretations. As they zoom backward and forward, inward and outward, distinctions between the personal and cultural become blurred, sometimes beyond distinct recognition. Following Tindemans (2010: 2), as a way of tracing such non-identity a media autoethnography is to describe what the relationship is between this document both in the sense of documentation as in the sense of performative paper and theatricality in contemporary performance practices. He notes that questions about this relationship deal with the truth claim of this genre the dramaturgical issue and with the consequences of the nature of this material on acting attitudes the performance issue. Corporate Humans in Western societies have become enmeshed in vast bureaucratic organizations and the dream of escaping bureaucracy, enacting justice as an individual against all the array of bad guys in the world, may be held by many who idolize American film and television culture. The media landscape of both the US and The Netherlands has developed such that everyone adapts individually to the norms of human-computer interaction. As such, everyone becomes a media professional, working to depict selves that are recognizable to their audiences as 'digitally well-organized, .zipped-up and shopped-out selves.'iii Whereas deterministic rhetorics of digital media, like those of previous communication technologies, often focus on a universal notion of authenticity of identity and the well-being of 'real' relationships." (Baym: 2010: 38), a postmodern standpoint accepts that people observe each other and engage in mediated communications on the basis of power struggles that depend on the particular time and place (Garnham, 1993: 252). Humans define their identities not in terms of a universal culture but are arbitrarily different according to their culture and all values are perspectival. A meeting of different cultures leads not, as in the

modernist view, to a debate and a consensus on universal values but to a simple power struggle between incompatible value systems (ibid., 258). As such, citizens in Western societies are likely to engage in creating a corporate identity: the certainty of having a strong team of many true selves in oneself (Siegmund 1991: 132), to fall back on and not have uncertainties about. What results is an image of not only manifold, but also highly fluid egos; an image that always recombines itself into new compositions. In terms of gender, for instance, the enterprising self is a literary program consisting of autobiographical admissions, diary notes, stories of wishes and encouragement, aphorisms, a cathartic writing-out, and finally of contract texts, in which the individual makes a binding agreement with herself to reach certain goals. Taking ones life in ones own hands means, first of all, becoming the author of ones own story (Broeckling, 2005: 17). How auto-ethnography traces corporate self As part of the project, I will create and publish a personal website that shows the categories of media identity as listed in this chapter. The website will contain all material that I have written over the past six of years regarding media identity (my memory as stored and archived in media). By transforming it into a analytic instrument for tracing one's media identity, I will ask people in my environment to engage with the site and report on this experience in the auto-ethnography chapter. Play Following Ulrich Broekling (2005), the widespread catchphrase of the theories of subjectivity in the 1980s and 90s of a patchwork identity has still to be radicalized. The enterprising self is not the same as a patchwork quilt, which, once it has been sewn, no longer changes its pattern, but like a kaleidoscope shows a new image with every turn (15). The following discussion will take a playful approach to postmodern values and differentiate them according to current literature on media identity. Matthews (1995) claims that media consists of cultural raw materials that at a deep level mold the self in their image, and that at a shallow level are used by the self in molding its own image (107). Representations of self in media culturally shape the self, and on that basis are used by the self in culturally shaping itself. Matthews distinguishes three levels of the self's shaping. (1) deep shaping beyond the self's control and comprehension; this involves a shaping by a particular language and set of social practices that condition us as to how we comprehend ourselves and our environment. This level is largely below the level of consciousness. (2) mid-level shaping beyond the self's control but within its comprehension; the self's cultural shaping is what Matthews (105) calls the shikata ga nai level. Shikata ga nai is a Japanese phrase meaning "it can't be helped", "there's nothing I can do about it." This level is that at which we do what we must do as members of our societies whether we like it or not : we get up and go to work, pay our taxes, act like "men" and "women," and retire at retirement age because these are what we are required to do as members of our societies. It is also the level which is shaped in a way that it makes the less than fulfilling reality bearable. (3) shallow shaping with the self's full control and comprehension self's cultural shaping; the "cultural supermarket. Members of the same society - Japan, the United States, Hong Kong - may have fundamentally different interests, attitudes, and beliefs.

Level 1 shapes levels 2 and 3, level 2 shapes level 3. Just as life in general, media representations of self in literature and cinema, on TV and in comic books, and social networks - work on all three levels of shaping. However, the "taken-for-granted" is growing progressively smaller, while the "cultural supermarket" is growing progressively larger, because people are increasingly questioning all cultural traditions - habit, hierarchy and gender roles - because of cultural self-construction needs (105). The three levels could be taken metaphorically as Deuze's (2011, in press) definition of media as arrangements (1), activities (2) and artifacts (3). Arrangements are how media are structurally embedded in the environment, while activities are what we actually do with media, which either are 'just somethings that we do or explorations of new words. Artifacts are the actual devices, that disappear as soon as we can used to them, but that look so attractive to us when our marketed environments present them. As questioning cultural traditions likely undermines more formulaic, systemic, or even flexible ways of performing, a need to be more playful, relaxed, fun and exciting in media may surface. Corporate identities could due to their fluidity and oscillatory nature be similar to those found in the game industry, where a bewildering pace of having to deal with new ranges of issues often leads to overly simplistic classifications (Deuze, 2007: 232). The performativity of corporate performances as well as the experience of play, as Natascha Adamowsky (2002: 27) notes, are culturally embedded in specific ways for each person. Play as such can be related to dreaming, laughing and fantasy, to theater, art and poetry, to feasts and carneval, as well as to rituals, symbols and magical activities. Adamowsky, following Winnicot (1973), locates an intermediary place, within the performativity of play, in which self and other (or actor and world) coalesce and connect to how one discovered this distinction as a child. To move within the intermediary means to overcome self and world in a short but always repeatable unifying moment (28). How autoethnography traces playful self Autoethnography has been heralded as the potential begin of a 'robust dance of agency in one's personal/political/professional life (Spry, 2001:706). Spry thinks of the autoethnographic performance as making us acutely conscious of how we I-witness our own reality constructions. Performing autoethnography encourages one to dialogically look back upon self as other, generating critical agency in the life histories, as the polyglot facets of self and other engage, interrogate, and embrace (708). The emotional texturing of theory and its reliance upon poetic structure suggests a live participative embodied researcher (709). Ellis and Bochner (114) describe autoethnography as poetic insofar as it represents how we use communication to attach meanings and values to experience, to bring experience to language and to life. The reflexive mode, according to Murphy, is a privileging of the process of representation, expressed through poetic exposition, and an open voice that provokes and explores ethnographic boundaries (2008: 280). Autoethnography treats self and other as identical categories, using the same terms and attributes of agency to describe them both. A constant use of self-reflexive questioning regarding moral dualism should, furthermore, be accompanied by a critique on the selfreflexive attitude itself. Hills points out how this move unmasks the fantasy of academic power and of the idealist transformation of society: self-reflexivity becomes academia's 'critical industry'. Here, autoethnography can be embedded in a broader scope on cultural theory, claiming that it lacks the systemics of academic theory: it occurs in flashes, in local circumstances, rather than in sustained analysis (McLaughlin, 1996: 59).

Usually written in first-person voice, autoethnographic texts appear in a variety of forms short stories, poetry, fiction, novels, photographic essays, personal essays, journals, fragmented and layered writing, and social science prose. In these texts, concrete action, dialog, emotion, embodiment, spirituality, and self-consciousness are featured, appearing as relational and institutional stories impacted by history and social structure, which themselves are dialectically revealed through actions, feelings, thoughts, and language (Ellis, 1999: 673). Cosmopolitan In Terhi Rantanen's The Media and Globalization, she describes cosmopolitanism as a matter of competence of both a generalized and a more specialized kind (citing Hannerz, 1990: 293). A person, by becoming cosmopolitan, gains the ability to make one's way into other cultures and to deal with particular systems of meanings. Contrasting the common belief that media and communications technologies make just about everybody a cosmopolitan, Rantanen emphasizes that there is little scope for ordinary people to achieve cosmopolitan qualities. The concept has been criticized for its elitism. The interesting question is whether communication technologies make more humans into cosmopolitans, or whether the reverse is happening, namely a return to locally situated cultural experience. Such experience is exactly what this Western white ideal has denigrated. In that latter case, one must draw the conclusion that cosmopolitanism cannot be mediated and mass-mediated (2005: 122). Whether one is cosmopolitan is often a matter of access, and of what kind of access. Where earlier notions of cosmopolitanism (for instance in Jules Vernes' hero Phileas Fogg) drew on the physical access, the question now whether access can be provided by mere visual access. to Beck has called cosmopolitanism the question of level of mediation', referring to the fact that for humans who don't travel or leave their countries at all (and even for them) communications technologies provide their main channel to other parts of the world. Rantanen lists five 'zones of everyday cosmopolitanism' that move away from a more traditional, 'explorer' definition (broad-minded, catholic, open-minded, urbane, well-traveled a and world-wise) and instead emphasizes its unstable character: m media and communications l learning another language l living/working abroad l living with a person from another culture engaging with foreigners in your locality She therewith also disputes Castells' notion that the fundamental divide in cities lies between the inclusion of cosmopolitans and the exclusion of locals from control of the global city. Relatedly, Giddens (1990: 21) refers to 'distanciation' of presence in a globalized world, "the interlacing of social relations 'at distance' with local contextualities". Agreeing with Rantanen (2005: 6), Giddens undercovers the role of media and communications in the analysis of globalization. Inherent qualities of mediated communication representing the term 'connectivity' and characterized by "distantiated relations, which determine its nature" (ibid.: 19, italics in original) remain hidden in Giddens' notion of a 'visible form' of the locale (that which is present on the scene). A focus on such qualities illuminates the older ontological dilemma of finding the internal outside and make it acutely observable, either in its absence

or in its complete transformation. How autoethnography traces cosmopolitan identity Cosmopolitan identity can be traced using a mediagraphy (Rantanen, 2005), consisting of four generations' attitudes related to, amongst others, their media and their local-historical background. If for instance my grandmother was published in a particular newspaper it is interpreted as embedded in early stages of the enterprised self. Presence An important distinction lies between mass-mediated and non-mass-mediated experiences. The first relates to a one-way and monological form of communication, whereas the latter is two-or-more-way. What tells a human that he is able to understand what others do is the inclusion of this other in his circle of friends. Instead of a centralized mass-oriented message being delivered to everyone at will, the sender now has to become part of an exclusive group of friends in order to communicate. This group is not likely to be in each others physical presence all the time. In online social networking - with its absence of the others' body - the self and other (or group) are thus shifted into the physical materiality of the own body. This relates to the sense that mediated communication are quasi-real, or 'quasiinteractions' (referring to Thompson, 1995: 84). Harvey (1993: 14) speaks of 'mass-mediated social relationships' to describe the same phenomenon of feeling that mediated interaction just lacks behind the physical form in terms of reality. However, our perception and experience during either form of interaction does not become more of less in touch with the physical, material world. Instead of perceiving the other to be there with us in the room, we perceive the computer to be there and think the other elsewhere. Following Reeves and Nass' Media Equation (1996), it is more likely that the act of (conscious or unconscious) fantasizing the other human to be in another place emanates the feeling of unreal and that humans have to adapt to it to regain that feeling of real. Because mediated communications lend themselves to dialogue traditional mediated interactions or relationships fall behind in dialogue and are not combining all traditional forms of communication like the Internet does. This makes them go beyond the boundaries of locality, region and nation-states (Rantanen, 138), and suggests that other epistemologies (how people do things on the bases of which expectations) concerning physical proximity or geographical location become possible. Lazarsfeld's (et al., 1944) two-step-flow of communication, which states that information is passed first to opinion leaders and then from them to other people in that sense should be interpreted in a way that invites the notion that the division of labor is no longer vertical, nor linked to the local or national, in the way it used to. Humans can now more than ever connect vertically with other people at distance and may have a more dyadic or rhizomatic understanding of their worlds. As such, one may have to locate the presence of others in in the human-media interaction. The social environment may best be approached, following , as perceived from within the body, or from the 'sphere of physical perception' (Kittler, 1989: 18). The cerebral cortex neurologically reproduces all the parts of the environment. The German poet Rilke, as Kittler notes, used the physiological insight that to the central nervous system the own body is the outside world. Rilke was fascinated by the achievement of the skeleton of the human body, and in particular of the skull: due to the limiting skull, the mind-body structure has a boundless field of activity (ibid., 42-43). Such an inner sphere makes the presence of the own body already an external one. Thus, self and other are shifted into the physical materiality of the body and media become not so much the external, but an adaptation to an

already existing external. The exterior self, following Kittler (1989:14), as shaped by our engulfment into paper-based education, uses the universally pragmatic mode of being that has the internalized world in the external. The external therefore has to carry in it the key to understanding the internal, or our 'inner thought world'. Agency can thus only be the systemic functioning of a hardware imprint in the mind, or perhaps a mindful print of this hardware structure. The medium, following Carpignano (1999), as apparatus-support-procedure, cannot be conceived outside of its social dimension. The boundaries between self-referential technological operations and the social conceptualizations are therefore almost impossible to locate. Luhmann's (2008: 79) system theoretical approach is capable of tackling this epistemic difficulty as it enables the 'interpenetration' of the subject as contributing environment within social systems. The inner selectivity of the subject, that which constitutes it as organic-psychical unity, is not identical with, and proceeds entirely different compared to social selectivity of communication systems (83). Therefore, the system/environment difference does not simply distinguish facts but instead distinguishes and recombines selectivities. Historically, this has led communication systems to distinguish in their environment both the psychical-organic and the subjective-personal dimension. These categories seem to overlap those that distinguish attribution of resources for object-oriented attention from non-attribution of resources as subjective non-storage or control (manipulation). Kittler (1996) suggests a similar separation from the physical when he explains how Nyquist and Shannon's (1949) decoupled information from communication: [t]he quantisation noise which necessarily arises in the process can also, in contrast to the physically-determined noise of analog systems, be minimized to any degree simply because it obeys the laws of a digital system. The liberation of Information has meant the ultimate step towards Luhmann's functionally differentiated society in which communication happens independently of conscious input by humans. From that point on, moral life was led by the machine while functional life replaced the human rationality principle. One's identity could now be questioned: it could and thus should be shaped in ways that made one feel good about self. As Laclau (2005: 152-153) notes, any internality will always be threatened by a heterogeneity which is never a pure outside, because it inhabits the very logic of the internal constitution. And, conversely, the possibility of an outside is always going to be shortcircuited by the operation of homogenizing logics. Hannah Arendt's (1958: 179) public realm emphasizes the physical presence of the human in public realm commucations. In the public environment, humans would show who they are, reveal actively their unique personal identities and thus make their appearance in the social world, while their physical identities appear without any activity of their own in the unique shape of the body and sound of the voice. Autoethnographic study forms a second-order approach to language in and of the environment and can therefore provide a perspective for the researcher to both participate and observe. Such a perspective is necessary for seeing how our media ideology, or how we embed the structure and meaning of communicative technologies in our belief system (Gershon, 2010: 3), shapes who we are in media. Chris Marker speaks of such a place at the end of the film essay Sans Soleil: Lost at the end of the world on my island, Sal, in the

company of my dogs strutting around, I remember that January in Tokyo, or rather I remember the images I filmed In Tokyo in January. They have now put themselves in place of my memory, they are my memory. I wonder how people who do not film, take photos, or record tapes remember, how humankind used to go about remembering (in: Kittler 1999: 10). To access such a place, one has to metaphorically to integrate media ontology (the environment as rendered via screen printiv) in the social dimension as fractured by repercussions of the social media on existence. How autoethnography traces presence Following Braidotti (2002), the representation of self in technology emanates the sense of systematic ambivalence vis-a-vis one's privately owned inner world. Such representations can easily be headed under the labor norm in conducting one's self properly, whether in business or in domestic relations. As Warren and Brandeis (1890: 212) noted, it has always been far easier to express lofty sentiments in a diary than in the conduct of noble life. The interaction between words and physical artifacts - particularly inscription artifacts according to Hayles (2002: 24) - I can conceptualize as material metaphors". These artifacts (e.g. books, computer screens, videos) Hayles sees as initiating material changes that can be read as marks". As such, these artifacts not only influence on some explorable external world but also the researcher's conceptualizations and communication. As Denzin (2002: 483) argues, "[w]e change the world by changing the way we make it visible." Emancipation In a life increasingly lived in media, humans express themselves through newly formed, emancipated social identities.v With the societal norm being in favor of performing a self in such environments, the already existing external is formed by identities that may be shaped less consciously (Matthews' level 1 and 2). Because it simultaneously becomes easier and is expected more that marginalized groups (for instance introverts) adapt to extrovert culture and thus identify with an emancipated self, communicative technologies make it possible through the illusion of being together, to experience the self as part of an emancipated group of others in mediated networks. The depersonalized self as void is only one way of objectifying. To be sure, digging for this self alone will not mean access to a new form of emancipation. Instead of focusing on either such emptiness or intractable underlying identification structures, following Latour (2005: 214), one could trace at the forefront the flood of other more subtle conduits that allow us to become an individual and to gain some interiority (italics in original). Having this variety ready-to-hand guarantees a continued dynamic environment in which to jump from one ungraspable (depersonalized) subjectivity to a more tractable emancipated self. For instance, performing a self that is expressively introvert in an newly emancipated way means art and politics become more individualized, spiritualized, interiorized" (ibid., 212). One could then obtain an experience of the inside of the inside (I-Thou), having gone through the outside (I-It). This is the same move Martin Buber makes in his philosophy of being. The Between, as his main focus and goal, forms the seat of his anthropological perspective (Buber, 1954: 294) that binds human and his world into the whole of Being. In I and Thou he notes that for I-Thou, or The Between, to appear, one has to go through a process of development that passes through three stages, usually described as the mystical, the existential and the dialogical, in that order (Wood, 1969: 5). Ich-Du is dialogical, whereas Ich-Es (I and It) is monological. This figure is then repeated by taking the next issue and move on. The paradoxical in the purely analytic, material view of existence is its core: an advocation of Ich-Es relations, even between human beings.vi

LeBon (1896) professed that mental unity is what defines a psychological crowd, not its physical proximity. Reicher (1987) has emphasized that the unity of participants, if they rally behind their cause, makes them oblivious to the differences that may exist between them that lie outside of the realm of identification. Similarly, to perform oneself online may become so common because the group that normally is unable to participate as they don't identify with performing a self, now is able to participate, but differently. According to Adorno (1966: 163), we can find ourselves in the internal of what we are not, or in the non-identical.vii Thus, what binds the non-identical to what we are is exactly its internal. The internal of the non-identical is "what is not itself and what its arranged, deepfrozen identity holds back". As such, it is only perceived (can only come to itself) in its externalization ('Entaeusserung', 'relinquishing'), and not in its hardening. He maintains that the possibility to sink into the internal (to contemplate on the internal) requires this externalization (emancipation). If mediated communication reflects or mirrors this dynamic, then it both externalizes the internal as well as re-constitutes 'internal' in the guise of older ones. Externalized emancipatory participation could there build such moments of selfactualization. Mediated social networks could therefore provide aesthetically and ethically acceptable forms of depersolized self through accellerated transformations of negational identifications ('this is what I am not') into affirmational ones ('this is what I am'), and affirmational identities provoking negational ones (Zhong et al., 2008: 12). The depersonalized self as void is only one way of objectifying. To be sure, digging for this self alone will not mean access to a new form of emancipation. Instead of focusing on either such emptiness or intractable underlying identification structures, following Latour (2005: 214), one could trace at the forefront the flood of other more subtle conduits that allow us to become an individual and to gain some interiority (italics in original). Having this variety ready-to-hand guarantees a continued dynamic environment in which to jump from one ungraspable (depersonalized) subjectivity to a more tractable emancipated self. For instance, performing a self that is expressively introvert in an newly emancipated way means to become more individualized, spiritualized, interiorized" (ibid., 212). How autoethnography traces emancipation To the extent that internally identifying person(s) are given a place to voice themselves, the form of autoethnography that is at issue here can create an emancipatory discourse, though tracing the vicissitudes of one life, concerning itself with the place of this life in a media environment and the impact of each on the other. As Rose Richards (2008: 1722) explains, '[e]mancipatory discourse gives a voice to the voiceless and can allow people to say the unsayable'. Some criticize the autoethnographic form of writing as sentimental, unscientific, and the product of the excesses of postmodernism. However, following Noah Porter (2004), because of the epistemological difficulties involved with knowing how humans interact with their computers, this genre of writing may have much to contribute to discussions on identification in cyberspace studies. Following Mary Louis Pratt (1991: 2), autoethnography originates as discourse from the margins of dominant culture. Therefore, they are not what are usually thought of as autochthonous forms of expression or self-representation. As autoethnographic works are often written for both metropolitan audiences - because of its appealing style of writing - and the speaker's own community -their reception is thus highly indeterminate. Such texts therefore constitute a point of entry for 'marginalized groups' to enter into the dominant

circuits of print culture. They are selective appropriations of idioms of the metropolis and merged or infiltrated to varying degrees with indigenous idioms to create self-representations that intervene in metropolitan modes of understanding. A thick and textured description of this personal memories using field notes and audio recordings as well as frequently referencing the theoretical background in this first chapter make up the internal gaze at my own identity in media. Paraphrasing Clifford (2001), ethnicity is connected to and made up of the memory function of the brain. This leads me to recognize auto-ethnography as having a unique emancipatory potential for the voiceless internal identity in performance-driven media.

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