Settling Accounts

On accounting

I've been a member of the internet-addicted community for some years now; it was March of 1996 that I got my first modem-enabled computer dialing up to speeds of 14.4K (!). I was hooked. It was like a drug; the coding, the chatrooms, the web searches that required a gentle hand and a clever mind. But online communities, the heart of the internet's popularity explosion, around since the WELL's inception (and conception) in 1984, were not really a part of my world; most were hosted by Prodigy and AOL and required fees to join. A few interfaces such as IRC created "channels" or chatrooms in which individuals could converge and ramble on about their lives, but IRC, unlike today's communities, was more fluid: users had multiple "nicks" and could change nicks at will, and you were never really sure about who you were talking to--I mean, sure, you could find out their IP address, the name of the server hosting the channel, their ping time, etc, but as for the person behind the nick, well, you could be anyone, including creepy voyeurs and pedophiles.

I don't remember my first "account" creation that gave me a stable internet presence. It might have been my hotmail, but definitely by the time I got my Yahoo! email, I had registered on several sites--a lot of them for casual games, a few on early blog-like sites. Today I have so many accounts, I can't account for them all. There's my credit card company account, my Papa Johns account, my Amazon.com account, Shockwave, various fan sites, facebook, delicious, my blog, my various emails and IM accounts, WebCT, job search engines, my MLA and PCA memberships, some more casual games sites, Bluffton Alumni...etc etc etc. There are accounts for sites that don't really account anything (such as Icanhascheezburger.com), and accounts that are attached to my bank accounts security sensitive accounts (like mypurdue).

Derrida says that postmodernism is marked by an "archive fever," a need to constantly count and account for (accompter) people, places, and things by rendering them into text--that permanent, substitution-vehicle that stands in for us long after we're gone. What does it meant to have an "account," then, but to re-iterate and re-cite one's own self-hood, to nominate yourself as part of a count, to ask to belong to a certain set? To call oneself into being through text, through the legitimating power of an email address--after all, most accounts require you to prove your identity or confirm your account by responding to an email sent by the automated program. Yes, I am real. Yes, I exist.

These "accounts" name us, they classify us as members, and they give us a place within a larger schema. They, not surprisingly, mirror many of the usually hidden aspects of language and governance, making them transparent. Who are you? When were you born (i.e. are you a legal adult)? What do you look like (in the case of avatars)? How can others identify you? Substitution upon substitution that makes us "present" online, that presents us online, that re-presents us to the world. The text and image stand in for us, they reserve our place among the counted.

Presence and presentation are, of course different. One can still create multiple accounts with the same site. One could change one's avatar to be older, younger, a different gender, blonde, fat, thin, elfin, wizard, troll, or sheep. Clever people have created MySpace pages for everyone from Hitler to Heidegger, Aristotle to Zola, and yes isn’t it cool how digital “presence” shows us that all identity is a performance. But for those less overtly ironic identities, those accounts we take seriously, the ones that are supposed to equate presence and presentation for operations in the “real” world--what does it say of us, this endless profiling, selecting, electing and editing of our selves into text, into image? Into something that will remain long after ourselves (thanks to the Internet archive project)? Does blogger.com really need to know my gender? My state of residence? My likes, dislikes, favorite quotes and movies?

Part of me gets frustrated with the multiple username/passwords I have to remember every day. Part of me wants to create a universal ID that allows me to log-in efficiently to every site or community I am a member of. Then the dystopian imagination kicks in, and I think of the Mark of the Beast, of Big Brother tracking my purchases, my involvement, my movements across cyberspace. Paranoia is another condition of postmodernity, and it is also a condition of a dystopian imagination.

For now, I suppose I’ll do like everyone else, and use the same two or three web identities for everything, the same password with variations, for everything. So if you see an unwiredmascot or a pandoratrue somewhere, it’s most likely me. It’s just easier to keep account of accounts this way.