ulises mejias

But if the decentered self requires the internet to support its multiple identities and realities, and the internet can only be maintained with the hardware and electricity provided by multinational corporations, then we must admit that the decentered self is partly complicit in the process of globalization. In other words, the discourse of the decentered self must acknowledge how it, as a product of postmodern culture, helps to perpetuate the centralized logic of capitalism. As Jameson argues, “every position on postmodernism in culture-whether apologia or stigmatization-is also at one and the same time, and necessarily, an implicitly or explicitly political stance on the nature of multinational capitalism today.” (¶ 4)

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Frederic Jameson’s essay, Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, describes the ethos of its time. Published in 1984, the work provides a detailed analysis of the social and political implications of postmodernism, and predicts the continuation of a trend already well in progress in the 1980’s: the further fragmentation of the self. Jameson’s predictions are validated and updated in Sherry Turkle’s book Life on the Screen (Touchstone Press, 1995), published a decade later. Where Jameson looks at art, literature and architecture in the 1980’s, Turkle looks at virtuality and the online world in the 1990’s for evidence of the postmodern decentralization of the self, and what its sustainable and unsustainable consequences might be.

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The relationships we form online with people we have never met in “meatspace” are real, to the extent that they involve real social transactions. But what kind of relationships are they? In what ways do they differ from actual (I use the word here to mean the opposite of ‘virtual’) relationships? Can online relationships affect and shape us in the same way?

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