“With the development of radio and film, one’s opinions, emotions, facial
expressions, mannerisms, styles of relating, and the like were no longer
confined to the immediate audience, but were multiplied manifold..... Television has generated an exponential increase in self-multiplication. This
is true not only in terms of the increased size of television audiences and the
number of hours to which they are exposed to social facsimiles, but in the
extent to which self-multiplication transcends time – that is, in which one’s
identity is sustained in the culture’s history. Because television channels are
plentiful, popular shows are typically rebroadcast in succeeding years.The patient viewer can still resonate with
Groucho Marx on You Ben Your Life or Jackie Gleason and Audrey Meadows on The
Honeymooners.....
“People can choose the actors they wish to identify with or the stories that
will bring fantasies to life. Increasingly, this also means that in terms of
producing a sense of social connection, any given actor may transcend his or
her own death; viewers can continue their private relationships with Marilyn
Monroe and James Dean long after the physical demise of the performers. With
television, a personage may continue a robust life over eternity.”
“We appear to each other as single identities, unified, of whole cloth.
However, with social saturation, each of us comes to harbor a vast population
of hidden potentials – to be a blues singer, a gypsy, an aristocrat, a
criminal. All the selves lie latent, and under the right conditions may spring
to life.... The populating of the self not only opens relationships to new ranges of
possibility, but one’s subjective life also becomes more fully laminated. Each
of the selves we acquire from others can contribute to inner dialogues, private
discussions we have with ourselves about all manner of persons, events, and
issues. These internal voices, these vestiges of relationships both real and
imagined, have been given different names: invisible guests by Mary Watkins,
social imagery by Eric Klinger, and social ghosts by Mary Gergen, who found in
her research that virtually all the young people she sampled could discuss many
such experiences with ease.
“This syndrome may be termed
multiphrenia, generally referring to the splitting of the individual into
a multiplicity of self-investments. This condition is partly an outcome of
self-population, but partly a result of the populated self’s efforts to exploit
the potentials of the technologies of relationship. In this sense, there is a
cyclical spiraling toward a state of multiphrenia..... It would be a mistake to view this
multiphrenic condition as a form of illness, for it is often suffused with a
sense of expansiveness and adventure. Someday there may indeed be nothing to
distinguish multiphrenia from simply “normal living.”
"A multiphrenic condition emerges in which one swims in
ever-shifting, concatenating, and contentious currents of being. One bears the
burden of an increasing array of oughts, of self-doubts and irrationalities.
The possibility for committed romanticism or strong and single-minded modernism
recedes, and the way is opened for the postmodern being"
"Increasingly
we emerge as the possessors of many voices. Each self contains a multiplicity
of others, singling different melodies, different verses, and with different
rhythms. Nor do these many voices necessarily harmonize. At times they join
together, at time they fail to listen one to another, and at times they creates
a jarring discord.”
"Concepts of truth, honesty, and authenticity now turn
strange. Not only do attempts at characterizing the actual person – the
workings of the mind, the human spirit, or the biological individual – become
suspect. The very concept of an internal core – an intentional, rational agent
– also begins to fray.”
"With the demise of rational coherence, a longstanding
demarcation of self-identity also recedes from view. For it is the sense of
continuity – that I know I am I by virtue of my sense of continuous sameness –
that for centuries has served as the chief criterion by which a self is to be identified"
“Under
modernism, the individual seemed an isolated, machinelike entity – reliable,
predictable, and authentic, propelled by a core mechanism embedded not too
deeply within the interior.”
"[Saturation/postmodernism]sets the stage for ersatz being, that is, the capacity
for entering immediately into identities or relationships of widely varying
forms... if identities are essentially forms of social
construction, then one can be anything at any time so long as the roles,
costumes, and settings have been commodiously arranged.... The possibility of ersatz being has also encouraged
the development of industries for identity production.... the deterioration of the traditional community is
hastened by the emergence of symbolic community. Symbolic communities are
linked primarily by the capacity of their members for symbolic exchange – of
words, images, information – mostly through electronic means. Physical
immediacy and geographic closeness disappear as criteria of community"
all quotes from Kenneth J. Gergen's The Saturated Self: Dilemmas of Identity in Contemporary Life (1991 - before the internet!)
