Skip to main content

Terror Of Anonymity


An essay titled The End of Solitude by William Deresiewicz is one of my favorites. Each time I read it, there is something new to ponder over. I have blogged about certain themes he discusses in it. In my most recent reading, I found myself thinking about  Deresiewicz's analysis on how connectivity and creativity converge at the our modern desire for visibility at some level. "The great contemporary terror is anonymity". If you search someone's name online and nothing comes up, it is as if this person does not exist. Whether or not that is terrifying for the person being sought, it is certainty disquieting for the seeker. I find the author's characterization of MySpace particularly easy to relate to :
"The MySpace page, with its shrieking typography and clamorous imagery, has replaced the journal and the letter as a way of creating and communicating one's sense of self. The suggestion is not only that such communication is to be made to the world at large rather than to oneself or one's intimates, or graphically rather than verbally, or performatively rather than narratively or analytically, but also that it can be made completely. Today's young people seem to feel that they can make themselves fully known to one another. They seem to lack a sense of their own depths, and of the value of keeping them hidden."
As the mother of a tween, I am naturally apprehensive about how J (when her time comes) will choose to communicate who she is to the world at large. It may no longer be MySpace then, but whatever replaces it is unlikely to any less "performative" or invasive .

Comments

NoWhere Man said…
I had read this article almost couple of years back. It was quite well written indeed.

As the mother of a tween, I am naturally apprehensive about how J (when her time comes) will choose to communicate who she is to the world at large. It may no longer be MySpace then, but whatever replaces it is unlikely to any less "performative" or invasive .


I find it amusing that in an article about solitude and the importanc eof having 'me' time , you have to end it with a line which betrays your sense of identity as a 'mother'. So where is your solitude ?

- NM
oneandonly said…
"As the mother of a tween" - "teen" you mean..

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t

Cheese Making

I never fail to remind J that there is a time and place for everything. It is possibly the line she will remember me by when I am dead and gone given how frequently she hears it. Instead of having her breakfast she will break into a song and dance number from High School Musical well past eight on Monday morning. She will insist that I watch and applaud the performance instead of screaming at her to finish her milk and cereal. Her sense of occasion is seriously lacking but then so is mine. Consider for example, a person walks into the grocery store with the express purpose of buying detergent because they are fresh out of it and laundry is only half way done. However instead of heading straight for detergent, they wander over to the natural foods aisle and go berserk upon finding goat milk on sale for a dollar a gallon. They at once proceed to stock pile so they can turn it to huge quantities home-made feta cheese. That person would be me. It would not concern me in the least that I ha

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques