Realism

[rivkat]

I’m interested in the “people who can verify I’m real” meme I’ve seen going around, connected to the Gay Girl in Damascus hoax. I’m trying to sort out my thoughts about it, because in many fannish cases I’m not sure why it’s relevant. I mean, if you’re performing “this is what an X looks like” online, then your “real”/offline identity or performance is likely to be relevant, and more so if you’re asking people to act or change beliefs based on your online performance. If you’re inserting yourself into a political movement and getting real activists involved in trying to help you, then yes, it’s relevant. If you’re asking for money, then yes, it’s relevant. If you’re asking people to meet you offline, then yes, it’s relevant. But a lot of people I read mostly post fannish stuff with occasional personal or even political content—and then I’m not sure how much offline identity means, especially when what you’re performing online is a privileged or locally privileged identity, like cis white American woman. Suppose I don’t have a partner or kids (to whom I occasionally refer)—does that change what my book reviews or stories mean? I kind of hope they speak for themselves (and I am certain that they reveal a lot more about who I am and/or who I think I am than I intend).

Flipping it around, would it matter to me if fans I think of as women were actually men? Would it matter to me if fans I think of as having kids/being pregnant didn’t or weren’t? In a lot of cases, probably not, if all they’re doing is performing a life. Then again, if I found out someone who performed being Jewish wasn’t—kind of like the sister in The Prince of Tides--that would skeeve me out.  There's something here about "always punch up," but I'm not sure how to get at it.

Anyway, solipsistically I assert that I am as real as these words.

Comments

[zvi]

Additional thought: because this is a transnational space, there are many, many people in my social circle I presume I am never going to run into due to distance. However, the fact that I am not going to run into them doesn't mean that no one in our mutual online social circle is physically proximate to them, and, also, because being on the internet for social purposes by default indicates you are privileged on a global economic scale, even people whose normal base of operations are geographically distant from me sometimes make it to my local area, for broad (or even narrow) definitions of local.

I just don't think the internet is remote from embodied life in a way where your distinctions hold commonly true?

[rivkat]

I don't think the internet is remote from embodied life.

I think we may be making different intermediate assumptions, because I'm not sure we're talking about the same things. Are you saying that you or someone you know offline can often confirm the offline identity of someone you hang out with online, so verifiability is often possible? If so, we agree, except that I was trying to say that (1) I am including in my definition of "identity" things that might not be confirmable by meeting someone offline, and (2) in the truly deliberate manipulations, it often turns out that other people either get involved in the manipulations themselves or overstate how much they've actually been able to verify; I suspect the latter happens mostly by accident and is then hard to back down from. So both of those can destabilize verifiability.