Creative Project

Welcome!

To analyze social media as a performance of the self and my reaction to it in my life, I've taken my social media presence and fragmented it into different interests or aspects of my personality.

I have created depositories (tumblogs and twitters) of my views and forays into photography, writing, media studies, moving from one that is everything all at once. In order to develop these different aspects, I worked first from my existing presence, in an attempt to show how these aspects can grow from being just one aspect of myself into the idea of a whole of myself. Basically, I took something I liked and made it be the one thing that defined me, as far as the internet is concerned.

This pre-existing presence included an old blogger account (this one!), on which I hadn't posted since 2011, a tumblog (and all it's original sideblogs), and two linked Twitter accounts, not to mention the experience gained from everything else I already do on the internet (Facebook, last.fm, Etsy, flickr, YouTube, etc.). I used my flavors.me account as a platform to present the project coherently, reformatting it from its earlier use.

While my internet presence didn't nearly begin with blogger, this was the first time I actively sought to create an impression of myself purely through my own output. I made choices about content, layout and audience, in order to mediate who saw it and what it said about me. I think it's fitting as the starting point for this project, as well.

I created my Twitter account in August 2010 to follow breaking news on world events I wasn't getting any other way, and my Tumblr in November of that same year, to fit in with my new college roommate.

I eventually divided my twitter account into two, one intended to be more professional, where I follow news and politics, and one where I post about, well, anything and speak personally to friends and family. This latter account was locked until this project, so that it can now be seen as part of the whole. My tumblr, too, branches from a main, personal blog to ones dedicated to side interests, in an attempt to organize my reaction to the public sphere, my life and the internet.

I can therefore analyze my reaction to new media as one that tackles it by branching from a main, disorganized narrative into ordered streams focused on different interests. This project is an expansion of that, wherein I pick an aspect, and create those identities, all of which are linked back to my real, pre-existing disorganized "self" on the internet. It required me to analyze what I want to express about myself and what I need to do that.

To examine this project, I suggest you take one aspect (connected by similar pictures) and see it as a whole, and then track back to find another, i.e. take the photography blog and twitter (me with a camera)  as one and then go to another. I intended each to show how a "whole" identity can be assumed from an offshoot of the original whole. My main blog/twitter, snazzamazza (the pink one) is as much of a performance of my real-world self on the internet as I can make it. While it is definitely filtered and its audience is somewhat restricted by who I tell of its existence, it fulfills my diary impulse and contains the things I like and think about. By taking from that blog as a source, and not the internet as a whole, I reinforced the idea that it was a branch of a whole that became itself a whole.


Each blog is me, but I am all of them together.

-Mariah

I miss grainy pictures of my old life.

the gap in the curtains makes me feel like running away

Mind vomit. Because for some reason, i sometimes think in poetic meter

Let the boys play their games of politics and sex
While the girls get told that 'father knows best'
The old ways must die before we'll be let in
To their smoke-rooms, cigars and sleaze-filled grins

I should sleep, but I don't dream here.

I've been thinking a lot of things lately.

Mostly that I don't know how to say them anymore.