Interview With Matt/You: Question One

May 15, 2007

What follows is an invitation to Matt to respond to a question about MySpace.

Tony: Matt, we both have MySpace accounts, and Myspace, as you know, continues to get attention from ‘concerned parents/ citizens’ due to the fact that under-aged teens can post revealing pics and due to the fact that there are, as reported while I was in Hartford, thousands of sex offenders who have MySpace accounts. I am wondering why sites like MySpace are so popular (popular enough to attract national attention and raise social concerns)…or, for that matter, why do people (including us) need or desire space on the web?

Matt: I think what I find most interesting about Myspace is the way in which it gives us avenues to construct public identities. These identities, in my experience, often bear little resemblance to what I would call an “authentic self.” I never feel as though I have adequately represented myself upon completing my latest edit, or adding the latest set of photos. This can be variously exciting and frustrating–we can revel in constructing new identities or throw our hands up in the air annoyed by our failure to capture/communicate who “we really are.” I definitely fall more into the frustrated category.

Lazy postmodernists like yourself (:) get out of this conundrum by insisting that the whole process just sort of dramatizes what we do everyday: try on various identities, masks, etc. and sort of play our way through life. I would argue that the whole process of constructing identities is fueled by an intense desire which borders on obsession: to construct an authentic identity, to come to know what is authentic or nascent within ourselves. Especially with gay men, I think there is often a bifurcation which burns to the core between what is desired and what is realized, per identity construction. Shall I wear those glasses? Those clothes? Have that body? What if I had that boyfriend? Or that job? If I possessed these amenities, would I come to recognize something which I could call “authentic?”

I recently read an article about a gay psychologist who writes and teaches in the area of alternate sexualities at San Francisco State University. He explains that he is attracted to the “aggressive … almost a stereotyped male who’s not too well-educated, or educated at all for that matter. Totally incapable of any introspection. Almost an opposite person from how I see myself.” I find myself frequently trying to create an identity that often resembles the very objects of my desire. The process is fueled not by some wish to represent or render public my identity in order to find like-minded matches. Rather, it is to incarnate a desired identity–an identity, that by its very nature, I have yet to realize. What I try to publicize are my dreams, my nascent yearnings, some desired possibility, or frustrated hope. It is the desire to act when one has never acted before or to become the beefy jock when one has always been the bookish nerd.

The paradox then is the juxtaposition between the desire to create something authentic which others will presumably gravitate toward and the converse intention of wrapping one’s arms around unrealized desires. How frequently do we seek validation via some representation which upon further inspection bears little resemblance to those tendencies/interests/values which persist within ourselves? Do we find the mysterious boy with the thorn in his side trying to become the beefy high school jock? There is something playful in all of this–something which is potentially “fun”—but my sense is that the whole process of Myspace actually exacerbates my underlying sense that I cannot find who I truly am. In the end, I think we are always stranger to ourselves than to anyone else.

Posted by Tony Posted in Interviews, Posts by Tony