Narcissism

In the Manovich reading, I thought the comment of video/computers as narcissistic to be very interesting.

Now days it seems like everything is made to be personalized in some aspect or another: color, shape, size, sound. We buy ringtones, we get the pink RAZR, we put up picture wallpaper, we get those stupid jinglejangles and skins...and that's just for our cell phones! Computers are almost worse.

Let's take for instance, my computer, a.k.a. POOTER and s.k.a. OKCOMPUTER. The fact that I have such names is the first hint of its narcissistic power; of its ability to reflect an image of me within its content. On my background is a picture of my horse, Frank. Almost everyone has some sort of personalized wallpaper for their computer and almost always it is a picture of themselves. Sometimes it is an image from Digital Blasphemy, which are usually pretty neat. But I digress.

Then we have sound schemes. What do you hear when you enlarge something? Close something? "Recycle" something? What is the startup music? What is the closing music? Before Pooter's chips n' bits exploded like an enema of matrices and algorithms, my startup music was Coldplay's "Clocks."" My shutdown music was a song from "Pirates of the Caribbean", and my "error" sound was a section from the "Empire Death March." Why am i such a huge nerd? I don't know.

Color schemes. What colors are your bars? What size is your mouse? WHAT IS YOUR SCREENSAVER?! There are literally thousands of ways for every individual to customize her computer. 99% of the time we customize our computers to fit OURSELVES. We want to see ourselves in our computers. We want our computer to mimic...even predict...our actions. We want a friend. We want A CLONE.

Anyhow, Rosalind Krauss' theory is a lot more complicated than that, but I guess I've illustrated a thought. oh my god this gummybear is attached by its ear to another gummybear's foot, or actually more like some extra appendage that's been added to the feet of the gummybear. gross.