It might be the postmodern elements of the internet that have destroyed my concentration, producing in my online activity a simulacra of intentional evasion of essentialist identity, which of course is more complicated and flattering than the image of some scatterbrained nerd whose tab key has fallen off her keyboard.
A truly brainy academic friend wrote a journal article about me four years back, supporting the opposite contention: that my scattered media personae – the lit stuff, the political stuff, the agitprop blog, the personal blog, the social profiles, all in various stages of being abandoned for the next – were intended as some kind of postmodern hybridity exercise. (Rather than, say, the result of an inability to concentrate or be organised. I think that’s what he said; I’m currently lacking the concentration to read the article again.)
In making this argument, he totally outed my secret blog, which I then abandoned.
Since then, I’ve scattered another good handful of blog carcasses to the vulturebots to pick over, with ever-decreasing content. An empty Posterous (for posterity). I think I posted about three pictures to a Tumblr. Pretty sure I registered a blog called ‘People of Colour for the BNP’ aimed at pleading with the BNP to amend its constitution to allow non-whites because our family members are driving us crazy and we want to lobby for them to be given one-way plane tickets to the mother country. I promptly forgot the password, URL, and the blogging platform.
In Deleuzian terms, I used to think I was a just trickster, but then for a moment it seemed I was a traitor all along (hooray!), but ultimately it really turned out that I was just lazy.
All these terrible thoughts came flooding back to me because a few days ago, I met for the first time IRL my very very first ever random online internet friend from TEN YEARS AGO. From those innocent days of LiveJournal where you totally became buddies with random people (How else could you ever meet anyone who also liked Godard and who writes LOTR fanfic? No-one has ever watched a Godard film or written LOTR fanfic!)
We hung out on South Bank and had a great time, and I had this terrible vision of all these lives, sloughed off like dirty, transparent snakeskins, end to end forming some shameful trail back to that childhood place where you could never verify any facts or stalk anyone.
She was here to do a Sociology Masters at Goldsmiths and had been asked to write a blog as part of her scholarship requirements. A little nervous, she asked my advice. “Don’t worry about it,” I said. “It’s easy.”