[MEDIUM] PHOTOSHOP
[YEAR] 2023
A few months ago, a friend of mine came to me for relationship advice. She was having issues with her boyfriend who hadn’t defended her in an argument she got into with his best friends. To summarize, the argument had been about how she didn’t deserve her internship position at a prestigious consulting firm they had all applied to just because she was a woman, as she had been accepted through a women’s leadership program while they were rejected from a regular pool of applicants. The argument itself, to her, wasn’t her main concern; to her, it was more the fact that he didn’t bother to come to her defense. However, this interaction alarmed me. These men were some of his closest friends, those he had chosen to live with in a house together and therefore was spending a good amount of time with. How can she separate him from his friends and expect him to not hold the same beliefs?
This episode made me think about the people I, myself, had managed to surround myself with and the lasting impact they had made on my identity—how much they had shaped me into the person I am today. A friendship, the way I perceive it to be, is an echo chamber, in which our pre-existing beliefs are reinforced and amplified through external feedback in an internal environment. The term is usually reserved for conversations on media studies, but in the same way that I am not subscribed to right-wing information sources, I do not accept those who do not share the same core values that I hold into my inner circle. My friendships are a reflection of myself; they are my identity.
This project, and how I define myself, defies the trappings of neoliberalism that is the “self-enclosed individualism” described by Julie Wilson (2018). Wilson uses feminist theorist AnaLouise Keating’s definition: “Self-enclosed individualism is a form of ‘hyper-individualism’ that tends to ‘focus exclusively on the human and define this human self very narrowly, in non-relational, boundaried, terms’” (p. 3). Keating’s emphasis on the “hard and fast-dividing lines between self/other and self/world” contradicts my definition of my own identity; I feel deprived of my sense of self without my friendships. In the making of this project, my friends enthusiastically cooperated even after a long day of classes and other responsibilities, curiously asking for more details on what this project was for, and for this I will be eternally grateful. Having surrounded myself with such supportive people who want to see me succeed in a creative field is what is propelling me further academically, and moreover, career-wise. As Wilson writes, “We need each other. We need social cooperation and a commitment to a common, collective good if we are all going to make it in this world … We want lives defined by mutuality, care, dignity, and security, not anxiety and competition” (p. 5).
For this project, I selected 12 of some of my closest friends and took a photo of them in polaroid-form to capture their candidness; although each of them were instructed to pose, we can see their good humor through the screen. ASCII art and the prompt, “Who are you and how do you know?” in pixelated font is layered over these photos to represent the space we live in in this digital age—one that has caused many of us to feel a fractured sense of identity. Yet, the images below are clear; despite living in a neoliberalist, social-media dominated world, I maintain a clear sense of who I am and they are how I know it.
Perhaps this mirrors the increasingly self-controlled mode of media consumption described by Chris Anderson’s quote by Rupert Murdoch: “young people don’t want to rely on a God-like figure from above to tell them what’s important. They want control over their media, instead of being controlled by it” (Gere, 2008, p. 214). The great thing about friendships is that it is entirely up to yourself to choose who you want to be influenced and shaped by.
Works Cited
Gere, Charlie. (2008). Digital Culture. Reaktion Books.
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1kuDlPuylSnCjA3vfRYT1ei0ZdBefechP.
Wilson, Julie. (2017). Neoliberalism. Routledge.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/10eFu-YakLXKOEMOypfmdAU-_v93SkH8_/view
Thank you to my friends Makayla Oas, Lola Arroyo, Sean Jin, Michele Lu, Emma Dexter, Owen Hunt, Rachel Schreiber, Sam Fredericks, Nick Forman, Odelia Wu, Hazel Sepenuk, and Angelica Eun for participating in this project.
This episode made me think about the people I, myself, had managed to surround myself with and the lasting impact they had made on my identity—how much they had shaped me into the person I am today. A friendship, the way I perceive it to be, is an echo chamber, in which our pre-existing beliefs are reinforced and amplified through external feedback in an internal environment. The term is usually reserved for conversations on media studies, but in the same way that I am not subscribed to right-wing information sources, I do not accept those who do not share the same core values that I hold into my inner circle. My friendships are a reflection of myself; they are my identity.
This project, and how I define myself, defies the trappings of neoliberalism that is the “self-enclosed individualism” described by Julie Wilson (2018). Wilson uses feminist theorist AnaLouise Keating’s definition: “Self-enclosed individualism is a form of ‘hyper-individualism’ that tends to ‘focus exclusively on the human and define this human self very narrowly, in non-relational, boundaried, terms’” (p. 3). Keating’s emphasis on the “hard and fast-dividing lines between self/other and self/world” contradicts my definition of my own identity; I feel deprived of my sense of self without my friendships. In the making of this project, my friends enthusiastically cooperated even after a long day of classes and other responsibilities, curiously asking for more details on what this project was for, and for this I will be eternally grateful. Having surrounded myself with such supportive people who want to see me succeed in a creative field is what is propelling me further academically, and moreover, career-wise. As Wilson writes, “We need each other. We need social cooperation and a commitment to a common, collective good if we are all going to make it in this world … We want lives defined by mutuality, care, dignity, and security, not anxiety and competition” (p. 5).
For this project, I selected 12 of some of my closest friends and took a photo of them in polaroid-form to capture their candidness; although each of them were instructed to pose, we can see their good humor through the screen. ASCII art and the prompt, “Who are you and how do you know?” in pixelated font is layered over these photos to represent the space we live in in this digital age—one that has caused many of us to feel a fractured sense of identity. Yet, the images below are clear; despite living in a neoliberalist, social-media dominated world, I maintain a clear sense of who I am and they are how I know it.
Perhaps this mirrors the increasingly self-controlled mode of media consumption described by Chris Anderson’s quote by Rupert Murdoch: “young people don’t want to rely on a God-like figure from above to tell them what’s important. They want control over their media, instead of being controlled by it” (Gere, 2008, p. 214). The great thing about friendships is that it is entirely up to yourself to choose who you want to be influenced and shaped by.
Works Cited
Gere, Charlie. (2008). Digital Culture. Reaktion Books.
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1kuDlPuylSnCjA3vfRYT1ei0ZdBefechP.
Wilson, Julie. (2017). Neoliberalism. Routledge.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/10eFu-YakLXKOEMOypfmdAU-_v93SkH8_/view
Thank you to my friends Makayla Oas, Lola Arroyo, Sean Jin, Michele Lu, Emma Dexter, Owen Hunt, Rachel Schreiber, Sam Fredericks, Nick Forman, Odelia Wu, Hazel Sepenuk, and Angelica Eun for participating in this project.