screens
(screen selves, cyberspace)
Where does the self end when so much of our identities is built online? Theorists in the film studies sphere such as Christian Metz and Laura Mulvey have asked how/why/if we see ourselves "on" screen, thinking through film images through the lenses of representation and identification. In the darkness of the theater, each viewer feels they are alone (there is no one to see them, which in this context is freeing). In this space, the screen is like a mirror. The viewer looks deeply into it and falls in, helped along with all the tricks in the director's bag (point of view shots, shot movement guided by the gaze and motivation of the protagonist, etc.). This isn't how I feel when I create a new profile in a digital space and see/create myself.
The digital screen might be more like a mirror where you can create your reflection, or multiple reflections for different contexts, alongside other viewers who are both alone/unseen in their private physical spaces and together/visible in their digital communities. This relationship requires both the suspension of disbelief needed for identification in film and active participation in the creation of online identity. When the prompt to enter my name on a new platform pops up, I'm more tempted by the old logic of forums and personal blogs to try something new and create a persona than to provide my full legal name, motivated both by dated stranger danger messaging and a sense of play.
Harris Kornstein emphasizes this potential in digital space to be "both noisy and shiny," or to deter surveillance through contextually dependent, always changing, non-heteronormative community structures and presentation of identity in the drag community. Facebook, the site Kornstein focuses on, is especially hostile to this kind of identity, as it asks for users' legal name, gender, date of birth, and even some kind of real world verification of identity to create an account. With the move toward age verification laws for the internet, as in countries like Australia, face scans and age checks on previously more anonymous platforms like Discord are increasingly portrayed as more protective than anonymity.
However, screen selves in video games, niche sites, or separate social media accounts have long been refuges for safe experimentation with identity away from one's real world connections. Video games, blogs, and forums could provide greater separation between a person and their immediate in-person community, if even just through a generational gap in tech literacy. In Andre Cavalcante's ethnographic study on trans users' interactions with the "counterpublics" and "care structures" of the internet, a user named Jen describes choosing female characters in video games away from the gaze of her father, and finding community and transition resources through blogs. By creating a profile on MySpace that first used another girl's photo, she was able to eventually recreate and move beyond that "fake" photo, creating that self virtually and outside of the digital space.
Shaka McGlotten writes of experiences like Jen's with virtual social groups, particularly MMOs, that "intimacy is always already virtual, tied to fantasy and longing, but also enabled through forms of presence that can be intensified by distance as much as by proximity."
edit 4/22/26: discussing this in class helped me realize that an essential part of this "counterpublic" as a medium is the sharing of knowledge (code snippets, custom or salvaged graphics, troubleshooting tips) that helps build the microblogging infrastructure itself, outside of the limits of algorithm-focused platforms like instagram. unlike the invisible labor that structures instagram or facebook, users choose to co-create their own decentralized community. if algorithmic platforms w/o customization features are more like the mirrors of the film model (projecting onto a set identity), then blogs like this one that encourage sharing and bringing into being suggest a more participatory, mutable model of life in the screen. thank you!!
Works cited
Cavalcante, Andre. "'I Did it All Online:' Transgender identity and the management of everyday life." Critical Studies in Media Communication, 33:1, 2016, pp. 109-122.
Kornstein, Harris. "Under Her Eye: Digital Drag as Obfuscation and Countersurveillance." Surveillance and Society, 17:5, 2019, pp. 681-698.
McGlotten, Shaka. Virtual intimacies: media, affect, and queer sociality. State University of New York Press, 2013.
Mulvey, Laura. "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," Screen, Volume 16, Issue 3, 1975.