On Mortality

Remember that episode of Star Trek when Scottie stores himself in a feedback loop in a transporter so that he can be brought back to life when his stranded ship is found? He is awoken 50 years later by Jean-Luc Picard. The sleeping beauty awakened by the handsome Patrick Stewart. How marvellous! Apparently Patrick is “repeatedly voted the sexiest man on television by American viewers, and has a large gay following”.

Fame is one way for man to achieve immortality, as Francis Bacon noted. I believe he saw it in the negative: the avoidance of death, cheating nature.

Do you know anyone dead with a Facebook account? It’s not uncommon. Epitaphs in cyber space. A note left for the morning remains stuck to the fridge. But this note does not dampen, curl and warp, does not become brittle and crumble into dust.

A woman closed her Facebook account. She couldn’t get her ex-boyfriend out of her mind seeing him all over the site. Out of her account but into her friends’. Into her rival’s. Her life flashed before her as she was forced to delete her friends one by one – each time receiving the demand “Are you really really sure you really want to boot this lovely friend out of your life?” She gave ‘em all the boot, closed her account and received a nice little email. “You have successfully closed your account - but all you need do is log-in with your usual username and password to use it again”. The pusher dangling the narcotic lure. Virtual friendship - a chance at immortality. Write your own epitaph. “I wos ‘ere”.

A Flickr account is like living life backwards. It shows the latest pictures first and your life flashes before you as you scroll through.

As Google Earth builds up successive images, as do Panoramio and Flickr, we will look at a place – it’s virtual image thus mediated – and scrape away layers of time. Virtual archaeology. The world wasn’t always this hot. The sea was south of London. Paris was not a desert.

The past is another world. Images consume reality. Is this nonsense? These could be my last words…

Have you read Roland Barthes’ Mythologies? It was one of the first books to look at the mythological structures at work in popular culture. Those French geezers took the anthropological theory of Levi Strauss’ and applied it to their own culture.

Barthes observed that the mass media puts people into pigeon holes. Once you have a media presence you are quickly classified as an archetype. Jordan the slut, Cheryl Tweedy the victim (have you noticed how often she is “frail”, “tormented” etc?). Once you are classified as an archetype it’s very hard to cross the line to become a different archetype. Once a slut, always a slut.

Psychologist Oliver James observes that this mechanism also works within families. Each child gets characteristics ascribed to it at an early age which soon become defining. “She’s the lazy one of the family”. Even when you’re having a civilised meal with your grown-up siblings they can so easily get under your skin with the tiniest reference to the stereotyping you have suffered within the family. “You’ve never been very good at taking a joke have you?”

So, the way of the press, is the way of the family, is the way of human psychology. We navigate our way through the complexity of personal relations with the crude tool of labelling people.

Famous people now have so-called Google reputation managers. But you and I don’t. So, be careful with your on-line identity. Once you are defined it’s a tricky job to change your label. Although as an Indian proverb has it: a bad reputation is better than no reputation at all.

In the light of all this, it is with some trepidation that I announce my internet acting debut. I play a Danish geeky businessman. I’m really very macho and fit you know…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L5a943p9QmQ&feature=player_embedded#