And when Horning says “And so we vacillate between anxious self-branding and the self-negating practice of seeking some higher authenticity: we have to watch ourselves become ourselves in order to be ourselves, over and over again” what he is talking about here is the “anxiety trap” that’s been discussed on Partial Objects since the blog started. Only here, rather than the producer setting the axiety trap through conventional advertising, they set up institutional structure in which we lay the trap for ourselves and each other. What is Facebook but a series of idealized representations of ourselves self-selected to make us appear more authentically happy than we are in real life? But Facebook pits our idealized representations against those idealized representations of others.
via Facebook, Forever 21, and the Hidden Hypocrisies of Capitalism | Partial Objects.
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