Posterior

The After returning from Reading '93, I wore the wristband for a couple of weeks until one of my friends noticed it and took the piss out of me for wearing a dirty piece of plastic on my wrist. In those days continuing to wear the wristband for a festival after it had finished was even more unusual than going to a festival in the first place. I guess I wore it because I have always been quite sentimental (and never more so than as a teenager) and in those days I didn't have a million Instagram photos to remember the festival by, just a grubby piece of plastic and my actual memories. I also think that in my adolescent brain I hoped it would act as a sort of visual key, as my way in to a secret society; that other people who had been to Reading that year would recognise me as one of them. Of course someone who had been to Reading that year did recognise it, unfortunately their response was "that was weeks ago, that must be really grubby by now. Why are you still wearing it you scummer?" 

Of course the youth of today can generate an almost unlimited amount of web based images with which to document their seemingly ubiquitous festival attendances, so why do so many of them seem to insist on continuing to wear the wristbands long after the music has stopped? I think that it's entirely possible that digital natives are even more sentimental than I was as a teenager, I think it's an inevitable consequence of the way in which they document every event of their lives. Similarly the manner of this documentation and the manner of its recollection - the act of social remembering - is entirely externalised, as if events, thoughts or emotions are not valid unless they are recorded and made publicly available*. It is a version of experience entirely anterior to the subject; it does not require an actual self, simply a complete set of the visual and cultural identifiers of self. It is compelling, as it allows us to simplify human experience by reducing it to a set of recorded data and images rather than attempting to grapple with the complex and inconsistent thing that it actually is. That is why, to some extent we have all come under the thrall of the digital externalisation of our lives. 

I am not saying that when I was a teenager, no one tried to externalise their thoughts, opinions or feelings for the validation or otherwise of their peers; part of teenage identity has always been about displaying the signs and signifiers of the internal process, finding your place in the world by presenting as much of yourself as possible to it in order to gauge its reaction. In many ways, the digital society simply allows us to continue to do this long after an age when our ancestors would have well and truly put away childish things. I can think of no other reason why grown men chug down litres of joyless milkshakes just in order to pump up their muscles: this is not a fitness thing, it is all about how they look. I don't think there's necessarily anything wrong with it, I just think we delude ourselves with a fiction that there is greater substance to so many of our gestures, that we are doing things for any reason other than how they look. 

In the days before I went to festivals I was always baffled by the people I saw on holiday spending seemingly their whole time behind a bloody great video camera. I always thought "why don't you get on with your holiday rather than worrying how it will look on a video you'll probably never watch?" When I went to festivals, no one took a video camera. I think if someone had, it would have felt odd, recording our transgressions. We would have spent the whole time worrying about the camera getting nicked, or what was being filmed (and whether we'd want our parents/the authorities** seeing it) to have all the fun we did have. What happened at a festival, happened at a festival. Over time, through the process of a collective remembering unencumbered by fact, certain events were allowed to take on the legendary status of the narrative elements that weave together to form our teenage identities and friendships. 

On the train back from Newcastle the other week I sat opposite a well built, tanned man possibly about 30, who spent most of the journey watching footage of his drunken antics from the night before. He appeared to be proud of it all. Beyond being drunk I have no idea why he had done any of the things he did. I wonder if he enjoyed them at the time. I suppose that doesn't matter if they subsequently entertain him. Except to me I think it does matter. I am not a religious person, so I believe strongly in making sure I enjoy all my experiences in life as much as possible. Indeed one of the things I find most depressing about religion is the fact that it has the potential to take up so much of the short time available in life that could otherwise be spent actually doing something fun, interesting or useful. Of course it's quite easy to see digital culture as a replacement for religion; a much more effective, much more easily accessible, much more distracting form of opium for the masses. We are offered salvation through documentation and randomly numbered sets of commandments, if we can create icons that others want to worship. We become tied in to it, we adhere to its conventions and a lot of the time we are not sure how it is supposed to make us feel, but we certainly wouldn't ask because then we'd be shown up as lacking faith. 

It's easy to see digital culture as the new religion, but just because it's easy doesn't mean it's right. I am simply making the comparison to point out that we seem compelled towards some form of structure that tells us how we should live, regardless of whether it makes us happy or not. In the same way that protein shakes and plastic surgery do for our bodies, digital culture allows us to fully control our memories and mould them towards our target self-image: once we have collected the full set of life events, we will be perfect. I can't help but feel that we have taken the last thing left that was truly ours - our experience - and commodified it. In doing so we have made it something that others can make us feel bad about. 

*yes I am aware of the irony of blogging this. 

**I think when there was much less surveillance we were much more paranoid about it.