The widgetized self
Through a lecture recently held at Mediamatic by Anne Helmond I stumbled up-on this fascinating term coined by Nancy Baym. It seems to me that it summarizes quite well several contemporary trends concerning the ways social software is used and conceived as an identity shaping space.
While what we used to call content becomes more and more portable (think to RSS feeds and microformats), easily embeddable in multiple contexts and sortable through different meta-sites and aggregators, individuals increasingly describe themselves by boasting into lists the cultural objects they consume (whether these are books, sound tracks, visited places, corporate brands, etc..).
In Hotlists which - with web2.0 services like 43things - is probably among the most shameless examples of this reductionist and database-biased approach to identity; describing yourself is a matter of piking up a set of items from a pre-established basket of brands. This made me think also to déshabillez-vous !, a net-art piece by Michel Clempoel and Nicolas Malevé which addresses this issue with a humorist and critical approach but uses almost the same operative dynamic of HOSTLIST.
