Glee and the Culture of Building Representational Online Identities

I'm not sure if I made any sense with all of this. I just had an idea this morning on the way to work and decided to run with it. So this post is a bit of a departure form my normal writings, but something useful may come out of it. 

I was purchasing some music through iTunes today--thanks to my loving sister for the birthday gift--and excited to download some of Glee's more recent songs when something interesting hit me. Glee is a TV show that uses pop music to help tell the stories of the characters. Sometimes the songs fit the characters and their storylines perfectly; sometimes they don't fit so well. The writers use popular songs to help define their characters; that is, these songs are acting as shortcuts to building identities. The songs the characters choose to sing are representations of how they perceive themselves: their identities are tied up in popular culture, which is something I see happening every single day through social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace (maybe not this one as much anymore), Twitter, and all the others out there.

Let me explain further. Last week's episode consisted of nothing but Whitney Houston songs, a tribute to the late singer's memory. The kids were directed to choose a Houston song that matched their current emotional states. The show opened with a mournful--and quite beautiful, I might add--version of the hit song, "How Will I Know." Usually a more upbeat song, the song is a lyrical questioning of love, whether the singer's companion actually has "true love" for the singer. Sung as an elegy to Houston, the writers of Glee, used the song not as it's lyrics suggest, but in a way that represents the characters' questioning of what their lives will be like after school, after loss. While the songs lyrics don't fit with the story arc, the emotional representation is close enough for the characters. In other words, by changing the style of the song, the writers have altered the song's meaning to fit the current emotional identities of the characters.

I'm not entirely sure if that came off as clearly as I'd like. Hopefully, if it's not all that clear now, it will be.

Today, with so many on social networks, blasting their personal preferences--their favorite films, their favorite music, their chosen political/religious/spiritual positions--all over the Internet, people use a kind of shorthand to establish their online identities. Of course, I believe this is something people have been doing long before the Internet and social networks, but the very nature and speed of the Internet has transformed this kind of representational identity into an explosion of tastes and counter-tastes. Many users don't care to explain their tastes with anything more detailed than a reference, a quote, a picture, or even a song. The idea is that others with similar tastes will simply "get it," while those who do not "get it" will simply skip over the information. Such shortcuts are supposed to identify the user; that is, the chosen piece of popular culture are keys to understanding the poster's chosen identity.

As a personal example, I frequently post news articles, videos, and pictures that identify my own feelings on homosexuality and gay rights. Obviously, as a gay man, I hope for a more inclusive society one day, no matter what a person's sexual orientation is--whether real, imagined, or fluid. Now, I have no problem fully explaining my positions and the reasoning behind them. I am a writer after all and teach my students to go further in their arguments than a simple "I agree" or "I disagree." However, many people do not, or they go about establishing their beliefs in the wrong way. I've read, and sometimes participated in online arguments that don't illuminate but infuriate. Argumentation is supposed to help people reach an understanding of some kind. Unfortunately, online arguments turn into vicious cycles of claim, evidence (if any is used), counter-claim, restatement of position, more evidence (or the same evidence, just in case the person didn't understand the first time), clarification of position.... and on and on and on in a seemingly never-ending battle for who's right and who's wrong. Usually, I stop reading and avoid posting to any form of argument that turns into this. Participating is nonproductive and frequently headache-inducing.

The Internet has created a culture of representational online identities, where the latest meme is used as representational markers of public identities. Basically, the Internet is a "I see only what I want to see" universe where new information, or anything a user may not like, can be easily discarded or overlooked.

Now, how does this relate to Glee, a show I love? The show is a fictional representation of the type of reality we live in now. So much of our lives are lived online that it's becoming increasingly harder to separate our online identities from our real life. Glee may get a lot of criticism by being over-the-top in its musical numbers, but how different is that from how we represent ourselves online? If I post a video of Gotye's "Somebody I Used to Know" to represent my mood after a break-up (I'm not broken up by the way) and my friends are able to see the video as a representation of my current emotional state, how is that so different from the mimicry fantasy of Glee, where the characters frequently place themselves in reproductions of popular music videos? The point is, it's not that different. Glee, therefore, is a representation of how people chose to represent themselves in online environments.

On another front, Glee can also be seen as symbol for a culture that has run out of new ideas. I have been finding it increasingly difficult to talk about my own book because when I do it sounds so generic, so "been there done that." I guess I'm feeling what Harold Bloom once wrote about: the anxiety of influence. How can we create anything new when someone else has probably already beaten us to the idea? Every piece of new literature then becomes a collection of references and allusions to other works. The only way to come up with anything new in this kind of environment seems to mean using such a large amalgamation of references and allusions that the material then takes on a life of its own, outside of and away from the source material. In other words, something like Glee, or even better, something like a Tarantino film.

So, it seems Tarantino was more ahead of his time than I'd previously thought. I'll have to ponder on that a while... Maybe a post on Tarantino is not as elusive as I thought.

Anyway, if you've made it this far, thanks! This post is kind of a mind dump for me, hopefully so I can later expand this into a more scholarly article one day. At least, I hope. :)