Upon looking over my self portrait again, the first thing I notice is that it has an affective quality that permeates throughout. In “Touching the Surface” I see lots of humor, stuff that pertains to my academic interests, and a little bit of my personal tastes in general. It’s sort of silly, not very thought provoking, and the affect is playful. When I look at the last page, “Charles,” the affect is much more solemn and thought provoking. It seems that at bottom my personality is more serious than it might seem at the surface. This affective quality can be easily seen I think for anyone else looking at my portrait, as well.
The next thing I notice, upon taking a step back and looking at my work, is that the amount of humorous content speaks to my personality as well. As noted in my Poetics post, after I saw how much comedic content had accumulated I was worried I didn’t have enough deeply-personal content. But thinking about it now I see that the amount of comedy that I acquired at first to define my identity speaks volumes to my identity: I like to laugh just like anyone else, but good comedy is a central tenet of Charles-ism. My life would be much different if I didn’t hold good comedy as such an essential part of life.
Thirdly, I’ve noticed that the more digital content on my portrait tends to be the less personal content, too. That is, it is hard, if not impossible, to adequately express myself through mediated, digital means. The content on my “Charles” page is dominated by thought provoking quotes, which are nearly outside the realm of digital expression. They are merely words, which are more sufficient to express the deeper qualities of my identity.
Lastly, I find it interesting that characters play such an important role in my mediated, digital identity. I put on my pages pictures of Barney and Scooby-doo, from early childhood characters of interest, and pictures of reputable physicists, Francis Reagan from my favorite tv show, and Ron Swanson from my favorite comedy tv show from more modern characters of interest. My life has been mediated, in some sense, by my experience of these characters through multimodal digital information. In some sense, you can learn a lot about a person by asking which characters they feel an affinity toward, whether it be in books, history, or digital entertainment.
Playing off of this, I can see that over the course of my lifetime the qualities of these characters I like have changed. Scooby doo is silly, playful, looking for a good time, and Epicurean. Francis Reagan is a man of high moral character, serious, wise, and Stoic. It is not that I am like these characters at any given time, more so that I like these characters at any given time. I find it very thought provoking to think about which characters, through mediated, digital experience, have had an affect on us throughout our lives.
Charles Golden 