Today I read an article in WIRED about ghost tweeters (people who professionally tweet for celebrity accounts.) The article talked about how most celebrity online personalities are actually just publicists and their interns, creating a type of uncanny valley, where our virtual selves seem to be real but are not.
The Uncanny Valley was first coined by a man named Masahiro Mori in 1970 but just recently reentered the public consciousness. Those who know me know I am obsessed with the idea of the uncanny ever since reading Sigmund Freud’s Uncanny, derived from E.T.A Hoffmann’s The Sandman. I have long thought technology possessed the same eerie, deathlike characteristics of the uncanny, but I just never had the words to describe it... until now. Basically the idea is that the more we try to stimulate human brains, the less we are going to use our own and the more skeptical and weirded out we are going to feel.
The perfect example of this is the ghost tweeter. Annie Colbert, professional celebrity tweeter, told her story to Wired about what it is like to make a living from mimicking celebrities’ voices and behaviors so she can become their virtual selves. It is definitely an uncanny situation. Colbert embodies her clients so she can impersonate them via social media and pass as a genuine voice. This is unique to the age of technology. Never before could a person have so many different selves: the most distinct being in-person and online. The online self – crafted, copied and mass-produced – is incredibly uncanny. It is like the real self, but strangely different. Our virtual reality provides a place that is familiar but uncharted and peculiar, simply because no one knows if the person behind the virtual self is the real person. Tensions arrive when technology starts to take over our independence. We embrace it up to a certain point until nature red flags it for us and we see the familiar human-like object become human. Somewhere – deep down – we know it is… uncanny.
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