Sorry, Mike. I’m carrying on a conversation here that has nothing to do with your post.

The thing is, you’re setting up the public as opposed to the private, as if there are two separate jars that make up “Joanna Howard,” and you put some things in the jar marked “Private” and nobody ever sees those parts of you and you put some things in the jar marked “Public” and those are the parts of you that you’re willing to share with people. I’m not sure I entirely agree with that construction. But it’s kind of beside the point: what de Zengotita is saying (and what Rosen isn’t saying) is that the formation of “Joanna Howard” is becoming an increasingly public process as a result of the ways in which our contemporary media work. Even if we don’t advertise to others the fact that we like jazz (although we often do), we aren’t just liking jazz, we’re becoming People Who Like Jazz and so aligning ourselves with Other People Who Like Jazz, publically or privately — and with contemporary media, there are enough People Who Publicly Like Jazz to make that alignment possible, and so a preference or a taste or even an isolated act of consumption becomes associative and social.

In such a circumstance, I think asking “Who’s in control?” is also beside the point, because control is decentralized and delocalized (or, perhaps more appropriately, individuated, and therefore supremely splintered into infinite localizations): to borrow Foucault’s language, control of the formation of identities, cultures, and classes functions on the capillary level.

But asking “what about the silences?” is important. Some suggest that there are parallels between Foucault’s capillary function and the perhaps over-glorified term “networks.” I might respond that there are dark spaces in networks; gaps, lacunae, isolates, blockages, oases. Silences.

I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on how those spaces might function in relation to the network of identity formation.