A Million Little Pieces

I know that the wordplay is probably getting old, but I just can't help it. Small Pieces Loosely Joined and A Million Little Pieces seem distinctly interrelated, at least in titles. Also, the typical cover shot on AMLP is of a hand covered in ice-cream sprinkles, and that serves as a striking image of the loose joining of small pieces. But I digress.

In reading the first chapter of SPLJ, a question struck me. It relates quite naturally to both books, so I'll keep heading down that path a little longer. It rotated around the quote, "The very basics of what it means to have a self-identity through time, an "inner" consistency, a core character from which all else springs--are in question on the Web," from chapter 1 of SPLJ.

Now, to me this is a chicken-or-the-egg sort of an issue. I think there is a lot more at work here than the internet revolution (large as it is). The ideas of core character and inner consistency, or even one self-identity through time are all up in the air, and this does not seem to relate solely to the web.

Take, for example, James Frey's book A Million Little Pieces. At the time this book reigned supreme on the bestseller lists, I was working for Barnes & Noble. I was also there to witness the book's fall, Oprah's humiliation, and enraged customers looking for their money back. All of this centered on a book marketed as biography, detailing the amazing pulling-myself-up-by-the- bootstraps story of James Frey's recovery from drug and alcohol addiction. The only problem was that this book was not biography. Frey certainly had been a substance abuser, but many of the "facts" he related were simply not true, or even close to the truth, as the truth came out. (What is truth?)

Frey's was an extremely embellished persona which perhaps developed out of lack of publisher support, out of Frey's black heart, or some unknown. But this persona was probably a lot closer to reality than the personae that many present on the web. But this time people got angry.

One defense Frey attempted was his plea for the "truthiness," of his book, rather than factual details. He was presenting his feelings, trying to capture the moments and emotions rather than the literal narrative of his life. Many accepted this as a valid explanation. Others would say that he had taken the concept too far.

But this brings up greater questions of our societal standards for truth and identity. Post modernism could certainly be a factor, as are the media, globalization, the web, and any other factors of "the now.” All of these deserve much more credit than I can give to them.

As humans in the twenty-first century, how do we reconcile our identities with the world around us? Is the idea of an inner consistency or core character outdated? What does it mean for a person to have one identity in class, another on Facebook, another at work, and yet another at home? Are we living in a technologically inspired state of schizophrenia, or is there an underlying unity to be found? Perhaps, as Aaron suggested, “What […] Web2 allows is that movement from ‘this is what people see me as’ to ‘this is what I've always really been,’” and we are just now beginning to grasp some of that complexity.