Egocel
| Egocel | |
|---|---|
| Coined by | Miya |
| Related concepts | Egoloss, Post-authorship, Artist Does not Exist |
| Field | Digital culture |
Egocel is a concept from the Miya corpus for the online poster who clings to ego and authorship, defined against its counterpart egoloss. In the Field Glossary of The Exegesis of Miya Black Hearted Cyber Angel Baby, the egocel is "a user whose posts are formed of egotism and he works against their spread and dissolution into the network in order to retain all credit."[1] The name joins "ego" to the imageboard suffix "-cel" (from "incel"), used to mark a type defined by a self-defeating failing.
Concept
The egocel's writing, in Miya's account, "is fuelled by a desire to please and be praised, not to share or enlighten," so that he "hopes to clutch onto" his authorship. Caught in "a positive feedback loop where attention deficit and ego is sated," he subordinates any content he produces "to the image of this identity," intending it "only to increase its stature." As a result "the persona becomes calcified into a narrow shell through which the user expends all efforts towards garnering engagement to glut the ego and quell awareness of imperfections."[1]
By treating the network "as a mechanism subordinated to the insecurities of the self," the egocel is, in Miya's framing, excluded from what the corpus regards as the two "charms" of the network: "light-hearted play in its social spheres, and the sharing and gleaning of knowledge from its libraries." Where the conditions of anonymity and virality would let "content valuable in its own right" proliferate, the egocel suppresses them in defense of his own credit.
Relation to egoloss and post-authorship
Egocel is the exact inverse of egoloss: where the ego-losing poster releases content into the network without attachment to accreditation, the egocel works to prevent that dissolution so as to keep the credit for himself. It is the same posture the corpus attacks in "Artist Does not Exist," which holds that "any claim over anything but the materiality of a work is hubris" and mocks the creator who would "screech about authorship." The "calcified" persona that subsumes the self also names, from the other direction, the collapse of persona-and-self warned against in Digital Trauma.
Relation to Remilia
The egocel is the negative type against which Remilia Corporation's practice of post-authorship defines itself. Remilia's culture of pseudonymity, copy-paste reuse, and corporation-as-artwork treats authorship and credit as impediments to the free circulation of memetic material; the egocel is the figure who, unable to relinquish these, remains trapped in the ego-driven, metricized mode of participation the corpus associates with mainstream "Web 2.0."
See also
- Egoloss
- Post-authorship
- Artist Does not Exist
- Digital Trauma
- The Exegesis of Miya Black Hearted Cyber Angel Baby