The Great Reveal or Whither the Shadow?

Relationships are about revelation. We build relationship by what we reveal to one another. In the case of intimate friends, and partners this can be what has been revealed over years. It can also be the forced intimacy of strangers caught in unusual situations where their true character is revealed by their circumstances. Now, granted, relationships are about a whole lot more than just telling our secrets to one another; and the revelation that goes on to form relationship is not always a conscious act; it is the day by day way in which our characters reveal themselves to those around us through our words and actions.  It is the slow unpeeling of the onion of our persona to find the person within.

I believe that at the core every person is good, but I also believe that we also all have a shadow or dark side, and while it is easy to reveal one's better side, (everyone likes a good person) the shadow is usually something that reveals itself in spite of ourselves. It is our shadow that makes us human.

Someone once said to me, and they may have been quoting Jung, but real relationship is formed in the shadow. It is in our darkest hours that our characters are revealed and in those times that our relationships are forged stronger or fall apart. It's a bit like that silly show the Bachelor and the Bachelorette; I mean how easy would it be to fall in love when you are provided a bevy of beautiful people of the opposite sex, in a tropical paradise, who seem to have all the money in world to wine and dine you and play the sentimental romantic, but as we have seen the minute the dead weight of ordinary existence falls upon them and they are removed from their paradise their relationships don't last. How easy is it to fall in love, how much more difficult it is to stay there. If your relationship can withstand the petty squabbles of the everyday and the more serious disagreements as well as the more serious character flaws of your partner, then you at least might say you are on the way to real relationship. (n.b. While my example speaks to romantic partners, it holds true of any and all of our relationships/friendships/acquaintanceship)

So all of this brings me around to revelation in the technological world and my alternate title for today's post, Whither the shadow? Mass media has deified image and the Internet has both allowed us to create alternate personas and to carefully craft the image that the world sees about it. It is a dangerous mix, for we have all become spin doctors of our own image. Image; however, is not reality.

If we look at the example of Tiger Woods, who crafted a image of himself as, quite frankly just about the most perfect man to ever live, aside from Jesus Christ; the moment it was revealed that he was in fact human after all, that he indeed had a shadow, he was finished, even Gillette has now dropped him from their ads, as if a man with a shadow can't sell razor blades, or be the world's best golfer (note to self, switch to Wilkinson Sword or a straight razor). If I was Tiger I would feel an immense amount of relief at my fall, for now he can start being a real man, instead of a caricature of one.

I wish I could say that this obsession with image is reserved for celebrities, but the evidence seems quite contrary, reality TV is but one example of this societal obsession with image. Not to say that image control is a totally modern phenomena, we don't call it narcissism for nothing, only to say that technology has amplified the effects and changed the dynamic.

It is one thing to point to mass media as a basis for an image based culture, and then to say, not I; but if you are reading this blog you probably got here via Facebook, and what is Facebook but a self-narrated tale of our own lives as we see them. A carefully controlled outward facing view of ourselves to the world. I have yet to see an example of someone posting something on their Facebook that they really don't like about themselves. Sure people make self-deprecating remarks, and may reveal unfortunate, even truly sad things, that have happened to them, but Facebook does not the shadow out.

Another example is online dating. There are some great stats on how many people lie on their Internet dating profile. People are online creating images of themselves that don't reflect who they are, even more importantly though from my own Internet dating experience (I've long since given up) it's not just the lies that bother me it's the would be truths. I mean if the number of women who claimed poetry as an interest was true, every poet in the world would be on the best seller list. Now maybe I'm wrong and they are all checking out volumes of Keats or Browning from the library but something tells me that most of these women like the idea of poetry more than they really genuinely like poetry. And therein lies my point, the Internet world allows us to create an idea of ourselves and publish it to the world, that idea may be more or less true.

None of this is meant to trash Facebook or the Internet or even online dating, it is only to say that technology has made it easier to hide from our shadows, and unless we are willing to confront them in other parts of our lives it can be a dangerous path to be on. I also don't think that is possible to be moral without knowing our shadow, to the extent that we allow technology to prevent that we are hindering our own moral development.

So now the great reveal of my title, which is where I reveal my hopes for this blog and the struggles I've had with taking on this task. I am determined that this blog not end up neurotic as so many blogs do, but a certain amount of revelation seems required if I am to continue to blog away with integrity and true to the purpose I have set up.  When I started this blog I was unsure whether I would tell anybody I was writing a blog, I thought I would wait until I had several hundred, maybe even a thousand, anonymous or unknown, followers, then I would thrust it upon my friends and family and say, "see I do have something important to say" and then with a solid repertoire behind me I would continue to write assured of the nobility of my purpose and of the fact that I actually had something to say.

In reflection though on my purpose I realized that I was playing the same game that I am criticizing in this post, failing to reveal my shadow to anyone. Hiding out in the anonymity of the internet until I have achieved the image that I have crafted for myself and until the ideas that I want to write about are complete. For some of my ideas will come from the shadow, and some of them will seem odd now, and some of them odder, in the future, I can not say that these ideas are complete or even worthy of discussion for anyone but me and so I have posted my blog on Facebook, told my friends and opened up my world whatever I might find there.

Perhaps not such a great reveal, but if you think about it maybe it's bigger than it seems.

Next post: What do we mean by technology, followed by the value of experience.