Becoming ‘The IT Girl’: Google Identity, Celebrity Culture and Contemporary Subjectivity

The IT Girl (ITG) is a play, devised by Central Coast theatre company DevisingTheatre, exploring the interrelated concepts of Google identity and celebrity. Here, I shall consider Google identity and celebrity as contemporary mechanisms of subjection. Examining ITG in relation to other theatrical works presenting media technologies as formative of our subjectivity, I shall draw on Haraway’s (1991) ‘cyborg’ theory to critique Watt’s (1998) analysis of media as ‘viral’ in these works. Unlike popular rhetoricising of IT as ‘infectious’ or dangerous, ITG positions the Internet as banal in both our contemporary lives and conceptions of selfhood. I argue that though the Internet contributes to thinking of the postmodern subject as interconnected, it is simultaneously adept at producing and reproducing the ‘individual’. This is illustrated by Google identity which, like Foucault’s (1977) ‘case’, discursively produces a subject for surveillance. Google identity is likened to ‘celebrity’, another discursive construct developed in virtual spaces. Both Google identity and celebrity represent a desirable formation of self: in ITG, both are equated with cultural significance. This significance relates to increased visibility and, in turn, the success of the Panoptic mechanism, illustrating the continued production of the subject within discreet power operations.