If you talked to yourself and no one was listening, would you keep talking?
On writing as a form of self-location (and very little else)
(Digital) fractures
Sometimes I google myself and the search returns nothing. I don’t mean nothing new; I mean absolutely nothing. I guess it’s some kind of glitch, something to do with my browser cookies, or the search settings, or whatever. The other option is that I don’t exist. This is perfectly feasible too.
“Why do you google yourself, weirdo?” you could very well ask, and you’d be justified. It happens that writers google themselves every now and then, especially those weeks and months and years and decades that follow a new book. We want to know what others are saying about our work, confirm how great or how rubbish we are. Still, I don’t think it’s only writers who do this now: I’m pretty certain that if Luigi Pirandello’s Uno, nessuno e centomila took place today, the main character’s identity crisis wouldn’t be sparked by a casual comment about his nose and a mirror, but by Google or a social media platform serving him an unsatisfactory version of himself. We are all digital Moscardas now.1
