jrblackwell:

The Gift

I am about to give you an idea of great power. Please, use it wisely.

With so much of our lives being documented online, with blog posts from those who know us referencing us, facebook, tweets photos and photomanipulation, the truth is that it is difficult to know how to sort out what really happened with  documentation of the online record. I say to take charge of the situation. Craft your own story.

This is where the idea of “Canon” comes into play. The idea of “canon” is shipped in from comics and movies and tv shows, when it comes to represent what “actually” happened during the story, and what was a flight of fancy that is not acknowledged  as a part of the “official” story.

You can apply the concept of “canon” to your own life. If there is a rumor about you that isn’t true, simply dismiss it as non-canon. You can also declare certain events to be non-canon if you’d like them to be dismissed from the general record. The following is a list of examples of how you could dismiss an event as non-cannon:

• Perhaps you had a particularly embarrassing moment where you hooked up with someone and both of you find the experience to be distasteful. Simply declare that episode to be “non-cannon” and dismiss it. 
• The job where you worked as a clown for a summer posted on YouTube? Well, obviously that’s an Elseworlds, produced by a particularly exuberant, though entirely batshit, writer!
• Applying for a job teaching pre-school and your employer sees a photo of you doing lines off a professional pornographers taut stomach? Declare it to be fanfic!

The same applies to creating “Canon” events in your life. To affirm an unbelievable fact about yourself simply declare it to be canon by producing evidence of the fact. (See “Pics or it didn’t happen)  If there is something you would have liked to have happened, but it did not, you can create a “canon” record.  Though some may say that you can simply declare something as canon, I suggest that you should go to the effort of creating a canon record for reference in the form of a photo or posts that back up your assertion.

Use this wisely, oh Internets.

Back in high school, I played a lot of Ultimate Frisbee. There was a day where everyone played horribly, as if we’d never tried to catch a disc of spinning plastic before in our lives. We collectively declared it was the Day That Didn’t Happen. I wish I’d had this language to apply to it then.

More broadly, there’s the collective editing of history we all do, the curation of the image of ourselves and the accompanying forgetting. You’re already doing this: bad picture tagged of you on facebook? It never happened. That night you got too drunk and someone has pictures? They’ve got nothing to do with you. That shit job you had for 6 weeks? It’s not on your resume. The three years you lived in Ohio? The estranged uncle no one mentions? Unspoken. That which we cannot speak about must be passed over in silence: cannot, will not, do not. You work to make yourself into your own image: You do not want to be thought of as a person who does that, so, you never appear to have done it. Lesson learned, evidence eviscerated. Your personal history is as a palimpsest and playfully making these revisions explicit acknowledges this construction and in doing so, highlights the great processes of becoming that is our lives and gives it the texture of a handmade thing.