Private Lives, Public Spaces- A Forever Question About Identity

Private Lives, Public Spaces- A Forever Question About Identity

     There are countless times people encounter the issue about self-identity during their growth, and usually they would not even notice them. It is because of the existence of society which shaped our identities. Recalling the memory of playing house with other kids and relatives, it is still a myth about when a person put themselves into the specific kind of “gender” the society wanted them to be. The direct influence could come from the parents. Children see all their behaviors and dialogues all the time. It is very hard to let a child choose him or her own identity if their parents are already under societies stereotypes. In Judith A. Howard’s essay, she suggests that there are certain schemas influencing people in multiple ways: “Cognitive schemas, abstract and organized packages of information, are the cognitive version of identities. Self-schemas include organized knowledge about one’s self, the cognitive response to the question of identity: Who am I? These include the characteristics, preferences, goals, and behavior patterns we associate with ourselves. Group schemas (analogous to stereotypes) include organized information about social positions and stratification statuses, such as gender, race, age, or class” (Howard, 368). Luckily, society always change. When society becomes more and more open to new and bizarre stuffs, it will be revolutionary for nearly anyone who did not understand them before. Nowadays, we can only look back at various media recordings to trace the origin. The “Private Lives, Public Spaces” home video show in MoMA represents various styles of people living in different points of the time. More specifically, most of them are showing the real states of human beings under natural circumstances. There are people recording their lives from different races, genders, classes, etc.

The home videos at the show are all slices of different lives in the past. Although the society today is much more open and provide more acceptance toward differentiation, it is still not easy for each other to understand the culture, habits, and moral in other groups. The lack of information is one of the main issues, but the least thing we can do is to understand the situation. Those video records are a good way to demonstrate some of the unknown ways of living between people. Afterall, if only we see more of the behavior, we could be used to them quite naturally. Just as Judith A. Howard’s perspective, “The basic premise of symbolic interaction is that people attach symbolic meaning to objects, behaviors, themselves, and other people, and they develop and transmit these meanings through interaction. People behave toward objects on the basis not of their concrete properties, but of the meanings these objects have for them. Because meanings develop through interaction, language plays a central part (see discussion below). Identities locate a person in social space by virtue of the relationships that these identities imply, and are, themselves, symbols whose meanings vary across actors and situations” (Howard, 371). There is one particular video in black and white featuring a girl dancing wearing the Hawaii traditional “Kapa”. At first, she is dancing with a gentle pace, but later it becomes an intense version of “belly dance”. Some people might think it is uncomfortable or inappropriate to see a “night club” dance like that, but remember it is a home video. She might be totally relaxed and happy when dancing like that toward the unknown recorder from her family, or it is even a traditional dancing style in her culture. The video is really a great choice for this show because it catches a precious private moment that may seems weird for general publics. It is worth mentioning that there are also other suitable home video choices for the topic about identity, and the collections at the show is indeed plentiful. However, it will be better if it adds more guidance toward the audiences. There are many family meetings or events like wedding from various races of people, but for some reason they are not putting together. When a video has a lot of visual elements within, it will easily lose focus or attractions to the viewer. But besides that, the close-up videos are well-picked. This kind of video have a clear focus on a single person’s face thus able to see the natural expression. Those facial expressions are totally different from the professional movie close-ups, they are the true expressions people generate from their own understanding of their own identities.

It is a whole new era about identity and many other things, and people will be challenged to accept new concepts and theories. On the way to defining our true identities, how about learning from other kinds of possible identities available? Nobody will be offended and the world will be more multiplex.

Works Cited

Judith A. Howard. “Social Phycology of Identities.” 2000. Annu. Rev. Sociol. 2000.26:367-393.