Dresden dolls tonight
I am so FUCKING excited about the show and afterparty tonight I think I'm gonna explode into tiny pieces of light. The only thing keeping me together is that it would be really hard to sweep me all up in time for the show
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As for personality editing displayed on camera, there seem to be at least two issues here. One is the authenticity issue, related to the question of how to understand people responding to lonelygirl15 being a "fake." For me, the basic issue is that of being lied to. In contrast, when we read fiction, we are willing participants in building a story that is pre-declared to be not real. When we believe a story is real, however, as when we view news or talk to a person on a date, and then find out it isn't, there's a feeling of betrayal. That seems to overshadow the issue of whether it's meaningful to talk about that story as 'real' or not.
A second issue is that of selective editing. One place to start here might be to look at Erving Goffman's _The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life_. He gives examples of such selective editing that have nothing to do with video -- one of my favorites is when he talks about how people living in a cabin can see their visitors put a smile on before knocking on the door. The linked text also talks about exclusive clubs in London as a marker of status.
The question then is how to explain the fact that different settings bring out different behaviors from the same person. A second question, which I think you're getting at here, is how the medium (e.g. video) impacts the answer to that first question. Goffman has a theory for the first question based on the idea of "performance" from the same unitary person, but I don't know what he had to say about the second.
Sherry Turkle made a splash in the mid-90s by looking at case studies of MUDs and claiming that things, were, in fact quite different now. Not everyone was convinced; I remember some friends of mine and I liked the article "Hyperbole over Cyberspace : Self-Presentation in Internet Home Pages and Discourse" by Wynn and Katz. That was back in 1997, though, and I'm sure a lot has been done since then. More recently, danah boyd has looked at social network software and how people use that.
This is all a long-winded way of saying that yes, these are interesting questions. and that there's probably a lot more to find about them. :)
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