Judy/Keiko and the Footage
The Internet community idea behind MySpace and other online forums plays a central role in William Gibson’s novel Pattern Recognition. Just as it is on MySpace, members of the Fetish:Footage:Forum (F:F:F) are able to create new names and identities for themselves, like the main characters Parkaboy and CayceP. The forum in the novel is mostly used in a straightforward way to discuss the mystery of “The Footage”. However, it is still an online community, and place where people from all over the world converge to indulge in the same obsession. There is inevitably an undertone of having a somewhat anonymous online identity aside from the real life one, and the element of being able to lie is exemplified in the creation of “Keiko” :
“Judy Tsuzuki, five-foot-eleven and about as Japanese as you are, aside from the DNA. Texas. Twenty-seven. Bartender…What we did to up the wattage for Taki, aiming to maximize libidinal disturbance, we shot this long tall Judy then reduced her by at least a third, in Photoshop. Cut’n’pasted her into Musashi’s kid sister’s dorm room at Cal…we decided to try enlarging her eyes a few clicks. That made all the difference…the resulting big round eyes are pure Anime Magic. This is the girl Taki has been looking for all his life, even though nature’s never made one, and he’ll know as soon as he lays eyes on the image.” (Gibson 132).
Keiko was created in order to seduce a man in Tokyo, who they needed contact with in order to find out information on The Footage. Taki truly believed that “Keiko” existed and was talking to him through the web. The Internet gave them the means to create an entire imaginary person, and use that identity to manipulate another person. Although MySpace users generally do not use their pages to directly manipulate their viewers, most do use the digital medium to manipulate how others see them. The Internet makes it possible to transform yourself into a new, “improved” identity, or make up a new one entirely.