I recently published a review of Paula Sibilia’s new book in mais! (Folha de S. Paulo). The book is very good, and since the review is available only to UOL subscribers, I am posting it here to read, and also as a PDF.
http://www1.folha.uol.com.br/fsp/mais/fs3011200812.htm
São Paulo, Sunday, November 30, 2008 
A festival of private lives
Paula Sibilia’s “O Show do Eu” investigates the processes that turn individuality into spectacle on the internet
GISELLE BEIGUELMAN
SPECIAL TO FOLHA
In “O Show do Eu,” Paula Sibilia investigates the processes that have transformed intimacy into a spectacle mediated by online networks.
To do so, she maps ideas and concepts of subjectivity throughout history and sets them against the practices of overexposure on the most popular Web 2.0 platforms, such as blogs and YouTube.
This mapping does not yield to techno-determinist euphoria, which sees the internet as the force driving every cultural transformation we experience today.
Nor does it bow to technophobic neoconservatism, which rejects any innovation generated by the characteristic practices of cyberculture.
Working like a blender of references, Sibilia cites thinkers such as Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), Walter Benjamin (1892–1940), and Michel Foucault (1926–84), without excluding figures such as blogger and sex worker Bruna Surfistinha, Big Brother Brasil winner Kleber Bambam, and the existential doubts of Capricho magazine readers.
She does this not to balance the discourses but to situate the particular characteristics of the “festival of private lives” generated daily with a few clicks.
Sibilia places this festival in the context of new architectural forms of homes built as multimedia complexes, the incestuous relations between the market and “free” products on the web, and the privatization of the experience of public spaces through the proliferation of devices “plugged into” bodies, such as iPods and mobile phones.
In a text crossing psychoanalysis, philosophy, historiography, literature, and data about online life, she sketches a panorama of the ways intimate experience is becoming “extimate” experience, destined for publication as video, photographs, and text.
Debord, packaged
She addresses the new forms of the narrator, the cult of personality, and the production of alternative virtual lives, moving through the various circumstances that eclipse the notion of interiority in a world where “you” are supposedly the protagonist.
Her analyses culminate in a diagnosis of the most perverse face of the spectacularization of the “self”: the conversion of subjectivity into a process of brand management. She takes Guy Debord as an example of this phenomenon.
He is a fundamental thinker for understanding the present, not only because of his early denunciation of The Society of the Spectacle [Contraponto edition], the title of his most famous book and film, but because of the way he has been “packaged” as a consumer product.
Sibilia notes that before taking his own life in 1994, Debord (1931–94) prohibited screenings of all his films. Despite this, the author emphasizes, his entire work was recently reissued in luxurious packaging containing his films and a series of personal documents, such as childhood photographs and letters.
As I read Sibilia’s book and think about the strategies for turning the self into spectacle through the seductive ways websites invite us to believe that “you” are the protagonist, I realize that I am taking part in three exhibitions with the suggestive titles “Netescopio” (at the Museo Iberoamericano de Extremadura in Badajoz, Spain), “YOUser,” celebrating the tenth anniversary of Germany’s Center for Art and Media (ZKM), and the Seville Biennial, titled “YOUniverse.”
The ironies of spectacular society examined by the author assert themselves as harsh reality, and I already feel myself yielding to YouTube’s invitation to “broadcast myself.”
Before succumbing to the show of the self—which takes only one click to join, “and, in fact, we all tend to make that click,” as Sibilia writes—I will stop here.
GISELLE BEIGUELMAN teaches in the graduate program in Communication and Semiotics at PUC-SP.
O SHOW DO EU
Author: Paula Sibilia
Publisher: Nova Fronteira (tel. 0/ xx/21/2131-1111)
Price: R$39.90 (288 pp.)