Think About Your Thinking
Online Self/Embodied Self
In crafting the audio for the Make and Share, I fell into this manner of speaking. I like it markedly better than the real/virtual phrasing of our divided experience. We seem to forget that our night time dreaming is real too, for one example, even if it is fantastical. I had not fully articulated the idea previously despite Skip’s assignments on web presence, but I am intrigued by the notion that we have an avatar online it is faceted by our sites of participation and yet is cumulative. In truth, it is similar to stories we tell about our embodied selves, lawyer, Mother, etc.. However, it is more abstracted. I think I mean by this Schumacher’s criticism/observation that a face-to-face conversation was meaningfully different from a phone call. I think his point was two-fold that we have evolved and made ourselves human in part because of our face-to-face conversations. Only of late has our communication technology become so sophisticated that we can lose track of it. Schumacher felt that rather than taking it for granted, and worse assuming an artificial posture at the outset of our inquiry we, to more precisely engage in our investigations, instead needed to inhabit our bodies first. Unfortunately, this abstracted avatar can be taken for granted too, as well its fictive origin, and we can become seduced by our participation in a representation of an altogether different event. Chris, you raise an interesting issue and that is our cyborg enhancement of our embodiments, or more subtle is our organic improvement of our embodiments. We have a long history of augmentation for beauty and this likely will continue. Certainly, one category of this is therapeutic. But, we are on the verge of augmentation for performance both cyborg and organic and that likely will call our notions of fundamental embodiment and being deeply into question.
I would like to hear more about this as I suspect we are at the beginning of a very long path that could lead to an expanded notion of embodiment (particularly if/when we are commonly and literally physically augmented by technology). I used to have students in this course read Douglas Engelbart and some older, pre-computer age work that focused on augmentation (along with many other dreams lost and diverted).
I’m also intrigued by the notion of both accumulation of our online selves (’tis true…but so is bit rot and decomposition while those avatars are still … live?) and the “abstraction.” Because this leads to considering the POV by which our selves are apprehended. From the outside, our virtual selves may be considerably *less* abstract and more particularized and atomized.