The Saturated Self: Identity and Communication in the Virtual Realm.
By Wayne Whitehead
The late, great social theorist Jean Baudrillard once said… “There is nothing more mysterious than a TV set left on in an empty room. It is even stranger than a man talking to himself or a woman standing dreaming at her stove. It is as if another planet is communicating with you.” … This communication with the unreal has increasingly adapted into our lives and fundamentally impacted on our society and culture than ever before.
Every day, millions of our population navigate social-networking sites to stay connected with friends and share their opinions with the world. Gadgets such as the I-phone, Blackberry, and computer tablets etc. keep their users connected online freely. The successful, global entertainment industry of three dimensional MMVEs (Massively Multi-user Virtual Environment) continues to subscribe millions of players’ world wide, inviting its users to be indulged in a completely synthetic world, create virtual identities, and forge online relationships.
This technology, as many writers as dubbed as CMC (Computer-Meditated Communications), has become a core element of today’s generation. The online world of social-networking websites and virtual worlds have easily merged and affect our offline daily lives. Has this technology helped to create a better-connected society of happy, communicative citizens, or has it encouraged people to become more individually isolated, anti-social and separated from the real world? Is technology still enhancing our lives or is it starting to control them?
In late 2008, Studio Ghibli co-founder and master Japanese animation artist Hayao Miyazaki, spent 15 minutes at a press conference addressing a warning about the dangers of virtual worlds today and how they’re affecting the youth of Japan…
“All our young people today derive their pleasure, entertainment, communication and information from virtual worlds… and all of those worlds have one thing in common: They’re making the young Japanese weak. These things take away young peoples’ inherent natural strengths… and so they lose their ability to cope with the real world. They lose their imaginations.”
Miyazaki’s comments about virtual media can be seen to insinuate at the unsettling news of contemporary Japan’s rising cases of social disorders, the term “Hikikomori” is a phenomenon of social withdrawal, where youths seclude themselves in their rooms for long periods of time (an average of thirty-nine months) and only communicate with digital communications to avoid any kind of physical contact in the real world.
These concerns of the virtual replacing the real have been debated and argued by many sociologists, and media theorists who have made it their task of understanding the effects of CMC on our culture and society. Most known are Marshall McLuhan, who coined the phrase ‘the medium is the message’ and the term ’global village’ that has been considered to be a metaphor for the World Wide Web, and educator Neil Postman, who investigates technology’s impact on culture. He argues that information media such as television and the Internet confounds serious issues with entertainment, how it degrades our conception of what constitutes as news, political debate and education, where too much information access can reduce us to passivity and egoism.
However, it is Jean Baudrillard who had gone much further from the socialist teachings of McLuhan and Postman of exploring the implications of a media saturated world. For Jean Baudrillard, he believes that the world we live in has been replaced by a copy world, where we only seek simulated simulation, that our fascination with imagery has fundamentally altered our experience.
Baudrillard argues that the proliferation of images means that we live in an increasingly unreal and meditated world. This condition is called “hyperreality”, in which entertainment, information, and communication technologies provide experiences more intense and involving than the scenes of banal everyday life. All this is closely related to what Baudrillard calls Simulation, as he says in his classic essay ‘Simulacra and Simulations’ (1985), it is an internal state as well as an external hyperreality, where the representations become more important than the “real thing”.
My studio practice revolves around these questions and concerns; is the virtual becoming more relevant than the real, where our human responsibility of direct communication in face-to-face is gradually being stripped away? How our society is dominated by screens and ninety-percent of our days are spent watching them and using them to access the Internet for communicating, searching for specific information, downloading files, viewing streamed videos etc.
I believe that our current fascination with the Internet, how we keep ourselves logged in and developing symptoms of online addiction and social withdrawal, all lies into the identities that we use to portray ourselves online. As Miyazaki suggests, simulated selves are becoming a displacement of the self, with the use of customizable Avatars, home pages and profile descriptions, you have the ability to create and re-create the self. The online persona offers many different factors that can contribute users to living out multiple lives – whether it is the social factor, to be anonymous, whether it’s the safe and private environment, or to compensate for a physical or personal issue.
This blog, for instance, can be seen as a separate identity of me, l can change anything that suits my taste; the layout, the background, text, photos and description. I can even target any demographic to give this blog a sense of belonging. I find that this blog compensates for my “work-place identity.” The same can be said about my other blog, “Wanderings.” It portrays me as a more cultural person than l actually am in the physical sense.
There are many contemporary artists who are producing work within the areas of cultural practice that is referring to mine, including digital artist Cory Arcangel, whose practice is concerned about the relationship between technology and culture. The influential art movement ‘net.art’ that include infamous hackers such as Jodi.org and ASCII code enthusiast Vuk Cosic, all who use the internet exclusively as the medium of their work.
One ‘net.art’ artist in particular, Heath Bunting, interrogated with the ownership of his identity in his work “Own, Be Owned, or Remain Invisible.” (1998) He utilizes an article from the Telegraph that’s about him. Instead of presenting the article in its traditional form, he adds hyperlinks to nearly every single word. He plays with the hyperlinks as a context of visibility. There are words that are left as light grey, which are describing the identity of Heath Bunting and suggesting that he wants to remain invisible.
These artists are, merely touching on the subject of our culture of simulation, but they are a demonstration of how artists are interrogating their practice within the realms of the virtual. I have, however, discovered some contemporary artists today who share the same concerns and subjects about virtual media affecting the reality of its users. On the introduction to his project titled ‘The Illuminati’ (2009), photographer Evan Baden understands that we have become personally attached to our gadgets and that the more connected we are with the world, the more isolated we become…
“They allow for great freedom, yet so often we are chained to them. They have become part of who we are and how we identify ourselves. These devices ordain us with wealth of knowledge and communication that would have been unbelievable a generation ago. More and more, we are bathed in a silent, soft, and heavenly blue glow. It is as if we carry divinity in our pockets and purses.”
Baden’s project consists of photographing people being mesmerized by the glow of their electronic devices. l find that his imagery shares a similarity to the themes of my video work last year. Like Baden, l too was trying to convey the glow of the screens on our gadgets and computers as an ‘unreal’ and ‘unseen’ entity in our lives, how this light draws the eyes of its user into its warm and welcoming presence. Baden, however, was not the only artist whose practice was investigating with the subject of media immersion. British photographer Robbie Cooper is not only interrogating our culture of simulation but is also following the teachings of the hyperrealists.
Robbie Cooper’s practice revolves around investigating the fixation with the imaginary and visual aspects of our experience and conscience that is caused by digital, immersive surroundings such as the media, video games and virtual worlds. The aim for his work, as he suggests on his official website is to… ” assemble videos, texts and images that record our relationship with this world… In this environment, the ways in which we relate to mediated experience become, for me, an interesting portrayal of life in our twenty-first century culture.”
Coopers most recognized work is ’Immersion’ (2009), baring a similar theme to Baden’s ‘Illuminati’ project, ‘Immersion’ is also a visual recording of how we interact with the screen but in a more personal perspective. By imbedding a red digital camera directly into the screen, Cooper captures the gaze of his viewing subject(s) who are watching a range of different visual stimuli, from video games to horror films.
‘Immersion’, for me, displays the connection and disconnection we can have interacting with the screen. It is where terrible brain programming is innocently disguised as entertainment. By letting the audience fit into the role of the screen. I find that it recites what Baudrillard said about the microscopic simulation… ”You are the screen, and the TV watches you – it transistorizes all the neurons and passes through like a magnetic tape – a tape, not an image.”
By observing these viewing subjects, who are expressing un-natural movement, unguarded behaviour, and are in a state of consternation, it could be that ‘Immersion’ interrogates the meditative experience caused by hyperreality. That of what we are unconsciously aware of in our every-day lives. However, it is Cooper’s other project that l find to be a key work for my current art practice.
Before ‘Immersion’, Cooper had invested into the online phenomenon of MMVEs in ‘Alter Ego’ (2004).This project began when he was travelling around the world meeting players of virtual worlds and recording their experiences. Here, Cooper provides a valuable insight into the reality of MMVE users. His aim for ‘Alter Ego’ is to compare each person with the Avatar that they had created to interact with others online, creating a juxtaposition of the “real” and the “imaginary”. What makes this project more insightful is that each portrait contains a written description by the subject that records their online experiences. It is this feature that brings an introduction to the pros and cons of the immersive experiences of MMVEs:
Jason Rowe is an MMVE user who suffers from Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy, a physical disability that means the only muscles he can move are his thumbs. This is what he has to say about virtual communities… ”Virtual worlds bring people together - everyone is on common ground. In the real world, people can be uncomfortable around me before they get to know me and realise that, apart from my outer appearance, I’m just like them.”
For Rowe, his physical appearance and disability was hard for him to communicate with others in real life, but in a synthetic environment, he could be social with others because physical features become irrelevant. On one hand, virtual worlds allow people to exercise their minds and their creativity; they adapt a friendly atmosphere to other players and allow forms of association not possible in the real world.
But virtual worlds are designed to be a very addictive medium; they can become an all-consuming experience leading users to neglect their real world observations. Lucas Shaw is a user who has been pulled by this strain…
”For a while I’d be playing up to 12 hours a day to try and get into the top ranks. It’s not really about winning - you can’t win EverQuest, there’s no end to it. I just wanted to win respect from people in the game, to be somebody in the EverQuest world. But it cost me. Everything else in my life started to suffer – my social life, my schoolwork, even my health.”
This information persuaded me to learn more about the effects online identities can have on the self, to understand how the Internet provokes new ways of thinking about our identity and challenge the most basic concepts of the self. Just what are the consequences of this technology doing to the self? To help me the answers to these questions, l came across the book ‘Life on the Screen: identity in the age of the Internet’ (1995) by clinical psychologist and sociology professor, Sherry Turkle.
In ‘Life on the Screen’, Turkle observes people who use text-based MUDs, an acronym for ‘Multi-User Dimension’; the first online virtual world software. In a chapter entitled “On the internet’ she seeks to answer the questions about the daily online construction and reconstruction of the self…”What kind of personae do we make? What relation do these have to what we have traditionally thought of as a “whole” person? Is the online persona experienced as an expanded self or as a separate self?”
Her theory suggests that the constant use (and in many cases, overuse) of this technology allows users to develop different personalities in their environments. A screen persona can be used as a way to improve some aspects of your personality. Male and female users genre-swap as an attempt to understand better or experiment safely with sexual orientation. You can use your screen persona to “act out” your “hidden self” while remaining safe behind the screen. Some players claim that they inhabit themselves in these synthetic environments as a way of escapism to temporarily “shut off” their lives and become a part of an alternative reality.
Turkle sees this as a psychological problem of identity for today’s young people, as virtual communities have the potential to assist psychological growth. By being able to fully customize the appearance and personality of how you want to portray yourself online to others, you embrace the idea of a fragmented self and disregard the traditional, unitary notions of identity. For Turkle, the postmodern view of the self is siding within the realms of the virtual.
The postmodern view of identity suggests that we are nothing more than a play of surfaces or a set of shifting signs. There is no ‘core-self’ beneath them all because no matter how deep you go, another surface is all you come across. Many critics use Madonna and the work of Cindy Sherman as examples. Their self-identity is something that is fabricated ‘on the outside’. This identity is then seen as a fabrication that you can manipulate more or less at will.
These postmodern ideas of the self can be seen to side within the cyberspace of the Internet, with these connections:
- Virtual identities and communities help the users discover a postmodern way of knowing. It questions the ‘original’ identity of community members as authenticity becomes irrelevant here. To quote Howard Rheingold: “In cyberspace, everybody is in the dark. We can only exchange words with each other -- no glances or shrugs or ironic smiles… We reduce and encode our identities as words on a screen, decode and unpack the identities of others.”
- They upset the traditional logic of communication by allowing ‘multiple’ and ‘unstable’ ways of communicating.
- In cyberspace, the self becomes saturated, fluid, non-linear and multi-faceted. The virtual communities of virtual worlds and social networking make the self become concerned. No clear distinction can be made between the public and private self.
These postmodern connections and the use of multiple identities creating a sense of a saturated self are all key themes to my studio practice. Turkle described virtual worlds as a space that exists where the self can be fabricated and multiplied. In some instances this has been taken to extreme lengths. One associate of mine once told me he has created fourteen online personas, all on same MMVE.
From one to many, obtaining that many roles and playing that many transformations of the self is an image that l see as fragmented but also coherent. I first experimented with this vision by creating six personas of myself, all from various MMVEs so that there are a variety of different races and genres. These characters each share a different aspect of my self:
‘Wayne2501’ is my virtual counterpart on Second Life, customized to resemble my physical self except for an addition of blue hair. ‘Lilith’ is my “genderswap” character on PS Home, a female that carries my sense of humour which leads to other users questioning what her true genre is. ‘MxG’, another PS home avatar, is a character whose tanned and built appearance is the complete opposite of my physical appearance. ‘Dahlia’ and ‘Caerula’ are two female characters on a “hack n’ slash” MMO whose appearances are suited to my tastes and historical fashion. From the same virtual world is ‘Benten’, a character whose personality and appearance is made out of a pastiche of fictional characters from films and shows that l grew up with.
My aim with these Avatars is to capture portrait photos of them and collage those layers on top of a portrait of me. Unlike Cooper’s ‘Alter Ego’, l didn’t want to bring the ‘real’ and the ‘unreal’ side by side. I wanted to bring them together by treating the masks that we use online as surfaces. The Avatar photos are then cut into sections and their facial representations are lining up with mine, thereby covering up the core self with surfaces of extended selves. The result of the compositions look fragmented but in some instances coherent. The abnormal structure of the personas representations mixed with the real creates a visual expression. The more surfaces I applied, the more saturated and displaced l become.
But how does one be multiple and coherent at the same time? And just what is the notion of a saturated self?
The social psychologist Kenneth Gergen, who coined the term “saturated self”, describes us as saturated by absorbing the many voices of humankind that leads to a social consumption that furnishes us with a multiplicity of incoherent and unrelated languages of the self. Gergen suggests that we “exist in a state of continuous construction and reconstruction; it is a world where anything goes that can be negotiated. Each reality of self gives way to reflexive questioning, irony, and ultimately the playful probing of yet another reality. The center fails to hold.”
Gergen’s notion of a saturated self can be seen to have a frequent connection with virtual communities and how they affect the self. Rheingold refers to Gergen’s theory with the idea of technology causing us to “colonize each other’s brains” … “We live in each other’s brains, as voices, images, word on the screens…We are multiple personalities and we include each other.”
Gergen’s reality of constructing multiple extensions of the self have been realised in the cyberspace of the net, as it allows its users to break down their identity and embrace the new possibilities. Rheingold finds that being a saturated self is the chance for us to reflect on the positive aspects of identity as multiplicity; exploring and intertwining the pluses and minuses of your personality. But how can we become multiple and coherent?
Turkle believes the answer lies in ‘The Protean Self’ by Robert J. Lifton. Lifton’s theory suggests that the solution is a healthy protean self, where embracing the idea of a fragmented self can be capable of developing fluid transformations and many-sided personality that’s grounded in a coherence outlook. You can have a sense of being one self without being one self by allowing the transformations to be multiple but integrated.
Turkle argues that the Internet is bringing Lifton’s theory “down to earth”, describing home pages as identities that are multiple and integrated by pasting links to other domains that connect to the users identity as a string of web. On the web today, every commercial network and virtual community can be seen to have this multiple integration; social networking sites can upload activity stats of friends playing games offline and online, share streaming videos from different communities and can link to other relevant interests of the web user.
Looking back at the collages, l started to see them as their own identity, how these multiple fragments can be seen to integrate with each other to create a sense of one self made of many. This gave me the idea of creating a profile for them on social-networking site ‘Facebook’, to create their names, a narrative and give them a sense of belonging. Social-networking sites are best described as two-dimensional virtual worlds or online life journals. But unlike the nature of the hidden and private spaces of MUDs and three-dimensional virtual worlds, social-networking sites promote open and public information for all its users to construct an online home that attributes to your offline identity.
Facebook has become the most dominant SnS online today with more than eight-hundred million registered users. Facebook believes that an open world would be better but in a recent article from New Scientist magazine, Jim Giles argues that online anonymity is disappearing from the net because the open world that Facebook created has rippled across the net. Giles suggests that once you sign up on Facebook with your real name and input your personal information then trying to act as a hidden self in other communities becomes irrelevant. This is due to the fact that many websites and applications have adopted Facebook’s integration.
Many journalism websites such as ‘The Guardian’ and ‘The Independent’ automatically connects you as your registered Facebook account and posts the article information you’re reading to your current profile status. The new web-design layout for Youtube’s user homepage has the option to connect and share your Youtube information to your social-networking profile. By having author authorisation software being employed on the net, you no longer choose whether to share your real identity with other websites because “your visit is no longer entirely within your control.”
It can be considered that the ideology of obtaining an online persona on the net, the aid of social experimentation and being a saturated self is becoming obsolete by the now common integration of public and personal information revealing online users’ true identities. Facebook and Google+ require you to input your real name and every detail about your offline identity from your address, phone number, education, religion, language and occupation.
This information requirement creates a huge juxtaposition to other virtual communities in the internet’s past, as users on MUDs would spend hours writing the description of their persona, to become immersed as that character in role-play. But on social-networking sites, the only character you role-play is yourself.
However, your social-networking identity should never be ‘fully’ considered as your offline identity. Just like three-dimensional virtual worlds, social-networking sites are designed to be an addictive medium. Depending on how many friends and how active you are on Facebook, it has become a continuous daily visit for relevant information and social exchange; notifications, gifts, friend requests, event invites, games, status updates etc.
The problem with Facebook, as with many other social networks, is that it creates a non-directive self-disclosure. Users don’t just openly write information about who they are and where they live but become infantilized by the idea of it and continually submit information for the sake of attention. The famed British artist Grayson Perry, commented on this in his exhibition ‘Tomb of The Unknown Craftsman,’ stating that his persona ‘Alan Measles’ sees the Facebook generation “distracted by their smart-phones” and “obsessed with becoming a celebrity.”
Presenting and working with your offline self on Facebook is problematic because its features can disregard commitment. I have two-hundred and nineteen friends on facebook, how can l manage that many friends in real life? The reality of social-networking sites is that they are a big popularity contest. They are where friends are treated as a commodity and conversations never really take place. One of the major concerns about social-networking sites is that employers could abuse its open-information to judge recruiters’ profiles as their job applications. Your social-networking identity is being considered as a more accurate description of your character.
With all these synthetic environments affecting the reality of our daily lives from education, social-life and the work place, can it be considered that the virtual is starting to overcome the real? Is the online self a more important role in your life than the offline self?
This is a concern that Baudrillard and Umberto Eco explored with their hyperrealist theory on ‘Disneyland’. Baudrillard argues that the imaginary world of Disneyland is the “first great toxic excrement of a hyper real civilization”. It recycles the dreams and imagination of kids and adults, influencing them to believe that their surroundings are “real” and the Los Angeles area is not; thus it is hyperreal. Turkle further questions this “the loss of the real” by referring to Baudrillard’s theory to a term she calls the “Disneyland effect”, suggesting that our move towards virtuality “tends to skew our experience of the real in several ways” :
1. It makes denatured and artificial experiences seem real
2. The fake seems more compelling than the real
3. Virtual experience may be so compelling that we believe that within it we’ve achieved more than we have.
Their discussion about the “Disneyland effect” and computer culture has further been implemented together with the creation of a ‘Metaverse’, a virtual reality term coined by author Neal Stephenson who also invented the Avatar concept of what we see online today.
In Stephenson’s Cyberpunk novel “Snow Crash” (1992), the story’s protagonist ‘Hiro’ is a hacker who spends most of his time in the ‘Metaverse’. Stephenson describes the ‘Metaverse’ as a computer generated universe, it is a collective space of virtual worlds, augmented reality and the internet. It is where users can “build buildings, parks, signs, as well as things that do not exist in reality” and “your avatar can look anyway you want it to, up to the limitations of your equipment...”
The ‘Metaverse’ is perfectly described as a fully immersive three dimensional MMVE, and there is one MMVE in particular that is considered to be the first widely used Metaverse. Unlike the majority of virtual worlds that dominate the web such as the “hack n’ slash” (EverQuest etc) and the commercial based communities (Playstation home etc). ‘Second Life’ (2003) is a virtual world that is designed to mirror our reality and utilize its virtual counterpart of our world to satisfy the imagination of their users. It has become the fastest growing virtual world online today. The founder, Philip Rosedale, had this to say about his intensions with Second Life…
“I wanted to create a digital version of reality, and specifically wanted to make a place where many people could build things together and generally explore their imaginations. As thinking beings, we can imagine a world much better than the real one. Second Life lets us actually build that imagined place.”
Rosedale intends to use Second Life’s potential to push the outside world into the order of the hyperreal. As Umberto Eco once said about Disneyland, their technology and created atmosphere “can give us more than nature can”, from hugely bright coloured buildings to animatronic imitations of animals, it is the place where everything is brighter, larger, and more entertaining than real life.
Second Life is gradually becoming more like Stephenson’s Metaverse. The users of Second Life are known as ‘residents’, they have the option to fully customize their avatar to their liking. Not only has Second Life helped its residents build their imaginations on screen, but it has even built its own virtual economy. Residents create items and sell them at their owned virtual stall. The in-game currency, “Linden” dollars, can then be converted into real US currency. Some residents have earned enough to make it a full-time profession.
Being involved in a virtual world with its virtual economy, it is considered that your avatar is an important tool and strategy to your marketing. Choi-Seang Rak is a professor of economics in South Korea, whose profit from selling weapons in the online game ‘Lineage’ is estimated around $15,000. He noticed that his shop sells more depending on the looks and mannerisms of his avatar… “People buy more from my little girl dwarf compared to the old male dwarf l used to have, even though they sell the same things. Because I’m very polite, people think l really am a little girl.”
In the real world, our country has inflation rising and over two million of the population unemployed, but in economy powered virtual worlds like Second Life, they have the potential to give its users a sense of empowerment and be apart of what could be a wealthy economy. In this experience your avatar becomes more than just a self’s visual proxy for the intention of socialising. It becomes a self that has a sense of commitment and independence in its surrounding environment. Maybe my Second Life persona ‘Wayne2501’ has the potential to become a successful figure in the market place than l will be in the physical world.
To conclude, simulated selves and the virtual communities are both liberating and limiting experiences to the self - playing a hidden self in an online virtual environment provides new opportunities for those with disabilities, as it gives them the space to embody their ideas and express their diversity. As Turkle writes, “the computer offers us new opportunities as a medium that embodies our ideas and expresses our diversity.”
The virtual space of MMVEs is used to offer us an experience that is absent from our lives. The MMVE Second Life is a prime example as it not only mirrors the real world but equips its users with creative tools to exercise their minds, engage in various activities and experience a different lifestyle. It provides a creative and cultural atmosphere every time they log-in on their monitor screens and questions their users on what they consider as reality.
However, as Turkle and Miyazaki are concerned with, virtual worlds can devour your sense of self. They are, in all cases, a life-consuming experience, to live the shadow of a life rather than the life itself. The most dangerous depiction of virtual life, especially for isolated individuals, is that they can create a false sense of belonging. In social-networking sites, people post constantly because they feel connected to others but there is no real connection because it’s a noncommittal relationship. The MMVE user Lucas Shaw lost his grip on the outside world by investing a lot of unsubstantial commitment to his online self, striving to become a legendary hero in the virtual world of EverQuest.
How the self becomes displaced and lost depends on the limit of how we use our personas. I am certain that with the today’s common transferability of virtual and real-life interactions popularized by SnS and MMVEs, it will be harder for users to keep their simulated selves balanced. Web profiles and avatars have evolved to a point where we are now starting to rely on them more than our offline self; proposing they have matched (or surpassed) the physical custom of communication and occupation.
We become deeply attached to these synthetic worlds because they are functioning as a real world. When you log off and shutdown your computer that virtual world is still living with millions of people’s avatars conversing with each other, participating in events, and interacting with the virtual economy for ‘real’ economic benefit. These virtual worlds of the net are becoming the experience of simulation that Baudrillard warned against – a world where the traditional realms of real and imaginary are collapsed into universal media simulations drifting from reality.
Virtual world users create multiple identities because they emotionally invest in them. They enjoy the creative process of constructing and reconstructing a new persona. It becomes a chance for all of us to play with the masks we wear every-day to cope with modern life. Multiple online identities can help their users to discover hidden potentials, and they can also be healthy to the self. We can consciously choose which persona to safely fit in our present sensation and use them as a means to work on your offline identity. The proliferation of selves saturates us but a saturated self can maintain coherency through this integration of multiple transformations. However, the open world of information that Facebook and Google+ has fashioned onto the net could become a threat to these fluid transformations of selves.
As Giles suggested, multiple hidden selves can now have their secrecy stripped away from them, revealing the user’s true identity. The Internet of today is no longer in Rheingold’s era of being “kept in the dark” and “unpacking the identities of others,” authenticity has now become relevant in cyberspace, and the self will be even more concerned. However, I am not convinced that your SnS profile fully represents your true-self; it is just another surface, another persona to play. Because of that, social networking could be used to further integrate with multiple selves. Facebook and Google+ have functions that are able to connect and share information with many virtual communities (including MMVEs.) The SnS profile page can be observed as a user’s persona connected with other multiple identities the user has on the net; this is why l thought of registering my work/personas as SnS users.
This integration of multiple personas forming their own identity is an idea l am exploring in my art practice and it reminds me of what Rheingold said about Gergen’s theory of a saturated self, suggesting that users and their online selves are “colonizing each others brains.” We have a spiritual relationship with our online identities because a profile page and an avatar are made up of something you can have or do rather than what you are. We write our desires, our imaginations in them, we “absorb their varied rhymes and reasons… they become part of us and we of them.” We are in constant play with the many surfaces and signs of our identity and imagination and it is that free will of manipulation that has become a trait of the postmodern view of identity and self.
I aim to implement these teachings of the saturated self and further evolve my practice with the use of 3D modelling software and video animation. Creating a composition of a mesh model of the user’s face metamorphosing into the faces of his/her personas, all wrapped with a saturated skin of moving images and information. To express these notions of a saturated self and show the many surfaces that we play on our identity and how our self absorbs and adapts to that information. This theme of a “Meta-Avatar” intrigues me, as a collection of all that information we write into our online selves entangling with our core-self, creating its own audiovisual proxy and the suspicion of this being self aware. My intended outcome is to create a surreal experience for the viewer; to reflect on the increasing use on the immersive experiences that we inhabit and how they affect our well-being. The same unreal experience and concern that is continually interrogated by artists like Evan Baden and Robbie Cooper.
These sources have helped me to progress ideas for my practice and have a further understanding on the subject of online identities and how they affect the nature of the self. Maintaining multiple identities is becoming more complex in today’s net of open world of user information, we can be revealed of who we are but we never act out our true-self in these virtual communities because their functions allow us to socially experiment in a safe environment. It may seem that the future of online life will continue to create permanent homes for the conscious self and provide more immersive experiences. However, in recent events, virtual communities and critics all over the net are concerned about an upcoming law in America that is viewed to be antithetical to individual freedom on the net and could potentially destroy the online market.
The Stop Online Piracy Act (S.O.P.A.) is a very controversial topic of debate on the Internet today, from critics and web companies stating that this law could “break” and “cripple” the Internet, threaten the right of free speech, and is a job-killing piece of legalisation.
The main cause of this is that the bill allows copyright holders to have ‘un-contestable’ right to police the Internet. I started to wonder how this bill would affect our simulated selves; the Internet is the equivalent of their life, world and universe. With paranoid and overreacting statements from the opposition, proposing that this law will “break” and be “the end of the internet as we know it” l imagine that our avatars will not allow their universe to break and their world to become a police state. But of course, some MMVE users are in-favour of S.O.P.A., as they see this bill as a way to further protect their market and virtual property from inhabitants using “copybots” (a tool that violates copyright by duplicating a user’s created items.)
Online personas are choosing whether to protect their property for the exchange of being limited and censored by their user’s government. Piracy has always been a complicated issue in the cyberspace of the net and this bill is taking such extreme lengths to attack piracy that it could trigger the Internet into becoming an Orwellian nightmare. Corporations are being given the power to be the judge, jury and executioner of a global free market which is already suffering from the issue of open information revealing hidden users true identities. The future of the net is going to be an intimidating and unsettling home for the saturated self, the home that saturated selves once catered to.
Bibliography
Printed sources
Ward, H.E. ed. (1997) Teach Yourself Postmodernism. Teach Yourself series, 338 Euston Road, London, Hodder Education.
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