January 13,2003:
Testing Our Assumptions about Identities: How and why is
our sense of self shifting?
Who are we? (who are we going to be?)
Explained by:
1. Movement from Modernism to Postmodernism
2. Movement from defining oneself by one’s body to having
“no physical body”
3. Shift from RL communities to VR communities.
4. Various Perspectives on these new identities.
************
Rifkin’s Premise:
“the men and women of the 21st century are a breed apart
from their bourgeois parents and grandparents of the industrial
era.” ( kit, page 95)
Lipton calls them “protean human beings” after
the Greek god Proteus who could transform himself into any
material or animal form at will.
(idea illustrated in the video, the shot of the teenager
morphing into the guerrilla fighter)
Rifkin et al. suggest different historical timeframes mean
that people define who they are differently:
|
Modernity
|
vs
|
Postmodernity
|
|
Age of Industriousness
|
vs
|
Age of Playfulness
|
|
Age of property, traditions, conventions
|
vs
|
ahistoric age of interconnectedness and access
|
|
"making things and exchanging and accumulating
property
(see page 99 in kit)
|
vs |
scripting scenarios telling stories and acting out
fantasies"
|
|
(exactly the world of the male teenagers in the video
playing their fist-person shooter games.)
|
|
acquisitions
|
vs
|
new lived experiences
|
|
(“new cultural industries, are creating an almost
infinite number of scripts for acting out one’s
life experiences, just as the manufacturing industries
provided a vast number of consumer products to buy.”
(page 107)
|
|
2. Unitary sense of self
|
vs
|
Multiple constructions of who we are
|
|
physical body
|
vs |
"no body" (see Barlow's Declaration of
Cyberspace)
|
|
3. Change in Human Interactions
|
|
|
|
F2F relationships in real communities
(see Rifkin, kit page 102: "In a small community...")
|
vs
|
online relationship in virtual time
|
2. How do we define ourselves?
Inclass assignment: take a piece of paper
and complete the phrase “I am” 10 Xs.
-- what does this tell us about how WE ARE? (as opposed
to the cyber-denizens of Rifkin’s world?
3. What are the communities we hang
out in?
Turkle (Life on the Screen: Identity in
the Age of the Internet, 1995) suggests a continuum
when discussing the movement away from the “real Main
streets of America.”
Main street-->Shopping Mall-->Disneyland’s
Main Street-->fantasy world online
Various Perspectives on effects of changing
identities:
1. Turkle’s perspective:
Her fears about this move toward virtuality
skew our experience of the real:
- Makes fake seem more compelling than RL
(see kit page 100: Baudrillard’s description: “Today
we live….)
- We believe we’ve achieved more in VR than we have.
2. Lipton (kit page 107) says “having
multiple personalities is a coping mechanism, a way for
the psyche to accommodate…”
- People have the ability to build alternate
identities / explore other possibilities denied in RL
3. Rifkin might say people are playing/being
connected to others -- living out the ideology of the Age
of Access.
4. Wright (Sims creator), referring to his
own simulated world, claims it helps people understand their
own lives. “You start to see patterns ….in SIMS
URL).
5. MLC’s perspective: People are struggling
to reconcile the ethical responsibilities in RL with the
possibilities of getting away with unethical behaviour online.
- I echo Turkle’ s hope: that 21st century
western people have a “healthy protean self. ..[that
is] capable like Proteus, of fluid transformations but is
grounded in coherence and a moral outlook. You can have
a sense of self without being one self. (Life on the
Screen, page 258)
