Monday, September 14, 2009

The Emergence and Development of Virtual Identity - Introduction

In What Way Are You The Same Person
from "Botgirl vs. Human 01"


Like a lobster who does not feel itself being boiled in the slowly rising temperature of a cooking pot, few humans deeply experience the dramatic shifts in their sense of self as they age over time. Of course, most adults would agree upon reflection that they are in fact very different beings than their five-year-old selves.

People can also experience and express divergent or even conflicting personality traits within the span of a day or even an hour. For instance, a prison guard who embodies a brutal persona during the day at his job, might go home at night and deeply experience the role of being a loving husband and father.

I propose that the emergence of a distinct avatar identity is rooted in the same processes that contribute to such variants of "normal" human personas, and that the main difference contributing to the somewhat dissociated state of consciousness is in the unique (virtual) body and name that is associated with the online identity.

I will explore this idea over the course of the next few posts. Part 1 will focus on the relationship between artistic expression and personality.
...the expression of the self through the medium of artistic materials is itself a prolonged interactive process in which both self and work acquire a form and order they did not at first possess... Gary L. Hagberg, in critical commentary of "art and ventriloquism"


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4 comments:

Anonymous said...

can I get this full perms for my psychology class paper? lmao. God topic, looking forward to all segments. ;-)

Anonymous said...

*good zomg!

sororNishi said...

I heard somewhere, and don't know if it's urban myth, that every cell in your body is less than 7 years old....we are constantly changing physically too.
The psyche likes to hold on to the (mis) concept of a unified personality though.

Lalo Telling said...

@sororNishi, re: "The psyche likes to hold on to the (mis) concept of a unified personality though." Isn't the psyche precisely that unified personality? Put another way: To whom do your dreams happen?

Actually, what I'm going for here is continuity; yes, we change, but by a gradual and constant process of editing and amending, not by a full delete/rewrite... rather like those body cells you mentioned.