In her post about Post-Immersionism Gwyneth Llewelyn touched something that is raising a whole new set of questions:
There is no digital self without interaction with others. And, indeed, it’s the mental image of what other people think you are that becomes your digital self.
Is it really like that? Maybe it is possible to develop a digital self without other people to see it. Maybe digital being can develop in solitude, like some weird kind of a cave man.
I am very fond of agreeing with Gwyn here. That is exactly what I thought in the first night of Mr. Dee’s life. An important part of avatar’s personality and identity comes from interacting with others. It’s not only the mental image of you in other people’s heads, interaction with other people discover to us things we haven’t thought about ourselves. It makes us answer the questions we never thought of asking. It pushes us into zones we didn’t want to face.
On the other side, second life is a narcissistic medium. Just consider the number of self-portraits we all do, amount of time and money we spend grooming ourselves. How much time you spend on the grid all by yourself? Before and after all, we stare at our backs most of our lives! Large part of our identities is made by our narcissistic need to play with ourselves. Question is, is it possible to create a digital identity in the solitude? Can avatar develop by spending the whole second life alone on an empty sim?
There is one tricky thing about this. Interaction in second life is not limited to meeting people and talking to them. If one wants complete isolation, then shopping and using stuff other people made might be excluded as well. After all, creativity is an important way of communication here. So our cave man should make it’s clothes and all the other stuff. Even the cave to live. If you think I am exaggerating think about how much your clothes, home and other things define and impact your digital personality. Sure, you choose them all, but it still have it’s influence. But let’s not go that far.
So our hero is somewhere on the grid, alone, meditating, digging and tweaking own mind, forming a personality. With a bit of luck and talent it seems quite possible. It’s nothing new, writers do that for centuries. Another question is, what’s the use of it. Why bother creating something that nobody will see?
But somebody will see. Even if our hero is the only avatar on the grid, even if the whole experiment is done on OpenSim running on local computer, there is one pair of eyes that will see. Yes, human’s. Avatar is never alone. The same mind that creates the digital personality, sees it and is being influenced back by it. The appropriate term could be feed-back. Musicians and sound technicians among you know the danger of feed-back. Yes, that’s the screetching noise that starts when you put the microphone close to the speaker. Sound from the speaker goes back to the mic, gets amplified, routed to the speaker again, and back to the mic, and again…. then your equipment burns. Or your ears get damaged. But usually, you’re quick enough to turn it all off or to bring it back into healthy measure. Does the same danger threats the lonely avatar and the human behind it? Would one go crazy in an experiment like this?
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