It’s All Me: (Inter)Facing ourselves in digital Worlds
Online or off, are we the same person?
As the line between the digital and physical world becomes increasingly blurred, so does our perception of self as an entity split between digital and a “real-life” identities. Here I consider the possibility that we can no longer divest ourselves of online existences, or our lived experiences in them, by closing our laptops and walking away. Deconstructing these binary oppositions provides an opportunity to consider the rights and responsibilities of ourselves and others in digital society and introduces a concept of the whole self-defined and constructed by all the spaces we inhabit.
TW: Sexual assault, violence.
In the last thirty or so years during which internet access and use has approached 65% of the population worldwide[1], we have found ourselves situated where we regularly engage with both a physical and online world. This phenomenon is often expressed as a dichotomy: the online vs. offline self, the virtual vs. the non-virtual. The idea that we are one person “in real life” and another online has been described by some scholars as a measurable change into “something else”, a temporary transformation which alters our own perceptions of who we are, until it becomes our self.[2] This relies on an assumption of a before and after, an understanding that there is an elemental “self” and that the persona we present online is either an extension of that, or else a pretense of identity performed in limited doses.
The concept of the self has been approached by generations of scholars from multiple directions and disciplines. Despite the utility of a fulsome discussion of philosophical, psychological or psychoanalytic theories of self, this paper will narrow in on how the self is understood in relation to online and virtual worlds, and how our understanding of our self is impacted, and can shift, by simulated contact in online or virtual worlds. First, we must argue for the idea that there is no difference between our physical, or non-virtual self, and our online, or virtual self: one is an extension of the other. More accurately, there is no other, only the self. Second, we can then examine online spaces not as mythical, imaginary worlds, but as society/ies. An online confrontation or attack affects us emotionally and even physically, and the consequences of actions by us and against us cannot be contained by what is a very leaky barrier between the physical and the digital. Even this divide is questionable as our physical movements increasingly control online occurrences. The possibility that we can no longer divest ourselves of online existences, or our lived experiences in them, by closing our laptops and walking away, must be considered. Further, by deconstructing these binary oppositions we have an opportunity to consider the rights and responsibilities of ourselves and others in digital societies and introduce a concept of self that can be defined and constructed by any and all of the spaces — both physical and virtual — we inhabit.
How can we describe the difference between our physical existence and our online one? To do so requires an acknowledgement that there is a difference, one substantial enough to warrant a belief that who we are and what we do online results in limited consequences to our non-virtual self. If we approach our physical self, our body, as an interface with which we interact with people and the world, it is not too far of a leap to suggest that those other miraculous machines, our computers (smartphones, tablets, etc.) are simply another way in which we interface with the world. Further, there is no difference between the virtual and non-virtual identities we project, rather a difference in the interface we have chosen to express our identities. In 1994, technology journalist Julian Dibbell wrote that humans are “on the brink of a future in which human life may find itself as tightly enveloped in digital environments as it is today in the architectural kind.”[3] If that imagined future was a map, it would have a large, red dot announcing, “you are here”. There is no such thing as a virtual world: there is only the world, populated with human/machine members of its citizenship.
Donna Haraway describes the human/machine cyborg as “a creature of social reality”[4], a “condensed image of both imagination and material reality.”[5] Imagining our physical and online selves in this context of blurry amalgam edges us closer to understanding the precarious nature of this division. When we click the “x” and close our laptop, our online self does not cease to exist, nor does our physical body refuse to react when we are exposed to trauma received via electronic means. It is easy to relegate online spaces to realms of the imaginary, but like the machine component of the cyborg, they have been created and constructed as a means of extending the human experience beyond what our physical bodies are capable of and expanding where we can roam.
Separating the virtual from the non-virtual also hinges on being able to say with a degree of certainty that what we experience in our physical bodies cannot be replicated online. Social media allows us to be in many places, often at once. Through gaming and VR, we gain new abilities and extend our reach into worlds that we can inhabit and experience in real time. We can shop by using our hands to manipulate items into carts. We can locate fairly easily those spaces where we can shoot at strangers with fake guns, or “meet” someone in a “room” and fall in love. Augmented reality games such as Pokemon Go create one world of the physical and the virtual, a world where, as we walk, our bodies and our avatar literally occupy the same space. For many years our online interactions have been limited to visual and auditory inputs and outputs: letters via text messages and emails, or face-to-face conversations with our loved ones in real time. With the development of haptic technology, we can feel vibration locally when we are touched remotely.[6]
The future articulated by Dibbell invites us to “behold the new bodies awaiting us in virtual space undazzled by their phantom powers, and to get to the crucial work of sorting out the socially meaningful differences between those bodies and our physical ones.”[7] The idea that we can be touched remotely exemplifies the importance of this “sorting out” of socially meaningful differences, and illustrates the connection between how virtual actions permeate our physical bodies. Being touched brings with it emotions and reactions that don’t necessarily differ whether they occur remotely or in person. When Facebook (now Meta) announced its move toward creating meta-verses, the non-profit group SumofUs (now Eko)[8] embarked on research into Meta’s Horizon World and Horizon Venues. Their research was followed by a report that documents instances of female players beta-testing the site being subjected to online rape, groping, sexual and misogynistic comments.[9] Further back in 2016, a gamer named Jordan Belamire wrote in Medium that while she was playing QuiVr in multiplayer mode, another player groped her breasts, and then, emboldened by her commands to stop, “shoved his hand toward my virtual crotch and began rubbing.”[10] In A Rape in Cyberspace, Dibbell recounts several avatars (with humans “attached” to them) being forced to violate themselves and others in unthinkable ways during a game of LambdaMOO.[11]
In A Rape in Cyberspace, Dibbell describes, accurately, the physical contact between characters - the rapes - as “a mingling of electronic signals….no bodies touched.”[12] The fact that there was no real-world physical contact is hardly the point, yet articulating exactly why it is not the point is complicated. The “facts” of happenings in digital realms are “shadowed by a second set of real-life facts”[13] They might be shadows, or it may be more likely that they are direct reflections of traumas inflicted on us by real people who inflict them. Behind Mr. Bungle the clown in LambdaMOO was a young man living in New York; and “Starsinger”, who Bungle forced to self-rape with a knife, was a woman living in Seattle. There is a perpetrator and a victim, an intent to harm, and a person harmed. The signals winding through the interface and the resulting action mimic an instruction to the brain to raise a hand against someone in violence. Recalling the body as an interface, the computer used to perpetrate the crime was not a bystander, but a tool used to activate misogynistic power and violence.
If we turn away from difference and toward similarity, we can perceive a lack of difference by looking at how these attacks in cyberspace deeply affect our sense of self, and our feelings of safety and autonomy attached to that self. As in non-virtual interactions, intrusions into our virtual personal space are rooted in existing power structures, ones that eerily mimic real-world challenges to bodily autonomy and justice. SumofUs reported that, very similar to the experiences of women who are impacted by violations of their physical body, Horizon World was an environment that made it extremely difficult to report these online “crimes” or have the perpetrators ejected from the platform.[14] Meta followed-up the findings of the SumofUs report with an internal review, stating that the victim “should have” used a feature called “Safe Zone”, a protective bubble that, when activated, creates a barrier between the player and those who they feel are threatening them.[15] In both cases, those who are touched or otherwise victimised online have little recourse, or are blamed for a lack of diligence in protecting themselves from harm. These experiences are linked to very real emotions that could not be felt if the online world was truly un-real, or if we decided that imagination did not play a role in human experience. The beta tester of Horizon World explained how being raped by another player, who passed around a bottle of liquor and invited others to watch, made her feel confused and disoriented.[16] Belamire was groped in front of family who were playing alongside her, and stated that the attacks on her virtual person felt as real as any of the other effects in the game, and were “scary as hell.”[17] In writing of her experience, Starsinger repeated a refrain heard so often from victims of physical-world crime: “I thought it wouldn’t happen to me.”[18]
Like these spaces, our online selves are not imaginary either. Far from being different people online, research shows that we use online environments to fine-tune our identities, experimenting with presentations of who we are as well as our self-concept, that is, who we feel we are.[19] The additional control and autonomy we have over our online selves makes the online a perfect environment for engaging in these explorations of identity. We can change, edit, and perfect characteristics that we believe to be lacking or flawed, engaging in a “precise manipulation” of the self.[20] These decisions are no more imaginary than those we make in the physical world: how we choose to style our appearance, carry our bodies, or strategically hide our imperfections. Any assertion that, in non-virtual settings, we do not already present different versions of ourselves depending on the situation is false. We do not create new identities online, but simply replicate the “divisions of self” we already engage in during in-person encounters.[21]
As it turns out, these divisions are crucial in allowing us to construct our social selves. For example, we can vent about our boss with our colleagues, but not to our boss’ face, or we will likely be fired. We cannot speak with our partners or close friends over drinks the same way we engage with an elderly relative. We must be allowed to perform differently in order to make stable friendships and protect others from harm.[22] If we assume, and accept, that our virtual and non-virtual identities are not distinct, but simply imbrications of the various representations of ourselves we require to simply get by in the world, form relationships, and protect ourselves and others, we can relieve ourselves of any notions that we are fake or duplicitous, and understand our “selves” as simply “self”.
The distinction between viewing online and non-virtual worlds as separate and the understanding that they are not is crucial to our acceptance of the posthuman experience as simply experience. If posthumanism can be defined as a state of moving beyond being only human[23], then our existence as citizens of the virtual world must qualify. Embracing the posthuman means we no longer question if our online selves are who we are, or if we are two distinct selves running parallel, and allows for a reckoning of the moral and ethical implications of citizenship in the virtual world. We have already begun the work of accepting machines such as robots and AI as inextricable from experience. Discourses have moved past speculative questions of what it will be like living with machines to what it is like. Philosopher Regina Rini, citing real-world examples, has engaged with questions of the epistemological consequences of deep fakes, and the threats to not only our ways of knowing, but also our knowledge that the people we are engaging with in online environments are who, and what, we think they are.[24] In Vindication of the Rights of Machines, cyberculture scholar David J. Gunkel, asserts that autonomous machines such as robots and AI “can no longer be legitimately excluded from moral consideration.”[25] By rolling our online selves and physical selves into one, we allow ourselves the same moral considerations, and accept that living with machines means, ultimately, living with ourselves. To explore the human-ness of robots necessitates examining the machine-ness of humans and realising that it is well within the realm of possibility that the two will eventually attain a degree of sameness, if not biologically, then ideologically and functionally.
Maybe we’re almost there. Dibbell refers to the “psychic self”, the idea that what we do online, including being physically and/or sexually attacked, is a “disembodied enactment…perhaps the body in question is not the physical one at all, but its psychic double, the body-like self-representation we carry around in our heads.”[26] This concept of the “psychic-self” is useful in articulated how we can reconcile our physical and virtual selves into one representation, one we have established as composed of interconnected personas, both online and in person. It makes sense to acknowledge that we can experience humanness in different ways and through multiple interfaces without the need to justify or explain that we have been harmed (or felt joy, or a range of emotions) in non-virtual settings. By doing this, we can effectively create a new cultural language that questions phrases such as “real-life” and the dismissing of online attacks as “just a game”. Our online experiences, and the way they are expressed, matters.
Notes
[1] “Digital Around the World,” DataReportal – Global Digital Insights, accessed March 1, 2023, https://datareportal.com/global-digital-overview.
[2] Joseph B. Walther and Zijian Lew, “Self-Transformation Online through Alternative Presentations of Self: A Review, Critique, and Call for Research,” Annals of the International Communication Association 46, no. 3 (July 3, 2022): 135, https://doi.org/10.1080/23808985.2022.2096662.
[3] Julian Dibbell, “A Rape in Cyberspace or How an Evil Clown, a Haitian Trickster Spirit, Two Wizards, and a Cast of Dozens Turned a Database into a Society Symposium: Fundamental Rights on the Information Superhighway: Appendix,” Annual Survey of American Law 1994, no. 3 (1994): 472, https://heinonline.org/HOL/P?h=hein.journals/annam1994&i=548.
[4] Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late 20th Century (1988),” in Manifestly Haraway (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), 5, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/warw/detail.action?docID=4392065.
[6] Olivia Petit, Carlos Velasco, and Charles Spence, “Digital Sensory Marketing: Integrating New Technologies into Multisensory Online Experience,” Journal of Interactive Marketing 45, no. 1 (February 1, 2019): 44, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.intmar.2018.07.004.
[7] Dibbell, “A Rape in Cyberspace or How an Evil Clown, a Haitian Trickster Spirit, Two Wizards, and a Cast of Dozens Turned a Database into a Society Symposium,” 472.
[8] “Ekō - People and Planet over Profits,” accessed March 5, 2023, https://www.eko.org/.
[9] SumOfUs, “Metaverse: Another Cesspool of Toxic Content” (SumOfUs, May 2022), 2, https://www.eko.org/images/Metaverse_report_May_2022.pdf.
[10] Jordan Belamire, “My First Virtual Reality Groping,” Athena Talks (blog), October 22, 2016, https://medium.com/athena-talks/my-first-virtual-reality-sexual-assault-2330410b62ee.
[11] Dibbell, “A Rape in Cyberspace or How an Evil Clown, a Haitian Trickster Spirit, Two Wizards, and a Cast of Dozens Turned a Database into a Society Symposium,” 473.
[14] SumOfUs, “Metaverse: Another Cesspool of Toxic Content,” 1.
[15] “The Metaverse Has a Groping Problem Already,” MIT Technology Review, accessed February 28, 2023, https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/12/16/1042516/the-metaverse-has-a-groping-problem/.
[16] SumOfUs, “Metaverse: Another Cesspool of Toxic Content,” 6.
[17] Belamire, “My First Virtual Reality Groping.”
[18] Dibbell, “A Rape in Cyberspace or How an Evil Clown, a Haitian Trickster Spirit, Two Wizards, and a Cast of Dozens Turned a Database into a Society Symposium,” 475.
[19] Nicole Strimbu and Michael O’Connell, “The Relationship Between Self-Concept and Online Self-Presentation in Adults,” Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking 22, no. 12 (December 1, 2019): 804, https://doi.org/10.1089/cyber.2019.0328.
[20] Strimbu and O’Connell, 804.
[21] Liam Bullingham and Ana C. Vasconcelos, “‘The Presentation of Self in the Online World’: Goffman and the Study of Online Identities,” Journal of Information Science 39, no. 1 (February 1, 2013): 102, https://doi.org/10.1177/0165551512470051.
[22] James Rachels, “Why Privacy Is Important,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 4, no. 4 (1975): 326–27, http://www.jstor.org.subzero.lib.uoguelph.ca/stable/2265077.
[23] Oxford English Dictionary, “‘post-Human, Adj. and n.’.,” n.d., https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/263433?redirectedFrom=posthuman&.
[24] Regina Rini, “Deepfakes and the Epistemic Backstop,” Philosophers Imprint 20, no. 24 (August 2020): 1–16, https://philpapers.org/archive/RINDAT.pdf.
[25] David J. Gunkel, “A Vindication of the Rights of Machines,” Philosophy & Technology 27, no. 1 (March 1, 2014): 113, https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-013-0121-z.
[26] Dibbell, “A Rape in Cyberspace or How an Evil Clown, a Haitian Trickster Spirit, Two Wizards, and a Cast of Dozens Turned a Database into a Society Symposium,” 476.
Bibliography
Belamire, Jordan. “My First Virtual Reality Groping.” Athena Talks (blog), October 22, 2016. https://medium.com/athena-talks/my-first-virtual-reality-sexual-assault-2330410b62ee
Bullingham, Liam, and Ana C. Vasconcelos. “‘The Presentation of Self in the Online World’: Goffman and the Study of Online Identities.” Journal of Information Science 39, no. 1 (February 1, 2013): 101–12. https://doi.org/10.1177/0165551512470051.
Dibbell, Julian. “A Rape in Cyberspace or How an Evil Clown, a Haitian Trickster Spirit, Two Wizards, and a Cast of Dozens Turned a Database into a Society Symposium: Fundamental Rights on the Information Superhighway: Appendix.” Annual Survey of American Law 1994, no. 3 (1994): 471–90. https://heinonline.org/HOL/P?h=hein.journals/annam1994&i=548.
DataReportal – Global Digital Insights. “Digital Around the World.” Accessed March 1, 2023. https://datareportal.com/global-digital-overview.
“Ekō - People and Planet over Profits.” Accessed March 5, 2023. https://www.eko.org/.
Gunkel, David J. “A Vindication of the Rights of Machines.” Philosophy & Technology 27, no. 1 (March 1, 2014): 113–32. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-013-0121-z.
Haraway, Donna. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late 20th Century (1988).” In Manifestly Haraway. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2016. http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/warw/detail.action?docID=4392065.
Oxford English Dictionary. “‘post-Human, Adj. and n.’.,” n.d. https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/263433?redirectedFrom=posthuman&.
Petit, Olivia, Carlos Velasco, and Charles Spence. “Digital Sensory Marketing: Integrating New Technologies into Multisensory Online Experience.” Journal of Interactive Marketing 45, no. 1 (February 1, 2019): 42–61. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.intmar.2018.07.004.
Rachels, James. “Why Privacy Is Important.” Philosophy & Public Affairs 4, no. 4 (1975): 323–33. http://www.jstor.org.subzero.lib.uoguelph.ca/stable/2265077.
Rini, Regina. “Deepfakes and the Epistemic Backstop.” Philosophers Imprint 20, no. 24 (August 2020): 1–16. https://philpapers.org/archive/RINDAT.pdf.
Strimbu, Nicole, and Michael O’Connell. “The Relationship Between Self-Concept and Online Self-Presentation in Adults.” Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking 22, no. 12 (December 1, 2019): 804–7. https://doi.org/10.1089/cyber.2019.0328.
SumOfUs. “Metaverse: Another Cesspool of Toxic Content.” SumOfUs, May 2022. https://www.eko.org/images/Metaverse_report_May_2022.pdf.
MIT Technology Review. “The Metaverse Has a Groping Problem Already.” Accessed February 28, 2023. https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/12/16/1042516/the-metaverse-has-a-groping-problem/.
Walther, Joseph B., and Zijian Lew. “Self-Transformation Online through Alternative Presentations of Self: A Review, Critique, and Call for Research.” Annals of the International Communication Association 46, no. 3 (July 3, 2022): 135–58. https://doi.org/10.1080/23808985.2022.2096662.