Comments on: “Avatardentity”: thoughts on the authentic online self

By: pj

pj — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 22:00:09 +0000

Hmm…

I think perhaps it’s not really a bifurcation–

I’m talking about ‘virtual’ communication. Which may be slightly different from just ‘virtual expression’. The latter has a passive receptor, the former an active one.

In any case, when it’s on the screen, that longer-than-a-blink space in between “moment of expression” and “subsequent reception” is not the distance between two parallel lines, or even converging lines where one and the other cross in a moment of understanding or “authenticity”.

That space in between is a different realm entirely, and there is not an authenticity (a ‘realness’ of a person) that is achieved, but an integrity (a ‘wholeness’) of a singular human being.

It’s variable distances, it’s amorphous wordblobs, it’s sometimes ‘getting it’ or ‘missing it’ but it is still and always will be: contact. Encounter. I mean, real-life human (body) interaction is mysterious enough… I think it’s entirely logical (or intuitive) to believe that one’s avatar/virtual persona is one’s essential (pertaining to or constituting the essence of a thing) identity.

I agree that there is a ‘meta’ or ’supra’ verbal interaction. That’s what I find truly exciting about this longer-than-a-blink world, and what it means for writing. The space in between is a malleable thing. How an artist fashions this medium is truly something to see.

By: Links for Monday, August 18th | mindpollution.org

Links for Monday, August 18th | mindpollution.org — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 23:55:13 +0000

[...] delgrosso dot com » “Avatardentity”: thoughts on the authentic online self – … "It’s my general belief that the person we “put ourselves out there” as online is, phenomenonally speaking, no different than the person we would have put ourselves out there as 20, 30, or even 50 years ago. Yes, the tools are there to handcraft a virtual personality for ourselves, but I don’t see how it’s all that different than what people have always done to make the same impressions; the effort to craft an impression of “us” has simply shifted to a different kind of community and in-crowd. Today we are no more the sum of the things we choose to put on Flickr, Twitter, blogs, etc. than we were the sum of our shiny DeSoto and Cape Cod house and electric range and picket fence in 1954. Same rules, same desires to “be” a certain person, different means of projecting an image. So despite our newfound ability to shape our online self—our “avatardentity”, if you will—we’ve always been shaping ourselves." [...]

By: Brett

Brett — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 17:52:22 +0000

This got me to thinking that with physical (non-virtual) communication there is a great deal that is related non-verbally, which creates a larger context for a semantic and intuitive apprehension of things like authenticity and sincerity. I would go out on a limb to speculate that the words probably matter less that how they are said and the various cues of eye, tone, and body language that are both expressed and received, consciously or not. Malcolm Gladwell had an interesting discussion of microexpressions and what they reveal along these lines.

When it comes to speaking of authenticity with regard to virtual identities, what strikes me is that in the absence of non-verbal cues, these nuances of authenticity, identity and feeling are inferred to some extent from meta-verbal (supra-verbal?) parsing of the words and their characteristics and connotations. Elements of humor, original, differentiability, authorial identity are construed in some ‘working’ sense from the words and their construction, making these authorial choices more self-conscious and careful (for the most part).

In my inchoate theory of things, this creates a greater split between the expressive authenticity of the virtual author and the receptive construction put together by an interested recipient. I’m speculating that in physical communication, this authenticity is more immediate and narrow in that sense, part of the evolutionary ‘blink’-like quick assessment of the interaction; whereas the virtual creates a zone that temporally bifurcates, to my mind, the determination of authenticity between the moment of expression and a subsequent reception.