Bill's E-learning and Digital Cultures Blog

A couple of weeks ago I finally resigned to the fact that I had to buy a small A-Z notebook and record all my social media user-ids and passwords. I now have profiles on Facebook, LinkedIn, my WordPress blog, Ning and EduSpaces, as well as accounts is Del.icio.us, Wikipedia, YouTube, Library Thing, Diigo, Digg, Twitter, Flickr, Tumblr, Vimeo, SlideShare, Second Life and a few more services. Using these services and making sure my profile is up to date takes a lot of time but also raises important questions: a) How much of my “self” do I project onto each of my online presences? b) Do I switch into slightly different personas depending on the media I am going to use? (In other words, will you find exactly the same Bill on Facebook and YouTube?) c) How does this multi-point activity affect my sense of a coherent self?

To be honest, I feel fragmented. In terms of temporal constraints, my sense of fragmentation is best described by a Greek saying that’s literally translated as “I had to cut myself to a thousand pieces in order to take care of everything”. But it’s not just a time issue; I am aware that a lot of overlapping but ultimately different parts of who I am are up on the Net, yet I still don’t feel that there is a social media on which I have a profile that is fully representative of myself. K.N. Hayles claims that the “I” of the posthuman has been “transformed into the ‘We’ of autonomous agents operating together to make a self”. In that sense, digital culture has amplified and upgraded our vision of own self as a “collectivity”. And although my various Web 2.0 “selves” are not exactly “autonomous” (I hope!), they do have their own needs and their own agendas.

As the time we spend online increases, our sense of a posthuman self will grow stronger. Hayles suggests that “‘human’ and ‘posthuman’ coexist in shifting configurations”; I wonder at what point will the scales be tipped and our posthuman self will be the dominant one.

Or has this already happened…?

Hayles, N.K. (1999). Toward embodied virtuality, chapter 1 of How we became posthuman: virtual bodies in cybernetics, literature and informatics. Chicago, University of Chicago Press. pp1-25