We have any number of online social networking applications up an running at any one time, each with a different profile representing our presence in that online space, and one could claim that the variations in how we choose to present ourselves in the different online spaces are in some way connected to our personalities and to our ”self”. As the overlap between Online and physical real-worlds grows, the question of what constitutes the self is brought to surface (as indeed it always is). At one end of the scale we have the embodiment debate with its proponents arguing against disembodied thought in combination with the common sense notion of the individual as a centre of action and consciousness .
At the extreme other end we have the AI communities attempts to create intelligent
systems by infusing them with data assumed to be unadulterated by interaction2 with the physical material transmitting it, thus distancing them from the very physical real-world,with which they are designed to interact.
In designing for interaction, our understanding of the ”interface” (what and where it is, what it does and how it can be engineered to improve our lives) rests on our having knowledge about how human beings relate to people, things and the world outside of their bodily or material selves. We have aggregated, and are continuously gathering, information about the relational basis of selfhood or our selves as formed by our social and societal relations. Our selves as being driven by the needs of bodies acting as machines, as transportation for genes and as the source of ever changing wills and desires have been explored by the Evolutionary biologists and Marquis de Sades of our times . My interest a lies in exploring the dynamic of the multidimensional accounts of the self in situations where we are reflectively both embodied and disembodied simultaneously.
In order to design systems that help human beings meet, understand and respond to the challenges that new modes of being, communicating and interacting bring, we need to being by understand them. Perhaps a good place to start is from within ourselves, by understanding if and in extension, how they influence and are influenced by our understanding of what being our ”self” actually involves.
And whether technology can help us in negotiating or redefining or escaping through the boundaries of the self...
