Monday, November 22, 2010

Technology and Identity video

Hey folks, I'm here to talk at you about a project that I cannot yet show you.  Suspenseful?  Yes.  Exciting? Perhaps.  Alright, enough chit-chat.  I will upload the project once it is ready for the public eye.  It is still shy, and not ready to go out all alone.

My video project centers around the idea that technology alters our sense of self by creating an outlet in which we can create alternate identities or extensions of our self that exist in a different plane than our normal physical existence.  Humans have always had ways to reinvent themselves in different situations.  Nearly everybody acts differently in front of their family than they do in front of their closest friends.  This idea is not new, but the internet and modern technology allow people to extend their being to touch a greater number of people, bringing about it a new sense of both anonymity and the drive to establish a new and coherent identity outside of the physical plane.

Almost everyone in our culture seems to have a Facebook, but this is only the surface.  In addition to social networking sites, we establish our identities through musical tastes, favorite videos, emails, and a seemingly endless amount of additional online tools and resources.  Many times, these identities seem to be formed without our knowing.  Certain websites log our activities, and it becomes a number in a database with our names on it, and as technology continues to expand at nauseating rates, these connections and identities only become deeper and deeper set into our own sense of self.  There are some people out there who identify more with their Second Life avatar or their World of Warcraft character than they do with their physical self.

An interesting question that this all poses is which of these identities is real?  When a person's sense of self is able to transcend the physical boundaries presented by one's body, where does the self exist?  Does the self exist?  It seems to me that someone's identity is whatever they relate to.  If someone spends more of their time and energy propelling a three-dimensional model through a virtual world, who is to say that it is any less 'real' than a non-computer-user's existence.  Through technology, humans are creating new worlds that are, in many ways, just as real as the world that we conventionally consider real.

These issues challenge the very idea of reality itself.  That is not to say that technology is the first thing to do this.  Philosophers have challenged the notion of reality for as long as humans have been around, but technology allows us to see this idea in full bloom right in front of our faces.  'Other planes' become less of a theoretical concept and more of a visible reality.

So yeah, those are the issues I'm trying to address through this not-yet-complete video.  I will write a little more specifically once I have a video to go along with this all.  Until then, my dear devout readers, contemplate the nature of reality and the absurdity of the universe.

3 comments:

  1. I love that you use the idea that everyone has their second or third identity on other plane. I can totally understand and comprehend this, I have a crazy blogger friend who lives online basically with all his online friends whom he never met in real life, to my surprise, he relies on his online friends and has a fake relationship with a girl, crazy?! but it's real! In real life, he's still the same person, just not as fun as the person online.
    I'm so intrigued by your project, can't wait to see it!

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  2. Great discussion of the topic! I was actually in an ethics of technology philosophy course (for a few days), and we discussed the idea of the day when civilization's "real" world is actually one that we "plug" ourselves into. Think of something like the matrix. Or, imagine something like the globally multiplayer game World of Warcraft through the five senses. And at the end of each day we unplug ourselves, and the world in which we live in now becomes a secondary, irrelevant part of our lives.

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  3. Dreams, fantasizes, mirrors, photographs, cinema all added complexity to notions of "realism". The media has recently been hyping Second Life and how relationships even weddings staged online mean more to users than lived experience. We question even the language to describe all of these things.

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