Computer Communications and the Self

Poster lists four effects that computer communications (email, chat groups, etc) have on the self:

"1 they introduce new possibilities for playing with identities;
2 they degender communications by removing gender cues;
3 they destabilize existing hierarchies in relationships and re-hierarchize communications according to criterio that were previously irrelevant; and above all
4 they disperse the subject, dislocating it temporally and spatially."

With computer communications "individuals engage in telecommunications with other individuals, often on an enduring basis, without considerations that derive from the presence to the partner of their body, their voice, their sex, many of the markings of their personal history. Conversationalists are in the position of fiction writers who compose themselves as characters in the process of writing, inventing themselves from their feelings, their needs, their ideas, their desires, their social position, their political views, their economic circumstances, their family situation - their entire humanity. The traces of their embeddedness in culture are restricted to the fact that they are compentent to write in a particular language." Thus, "the written conversation creates the (imaginary) subject in the process of its production without the normal wrapping of context. It may be the case that the subject is always an imaginary one, and that the unified ego is an ideological illusion of bourgeois culture. In computer conversations, however, a kind of zero degree or empty space of the subject is structured into practice: the writing subject presents itself directly as an other."

This is not to say that the writer is free to make himself any old way; he may experience liberation, but he is in fact constrained by his past experiences, his linguistic abilities, even by the self that his computer identity seeks to transgress and remake. Poster suggests is not a "total" self-constitution, but "that a reconfiguration of the self-constitution process, one with a new set of constraints and possibilities, is in the making."

There is an intriguing circularity to Poster's argument: Computer communications threaten to dissolve the self into a dew only if we already assume that the self is constituted by communication, by inter-relations with others. If the self is a fixed, stable, transcendent self, hovering over all contexts, then the fact that he is contextless on the web poses no danger. Cartesian selves are unthreatened by email. Yet, Poster argues that the communications technologies he discusses are forming (or disrupting) selves in a particular way.

posted by Peter J. Leithart on Thursday, February 23, 2006 at 05:01 PM

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