Getting Settled

I'm feeling a bit more comfortable in the office now, but less so in the classroom. I've had trouble keeping up the level of creativity I usually like to employ in lecturing; it's devolved to basically lecturing the whole time, and then showing a video clip here or there. It could just be the material, but I still don't like the trend. Hopefully now that I've been able to streamline my process for class prepping (thanks to the slides provided by the publisher) I'll be able to spend less time retyping words from the book, and more time coming up with interesting ways to get the students involved.

Also, that should hopefully give me time to do some work on my research. I've got a couple of grants that need writing, and ideas that need cultivating. One of the things that I have been thinking of lately, that could maybe get developed into an idea, is the idea that new media and the "connected" lifestyle lead to fractured senses of self. I never really found this idea compelling, though I will admit that I do subscribe to the idea that the self is a construct that is created in interaction with other people. However, I think that the new media, rather than fracturing the self, create a continuity that reifies the self as the set of artifacts that exist in (primarily) the digital world.

It is a truism that, once on the internet, data never truly goes away. Similarly, a self, constructed online, is not as ephemeral as the conversational and gestural interaction of two people. Text conversation and message board posts exist as conversation histories and archived discussions. Video communication is easily recorded and shared with the world (surreptitiously or otherwise). Even the less tangible, interaction-in-the-moment reality of face-to-face conversation is often captured as digital video or photographs using cameras and phones, later posted online using Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, and YouTube.

Not only are the traces of interaction thus solidified from emphemeral, momentary phenomena, but they are also distributed across individuals. Just as we might back up data by spreading it across several storage solutions (i.e. DVD-ROM, hard disks, online storage, flash drives, and hard copy printed on paper), our selves, created in interaction and recorded by these media, spread across multiple people. Each recipient of an email, each person who downloads a photograph from Flickr, and each viewer or downloader of a video from YouTube retains a record of the self presented in that medium. In any of these cases, the construction of the self is out of the hands of the individual, and exists as a collection of the material evidence of the self - the photographs, the video, the recorded speech, and the text communication.

In this context, the self is not fractured, splintered and ephemeral. Rather, the individual is chained by the digital record of their past behavior to a reified, solidified self that is visible to the entire world, accesible to all, and free of context and true interpersonal contact. Individuals can not rely on geographic and temporal separation between selves to exist.

Examples of this abound. Recently, several medical students were penalized for "misconduct" online . Some of the information the students presented was in violation of ethical codes, but in some cases, it amounted not to violation of the patients privacy, but of the boundaries between the students' selves. It is not unethical for the medical students to drink to excess on the weekends, but apparently it is unethical for them to reveal that they do so. However, in the digital world, they are unable to fracture their self based on context, and the self is reified and compressed into a single expression, that of the sum of the digital selves and the interpersonal selves, permanent and undeniable.