The self exists at the intersection of our internal neural networks and our external social networks. Anyone who has read my blog post, R, will recognize that as coming from a keynote at the AGPA annual meeting and will know how I’ve been mulling it around.

Yesterday, I went to a talk on Augmentation and Immersion in Second Life. I left the talk feeling very unclear about what people were trying to say or why they thought it mattered, but it seemed something like this: The Immersionists view Second Life as some sort of ‘other world’, a fictional environment. Their avatars a creations like characters in a story. They are acted out, role played, perhaps even some sort of fan fiction.

The augumentists view Second Life as just another communications medium that helps, or augments, our ability to communicate. Their avatars are extensions of themselves. They represent some aspect of who the typist is.

It sounds an awful lot like discussions about MOOs fifteen years ago about how real or not the communications in MOOs were. I tend to lean towards an augmentist view of Second Life and to not take these discussions all that seriously. There is a real typist named Aldon Hynes. He writes blog posts and emails. He talks on the telephone and with people face to face and he moves the avatar Aldon Huffhines around Second Life. The shape of Aldon Huffhines may vary. Sometimes it might be in a wheelchair. Sometimes it might be a close approximation of the typist. Sometimes it might be a young boy, or even a cat. There remains a real typist behind the avatar and the different shapes that the avatar presents reflects different aspects of the typist.

So, does the avatar exist as some aspect of our internal neural network, an idea that we present a little of online? Is it more about our external network, and how we connect with one another? Perhaps the interesting part is about how our internal neural networks and the avatars that exist in our imaginations intersections with our external social networks.

This goes beyond just Second Life. On the mailing list of Group Psychotherapists one person wondered “whether the increasing ease of (internet) communication that we are enjoying could give rise to greater difficulty in maintaining our embodied relationships.” This too, seems to go to the augmentation versus immersion discussion. Does the concern about great difficulty in maintaining our embodied relationships grow out of an immersionist perspective, that somehow our experiences online are different in some significant way from how we connect with others using different media? Does it come from a belief that online personae are different in some important way from our offline personae? Does it come back to issue of ‘self’ as that intersection between our internal neural network and our external social network? Are we using media to make that membrane more or less permeable?

Today, I went to a discussion on credibility and reputation online. That too seems related to this whole idea, but we didn’t get to that point. Likewise, there are a lot of tools springing up to look at aggregated personal content. That is another area worth exploring in a separate blog post.