Conclusions

1. Self-knowledge using the internet occurs in situations when certain complexes of signs online are perceived as representing the user’s self – either as an external object, that is, semiotically, or as objectification of one’s inner states and structures, that is, symbolically.

2. Self-knowledge can be approached both in positive and negative ways.

3. Self-knowledge is based on the alternation of projection and introjection or, to put it otherwise, the alternation between the alienation of one’s own meanings and the appropriation of meanings of others. It is a feedback loop connecting the self and the other.

4. In the process of self-knowledge the change occurs both in the set of semantic elements constituting the self and in the nature of relationships between them. The self in this process in not a static entity that precedes the act of knowing but a construction produced in the process itself. Self-knowledge, therefore, is a creative act, the object of which is the self itself.

5. Self-knowledge results in a shift of self-identification – whether a person identifies himself with a new set of meanings or he or she comes to the realization that any identification is illusory.

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