The internet as a tool of self-knowledge

The internet is generally considered as a means of communication or as a stock of information, that is, its functions are defined in terms of storing, dissemination and exchanging knowledge. The use of the internet for self-knowledge and self-understanding is not so evident and has been discussed in a much less degree.

There are several possible explanations of this fact. First, only a few people are concerned with self-knowledge. This not surprising. Self-knowledge does not provide any social advantages. It is not a specialized knowledge or a “convertible skill”. Therefore, it can hardly help one to earn an academic degree or find a good job. Its effects are personal, internal and have little to do with gaining social success.

Moreover, self-knowledge is an essentially asocial and anti-cultural activity. It demands withdrawal from social life and fixing one’s attention on one’s inner states and processes and it results in seeing the conventionality of socially shared norms and prohibitions. It naturally reduces one’s dependence on social values judgments. The person who knows himself and understands his real needs and desires can hardly be a good subject for manipulation. Therefore, society that aims at maintaining homeostasis is not interested in encouraging the craving for self-knowledge in its members. Moreover, it actively opposes to the need of self-knowledge by oppressing or ridiculing it as immature or autistic.

Alan Watts claimed in 1966 that the modern Western society put ‘a taboo against knowing who you are’. Jorn Barger, the author of a webpage about “Internet way of self-knowledge” argues that this taboo ‘is still in full force’. He notes that ‘capitalism (in the broadest sense) has no use for original, authentic, self-discovering individuals, because they naturally opt out of the conformist consumer culture’ (Barger 2002). This statement clearly contradicts the thesis of theoreticians of post-industrial society about the shift of motivation from extrinsic to intrinsic ends as the essential characteristic of the new social order, but it seems to conform to direct empirical observations. In this respect (as well as in many others), the internet is only a reflection of the dominant values of its users.

However, few people does not mean none. And self-knowledge does not necessarily demands solitary confinement within one’s own mind. It can be joyful and playful activity that includes communication and conviviality. The consciousness-liberating potential of the internet had been much discussed in its early stage before the processes of its privatization and commercialization began. ‘PC is the LSD of the 1990s,’ proclaimed Timothy Leary (Dery 1996: 22). Although being far from identifying digital revolution with psychedelic revolution, Sherry Turkle in her work on ‘Identity in the Age of the Internet’ based on long and thorough research stated that ‘[t]he Internet has become a significant social laboratory for experimenting with the construction and reconstruction of self that characterize postmodern life’ (Turkle 1995: 180). This laboratory is still in operation.

Cyberspace, as we have seen, turned out to be an ideal place for playing with, if not resolving, the most puzzling cases of the problem of identity and self-knowledge discussed in religious, philosophical, psychological, and literary or science fiction works. The list of bizarre cases that reshape the assertion of identity in the form of question – and at times of a question without an answer: Who am I, actually? – includes, for example, such phenomena as doubles, golems, homunculi, replication of brain and cloning of memory, teleportation, download of consciousness into the network, existence of many bodies for the same mind or many minds in a single body. In this respect, cyberculture can be regarded as a vast realm of practical experiments, testing various concepts of personal identity – both scientific and magical – and the significance of these experiments goes far beyond the limits of cyberculture.

There are many forms of online activity related to self-knowledge. They includeá for example:

• Online tests

  are probably the most primitive form of self-knowledge. Although sometimes one can find complex psychological tests online, usually the user is proposed to answer a few simple questions in order to know, for example, that as a city he or she is Prague, as an animal badger and that in his previous life he was Genghis Khan. Such tests have become very popular on the internet but they seem to be more entertainment that a real tool of self-knowledge. They can also be viewed as a degraded form or an involuntary parody on "psychology of traits" as well as on psychometric or experimental approaches to the study of human personality.

• Ego surfing

  is a search for information about oneself on the net (as well s in other media). I shall discuss this activity more in detail later. It can be noted that this approach to the self recalls the social constructivist and postmodernist views on the self as an entity primarily constructed of what other people think or say about the person. However, as we shall see, it can also be understood in quite different terms.

• Role-playing

is creating a character of multiple characters and interacting with other characters in the online gaming environment. It is probably the most discussed form of online self-construction. The experimentation with various identities and identifications can be analysed in the framework of various theories of play and theatre as well as in many other ways.

• Personal homepage

(see Mirza Babayev's Apology of Homepage).

• Weblogging

is writing a personal online diary online or posting links or images.

• Virtual personality

(see An ontology of virtual personality ).

• Online spiritism, scrying and meditation

(to be considered later).

Speaking about self-knowledge, it seems appropriate to play a double role of both subject and object – a media-artist creatively investigating the issues of online subjectivity, and an analyst investigating the results of these investigations.

Therefore, I shall confine myself with description of three online projects of my own that approach the problem of personal identity from three different perspectives.

• Eugene Gorny: (Re)construction of a virtual personality
• Symbolic situations
• The Words of Others

Send your comments to gorny at list.ru