Say hello to my little friend…

Ok my friend isn’t so little, although he is having a little bit of a crisis right now and this is definitely having an effect of his general feelings of importance… The friend I’m talking about is my ego.

Most people who know me would probably reject the notion that my ego is having any sort of crisis short of delusions of grandeur… but I assure you this crisis is quite real… but perhaps not in the way first imagined.

Let me start by discussing the very notion of the ego and its importance in relation to ourselves and the world around us.

The ego, in terms of Freudian thought, is directly connected to the notions of our consciousness projected out to the world around us… it is also what gives each individual their own sense of meaningfulness and importance in the world – although we all might not want to believe it, the reality is that we are all very very small and fleeting moments in time – and our egos help us feel relevant despite this.

“If life is going to exist in a Universe of this size, then the one thing it cannot afford to have is a sense of proportion”

Douglas Adams

One thing to keep in mind with this notion of the ego is that as as Fliess puts it the ego is “in the first place a body ego,” connected quite directly to our corporeal selves… that is to say more directly that the Freudian notion of the ego connects our importance of self to the mental connection we have with our bodies.

This has been fine and good for quite some time now as we’ve had nothing else to draw upon, but over the last decade or so (perhaps even longer if you were one of the early Internet denizens), we’ve been interacting and sending our mental ‘selves’ out beyond the limits of our bodies through the use of the internet.

At first this may not seem to have any real effect on the body, or my little buddy the ego, but the Internet actually has had a very profound effect on him… let me show you how by examining the notion of roles (or as Erving Goffman called them ‘presentations of self’).

Depending on where I am and what I’m doing I take on certain roles: when I’m at school I take on the role of ‘Student Mike’; when I’m with my family I take on the role of ‘son Mike’, or ‘brother Mike’; when I’m out with my friends I become ‘social Mike’ (and after too many drinks perhaps I become ‘belligerent Mike’ too) – but one thing that is important is that they are all connected to the physicality of my own body.

To put this in perspective I like to use the idea of a party where everyone I know is in attendance… at this party everyone knows me, but one person may know me in a very different role than someone else, but they all connect their understanding of me to my physical body standing in the room with them. I could not be ‘Student Mike’ and ‘belligerent Mike’ at the same time without causing some major shifts in people’s perceptions of me.

Now in the digital world drastic changes are taking place in the creation and meaning of the roles that I take on. I can take part in online discussions, write to blogs, create a listing of my favourite links on del.icio.us, join a MMORPG and become an elf that slays dragons – all outside of my physical body.

This may not seem particularly remarkable on its own, but by delving a little deeper some interesting things are taking place… and I have a feeling it is this that’s starting to worry my little friend.

Many of the activities I mentioned above can be (can and often are) performed either anonymously, or with a pseudonym… it is  very rare that I get to register on a website with the name Mike, and for many obvious reasons I often choose not to attach my last name to many of them as well. We often create interesting and diverse names for our digital personas, and these will often vary from website to website.

Unlike the roles that I play in the physical world, the roles I play in the digital world have little or no connection to the physical me, and little or no connection to each other. In essence the narratives that I begin to create with these roles only connect back to my physical self, how and when, I choose.

Now let’s go back to the party again and let’s invite all of my digital personas to the party as well. Unlike the roles that are trapped to the corporeal body ‘me,’ my digital selves are free to do what they want. The ‘deli.icio.us Mike’ could be talking to some people in one corner about the great movie review he read last week; while, the ‘Blogger Mike’ could be getting in an argument with “Student Mike’s” friends; and “MMORPG Mike” has gotten drunk and has decided to relieve himself in a potted plant. None of these roles however are connected to my own physical body, and hence are free from the potential upheaval of others’ perceptions of ‘me.’

This may seem like an ideal situation, but as I spend more time interacting within these digital entities, my ego’s feelings of importance suffer. It is no longer the single conduit of interaction for me, and everything does not have to refer back to it… my body is no longer the single avatar by which I am defined.

I’m not sure how my besieged ego will react as more of my time becomes enmeshed in the digital… but I do have some theories… until then though stay strong little buddy – you have not gone the way of the Betamax yet, nor do I expect you to anytime soon.

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