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Abstract
This paper presents an emerging concept called the interactional self to
illustrate how there are no clear phenomenological distinctions between the
so-called virtual self (the self online) and real-world self (the self offline).
The paper uses Martin Heideggers, G.H. Meads, and Alfred Schutzs
philosophies of experience and wordly encounter to argue that subjective
conceptualizations of the online and offline self and Internet sociability are
instead rooted in and are part of the same socially situated, multi-dimensional
life-world.
Introduction
I would like to propose in the following pages that the Internet,
while imbued with powerful and efficient asynchronous and
synchronous technologies for interpersonal, inter-group, and
distributed communication, should be mainly viewed as a collection of
mediational technologies used in the normal course of everyday
personal, organizational, or mass communication. I would also like to
propose that a socially situated self, not a virtually fragmented self,
helps us better understand the Internets impact on sociability in
everyday contexts. Further, this socially situated self, I maintain, is a
self that is conceptualized by its interactions with others mostly rooted
in known social networks of affinity and conviviality; this is a self
primarily embedded in the world of embodied flesh-and-blood, not
splintered bits-and-bytes. I would like to call this socially situated self
the interactional self. In addition, because of the claim I will make for
the instrumentality of the Internet and its inherent technologies as
opposed to recent postmodern theories of cyberspace and its
autonomous and overtly deterministic impacts on self and society I
would like to term this online interaction between individuals Internet
mediated communication (IMC1).
With the term IMC I am borrowing from and adapting the acronym for
computer mediated communication (CMC).
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reality (Wellman & Gulia, 1999, p. 169) and that the uses of the
Internet are, overwhelmingly, instrumental, and rooted in everyday
life (Castells, 2001, p. 118). Castells concludes that roleplaying
and identity-building as the basis of online interaction are a tiny
proportion of Internet-based sociability (p. 119), forcefully pointing
out that the over-reporting of studies advocating a new kind of human
interaction emerging out of hypermediated technologies distorted the
public perception of the social practice of the Internet as the privileged
terrain for personal fantasies (p. 119). Instead, Castells emphasizes
that the Internet is an extension of life as it is, in all its dimensions,
and with all its modalities (p. 119). Both Castells and Wellman
suggest that the reality of IMC, for most, seems to side with
explanations that lean more on social interactionist sign-posts, not on
accounts relying on fringe or marginalized behaviours of experimental
cyberselves, as the postmodernists are wont to advocate. This
growing evidence begins to sketch out the first preliminary conceptual
images of the interactional self on our social-world canvass,
suggesting to us our first postulate:
Inwood (1999) tells us that Dasein literally means there-being (p. 42) or,
4
McLuhan also has much to say about how technologies extend the mind and our
bodies but is beyond the scope of my discussion here.
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called a hammer. In our Web example, our interaction with the tool
and the world online would become present-at-hand if our browser
were to freeze thus realizing the cursors and perhaps the monitors
presence, becoming aware of the mediational objects of interaction
making up the self-computer-Internet-world equation.
In summarizing our first exploration of the interactional self in
IMC from the perspective of Daseins Being-in-the-world, I make the
argument that Heideggers notion of practical worldly encounters that
are mediated and either ready-to-hand or present-at-hand is a crucial
first step in understanding fully what happens when the self engages
with the things of the world. The application to IMC is that, rather
than a new cyberself emerging from cyberworlds, or a new virtual
self being created, online interactions are fundamentally extensions of
a part of embodied beings as either ready-to- or present-at-hand. As
we use a hammer to extend our arms to drive a nail in order to build
something from wood, we use email (or ICQ or a blog) to engage with
a world and others when the practicality, appropriateness, and
availability of the intended social act deems IMC equipmentally fit for
us to use. Thus, Heideggers approach adds phenomenological weight
to Wellmans and Castells claims that the Internet is interwoven within
our everyday activities. Heideggers subtle brushes of Dasein begins
to fill in the sketch on our social world canvass and we arrive at our
second and third postulates of the interactional self:
I now dip the brush of Dasein into the paints of social interaction
theory, adding the intersubjective social colours offered by Meads
social philosophies and Shutzs phenomenological sociology. Their
views are coloured by the concepts of social emergence and
intersubjectivity as both sociological philosophers asked, in separate
circumstances: What does it mean to be social animals, to be human
with others? Their common themes include complementary notions
of the intersubjective (Schutz) and socially constituted self (Mead).
Mead, the generalized other, and IMC
George Herbert Mead (1934) was one of the original
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The accent of reality was, according to Schutz, his version of what William James
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