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Cyberspace:
Transcendence, Transience and the Battle over the Embedded Self

"[N]ew technologies change what we mean by 'knowing' and 'truth'; they alter those deeply embedded habits of thought which give to a culture its sense of what the world is like -- a sense of what is the natural order of things, of what is reasonable, of what is necessary, of what is inevitable, of what is real."
-- Neil Postman, "Technopoly"

"Although people may at first feel anguish at what they sense as a breakdown of identity, [Kenneth] Gergen believes they may come to embrace the new possibilities. Individual notions of self vanish 'into a stage of relatedness. One ceases to believe in a self independent of the relations in which he or she is embedded.'"
-- Sherry Turkle, "Life on the Screen"

Here at the end of the millenium a massive battle over identity appears to be taking place -- on an unseeable battlefield, yet right before our very eyes. The new medium of the Internet, along with the exponential growth in the role of technology in general in our quotidian lives, is forcing us to confront our own humanity, and acknowledge the inherent man-made constructedness of that humanity.

On the one hand are those who would halt or slow the seemingly inevitable uprooting of the embedded self technology will bring, and on the other are those who would celebrate the possibilities and opportunities such an uprooting would foster. We are witnessing the battle to decide whether humanity should privilege the embedded self or disavow the embedded self as anything other than an "absolute fake," a hyperreality.

Where do we decide to draw the line on what is human? That is the question we are asking when we teach a computer to do human things, like navigate an obstacle course or recognize a coffee cup, or trick us into thinking it's not a computer. We are by process of elimination seeking to get to some core element that would define us as unique, the anime that distinguishes us from silicon. We are searching for the collective self.

We are putting faith in progress, believing there is a reward at the end of the search. But the self, both the collective and the individual, is a fractured one, especially in the twentieth century. It is not cohesive. It is multiple. We are too mature to believe in the fairy tale of progress (yet we still cling to the naive optimism that we will find that elusive "human" quality, which is kind of sweet).

When we play Doom, when we visit BayMoo, when we have TinySex, we are many selves. We are a killer Marine, a harmless bunny, or a 17-year-old virgin. But we have always been these things, these many selves, even before the explosion of technological possibility. We are (and always have been) one self with a lover, another with a parent, and still another with the grocery store clerk. It is only because the so-called artificiality of technological alter-egos is so apparent that they are open to attack. We are now, and have been for some time, trafficking in subtle messages about simulations and degrees of reality (Eco, Baudrillard, etc.) Do you think the nostalgic notion of privileged humanity could have survived much longer, that the transcendent would have been honored over the transient even had this late twentieth century information revolution not occurred? The layers of embeddedness were already being peeled off. The process of decentering the constructed self was already in progress when computers entered our lives. Technology only speeds the process. It is not the primogenitor, and any credit or blame it gets for being so is misplaced.