More about Hayles...

After reading through all the posts I somehow sort of got fixated on the idea of avatars (although I don't really know much about how that term is used other than as a visual representation of a person or a kind of virtual body used to represent the actual body...but I guess I'm bringing it up because I'm trying to convey the idea of a self-representation). A representation of an individual can exist as an autobiographical text or maybe a self-portrait or a musical composition...but now it can also exist as this big jumble of different types of media. Online profiles, for example, can have text (including lists and links to websites), pictures, videos, songs, blogs, ways of contacting the individual (which takes different forms like phone numbers, email addresses, physical addresses, screennames), representations of networks of friends (with their pictures and names that they choose to represent themselves), results of online surveys (are you a slut, what cocktail are you, etc), animation, and other things I'm probably forgetting. I guess I'm just interested in how people use interactive media to represent themselves and how our view of an individual changes depending on how we interact with their personal representation.

I'm also sort of connecting all of this to some of the things in Writing Machines. I know the question has been put out there of why Hayles used "Kaye" and referred to herself in the third person, and I thought that a partial answer had to do with all this self-representation stuff I'd been thinking about...The use of "Kaye" and "she" to describe herself remind the reader that they're interacting with a representation of the self, that the self has been sort of filtered through the text and images and design of her book. And then I started thinking about all of this in relation to silversprung's post about "consciousness fused with technologies of inscription”... so the consciousness, the idea in our minds, is changed by how we take it and put it into language and then is again changed by how we take those words and inscribe them in another medium (?) I'm just trying to puzzle through all this and trying to think about how the self is filtered into different mediums...but that's as far as I've gotten for now.