Something we didn't discuss in class...

and that I may have been thinking about, but maybe didn’t bring up because I wanted to post it on the blog. In its list of “tools for online communication," the wiki article that we read on Social Software devotes a brief paragraph to this thing called “virtual presence,” which does not, as yet, have its own wikipedia article (although one has been requested), and which creeps me out about as much as some people were creeped out by Shelley Jackson’s designation of people as words in her Skin project. The paragraph defining virtual presence really is brief, so I’m going to cite the whole thing here:

Virtual presence means being present at virtual locations. In particular, the term virtual presence denotes presence on World Wide Web locations pages and Web sites which are identified by URLs. People who are browsing a Web site are considered to be virtually present at Web locations. Virtual presence is a social software in the sense that people meet on the Web by chance or intentionally. The ubiqitous [sic] (in the Web space) communication transfers behavior patterns from the real world and Virtual worlds to the Web.

Concern over the weirdness of virtual presence, though not in so many words, has come up a lot lately on our blog. Mostly, the turn these discomforts take has to do with the overlap, or questions about the extent of the overlap, between virtual or online identity and identity as it occurs in real life and real time. In a post on "Creating Identity on Social Sites," tophat1 takes issue with how it seems that, on the internet, because it is not a "real" space, we forget that our actions have consequences for other real people sitting in front of their respective screens. In "Characters," Shock and Awe says there is something about the opportunity to manufacture and maintain [an online] personality for oneself that I feel could affect society in unforseen and possibly adverse ways, and arrives at an assessment of how the real translates into the virtual that I really like: Virtual relationships strike me as relationships between characters rather than people.

And these are all really interesting, complex concerns that play out in tragic, amusing, disturbing, and sometimes violent ways, but what’s weirding me out about the wikipedia definition of virtual presence involves a different, but probably related (it’s become really apparent to me in my writing for this blog how much I like to try to relate everything to everything, and how much time I spend driving myself insane in quest of said never-ending relations) distortion of the subject as it becomes, simultaneously, a being who sits in front of the computer screen and a being who is displayed on that screen. That is, you can’t be at the computer without being on the computer, that no matter what online website you’re visiting -- it could be your own facebook profile or a website about the poetry of Katherine Fowler Philips -- you are both viewing and inhabiting that space. So maybe this is one of those culturally constructed fallacies, but even though there may have been times when I expressed frustration with “not being able to be two places at once,” that’s also a very comfortingly contained version of the individual subject. Doppelgangers are scary. So is the idea of a self that can be reduplicated -- potentially infinitely -- as a “virtual presence.” How many of me can there be at once? If I leave an internet page open and walk away from my computer, am I still there? And what about all those tabbed windows I’m not looking at? Or how about if I forget to log out of the facebook when I leave to go to class, or if I stay signed into AIM during a day at the beach?

Does this bother anyone else, or am I just paranoid? What does it even mean that my communication via virtual presence transfers behavior patterns from the real world and Virtual worlds to the Web? Obviously, this isn’t the most well written definition, but the implication is that there’s the physical, real world me, and then there’s any number of virtual me’s, and that all of my presences have traceable behaviors that can play out in the realm of online social interaction whether I’m at my computer or not.

And now, because I like to draw analogies, however tenuous they may be, I’m going to relate this back to thenewblack’s post about blog discourse and class discourse being "On Separate Paths." Given this multiplicity of selves, it would seem impossible for the realms to be mutually exclusive. Thinking about the blog in class even further proves that I can be virtually present here while my body is somewhere else, and that my real world behaviors have concrete effects on what my online personality says and does. If certain concepts seem to lend themselves to the blog better, virtual presence would certainly be one of them. So even if I didn’t bring it up in class, here I am saying it now, and here you are reading it, and above are all the links to other virtual presences that continue to have their say, and all these virtual selves interact through posts and comments and intra- or intersite linking, and then they all somehow manage to interact in class as well, and the only way I can think to put a stop to this is with this quotation by Henry James:

Relations stop nowhere.