"People often say that this or that person has not yet found himself. But the self is not something one finds, it is something one creates." (Thomas Szasz)....
Remember that quote from the "Online Personae" lecture? It immediately sprang to mind the other day when I read, on a Second Life Educators Mailing List, a critic of the utility of SL for educational purposes. His gripes were many and various, (I may post them here for your perusal and - PLEASE - comments), but one centred around the belief that we should not be taking our students to places (physical or mental) where we encourage the development of 'second identities'; that we should be aiming for integration of self in the pursuit of personal actualization and academic excellence. My initial reaction was, "How wrong is THAT!?". (You'll remember our discussions on how Maslow promoted the idea that expression of 'true self' may be the key to actualization / happiness and that cyberspace may be the means, for the first time in man's history, a means of achieving exploration and revelation of that core self, at least initially, in a safe environment?).
After mumbling Sasz's words to myself and muttering a few Maslow-like incantations, I began to consider (again) the nature of that 'facet of self' that, long incarcerated, may be liberated within cyberspace and how that may serve to hone / enhance self-concept and functioning offline. At first, I revisted the possibility that the affordances of cyberspace (anonymity, invisibility, especially) adaptively facilitate the freedom to articulate 'past selves' / 'future selves' / 'aspirational and possible selves'. That cyberpsace is somewhere that allows us to 'be' that which we don't outwardly seem to be at this moment in time....but that we have been or could be. Somewhere where the 'nerdy IT geek-type' could unleash onto the world the facet of him that is, for example, HUNKY LOVE GOD; a brilliantine facet of 'him' that shines so brightly within his private, psychical world. Equally brightly as his more apparent 'pallid and passive digital native' persona. But this seems too obvious and limited. Man COULD do that offline in journals. Man may achieve that by corresponding with a pen pal. Man might express this (admittedly, surreptitiously) in art....
Then I moved onto a place that is slightly more exciting with the idea that this medium of social interaction isn't just a petrie dish for the growth of 'historical or possible selves' but a catalyst for the development of someone....a self.... that we might not, if we had never been 'there', become. That the cyber 'whole' is different from (more than but not JUST more than) the sum of the RL parts. Exciting and scary thought, eh?
How is that beneficial to 'education'? Because it leaves open the possibility that a student engaging with information / experience within this medium may do so in a totally different way than ANY of the 'selves' that might have encountered the same offline. In other words...each time they log on, each time they interact with others there, each time they experience something there, they may be moulding, creating, a self that 'exists', (perhaps initially), only there but may be far more receptive to absorbing the notional as well as the factual. After all...as MIchael Benedikt said: it's a "realm of pure information". It may be that in cyberspace, information interfaces with intelligence far more powerfully....more symbiotically; in a way that we've yet to fully comprehend. Idea meets intelligence without the impediments and very salient distractions of the physical world. Just maybe?....it's certainly the phenomenology of what *I* experience there.
I suppose I'm trying to argue that we might be creating 'the fourth place'. And that fourth place might be somewhere that sheds light and breathes life into aspects of us that are embryonic or even non-existent elsewhere. (Whether this is always for the good, remains to be seen, of course.)
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