Participants' essays / Hanna Harris /

Strategies of Self

This Autumn has been a deep exploration into virtual identities, into various worlds of identities as represented on Planet Earth and into, finally, the Self in personal terms. My identity. What does identity stand for in the complex network society? Does identity have power, on and off screen, or is it in danger, along with the virtual agent, of becoming a tool of alienation?

Our project wishes to construct a character that could, as Mika Tuomola suggests, "give dramatic spine to the world of fragmented stories". This is a world which the sociologist Manuel Castells (1997) describes as "technologically overdeveloped and socially underdeveloped". According to my first impressions of the virtual worlds - and often the Real One, too - this is true. I was disappointed, I felt more than alienated. The documentation of these first experiences (as cyber girl Mju who had the task of organizing a party in one large cyberworld) will be in italic in the text.

Furthermore, I shall reflect in more general terms on how one should think of the Character. Amidst the confusion of space of flows and time of flows, where local and global try to live together and here-and-now seems to conflict with the concern for future generations, is Character the element that gives us ground to grow from? Is the Information Age also The Age of the Character?

Seductions and Strategies - Dramatic Construction Between the Real and the Virtual
I know how to organise parties! One Cybertown afternoon, scrolling the streets and joints of the cyberworld of 3D Blaxxun, from Plaza to the Suburbs, suggested otherwise. The Blaxxun party scene was clearly something beyond the regular vibes. Then again, maybe my avatar, party girl Mju, set out for something totally unexpected. This is how the party excitement, climax - and the virtual hang-over developed.

Quite often parties, although supposedly events for 'freeing the soul', require rigorous planning and preparation. Planning by somebody. I had created my to-become avatar girl figure, Mju, keeping this in mind. She was to be the goddess of seduction and of strategies to make it all happen.

Mju felt like a foxy lady, she even wanted to have the face of a pretty girl fox. First problem, no foxes to be found in Blaxxun, so Mju went for a trim Californian-style chick. She was planning to throw a housewarming party for her friend Lumia at a certain place in Cybertown. She had tapped down, ready to be used as quickly as possible, some casual opening lines to get fellow avatars on the move. "Hey! Having a nice day? Maybe you would like to come to my friend Lumia's housewarming party later on today?" "Anyone feel like a party?" "Yeah, you're welcome at 12.30 Greenwich time to Metaverse, Factories, White Tower."

She had funky NYC grooves in mind, she called out for any possible DJs around. She sought for catchy beats, repeating Madonna's latest hit's lines 'Hey Mr DJ put a record on I wanna dance with my baby…" She even had in mind more serious discussions of does music really make people - or avatars - come together.

Mju, in the pure Aristotelian sense, had her goal. But her tool pack for achieving that goal seems somewhat mixed up. Her mask kept changing from fancy babe to cold box (although due to technical problems), her language was not physical nor acquianted with the cyber language in general, she had no props (such as flyers), she was directing her energy rather randomly, losing her patience immediately if things were not working out.

John Emigh, quoting Victor Turner, points out that "performance activities tend to cluster around "liminal" occasions - times when continuity and change, past and future are held in an uneasy balance". Similarly, according to Michel Maffesoli (1995) we are arriving into the age of tribes where the archaic and the rituals replay significant roles.

Mju's mask was not marking clearly enough her Self and the Other, neither were her rituals consistent. During the springterm, we should focus on a Character who has a well-constructed mask (for in fact she shall herself be a mask or a metaphor of the human being of today) operating at times where borderlines between past, present and future are mixed, when information causes confusion. She shall have as her initiative goal to become a Character who seems real, the Masked Fiction. This dramatic construction between the real and the virtual will happen through construction of image, action and community activities.

From Space as Object to Mindspace
Mju set out to explore the streets and encounter potential party people with these cheerful "weapons". She, based on my ideas of where people hang out in search of excitement and parties, headed towards the cafés and clubs of Cybertown. Ready to flirt, ready to spread the beat. This attitude was also supported by Sandy Stone's (1994, 104-105) accounts according to which "members of electronic community act as if the community met in a physical public space" and "conferences act as if the virtual space were inhabited by bodies". To Mju's and certainly to my surprise, the cafés and clubs were empty.

Scott Moore has noted that in virtual worlds, discussions often occur, quite surprisingly, in places of simple architecture, places with no special function, no special landscape. Thus, communication-dense areas would be 'areas in between', streets and squares such as in the old tradition of gathering around village wells.

I thought I had my "foxy lady", the queen of all parties, well planned out. Following Robert Cohen's thinking in 'Acting Power', she had her intensions, purposes and future all sorted out. Or so I thought.

Mju is clearly communicating by signaling: one to one or one to many, as happens in our everyday lives. Virtual worlds are still mostly poor copies of the Real World. For me, they seem to try to slam in all possible activities from shopping to banking to job searching, and within the process they become pure compromises. Our project will try to introduce a Character who starts of by signaling, thus creating her aims and intentions, but who then becomes more and more transparent, heading towards confusion, and who then herself becomes space. Communication will no more be based upon signaling but it will be a process of wrapping the visitors into the Mind of the Character, letting them inhabit her Mindspace. Could story-telling then be seen, as Tuomola suggests, as a real-time "negotiated narrative" based upon community intelligence ?

In this view, time becomes space, elliptic or even spiralic by nature, and the three-act structure of drama (proposition, development and solution) would in fact become 1) Character in Space (introduction of theme and points of focus, finding the community around the Character), 2) Character and Time (phases through which the Character starts to become the Medium of the Message, the World to become, further seducing the community), and 3) Character as Space (her mind being the locale of communication and negotiation of narrative).

Go: Clashing Aims of Community
To me Blaxxun appeared as a world which is big and loud. I felt that it was maybe somewhat more hostile to curious new-comers, and more into straight-forward cyber suggestions. Mju tried to break this gap by using the positive image of Lumia, a long-time member of the community. Maybe by the network effect of another avatar she could easily "ride in". Things did not prove to be so simple (in a community of large scale the recognition of the other figures is not of course self-evident).

Making connection to even be able to invite the crowd to the party, not to mention if they actually turned up or not, was rather difficult. As stated above, cafés and clubs were empty. Job centers - forget it. No one even listened. All they wanted was a job, reasonably enough I suppose.

More fruitful areas were the streets and in some cases the flea-market. At one point, in the Plaza, Mju managed to get a whole bunch of avatars interested. "What party?" "Time location?" "Where?" they were all crying out. Mju was happy and said she'd meet them later at White Tower. "Sorry I can German" came LiebeFee's reply. None of the others turned up, either.

The first positive contact came through a private chat with Terigal. She was genuinely interested, but just as Mju got to the details, my computer crashed. So much for Terigal. However, encouraged by this encounter, Mju decided to systematically go for private chats. She went to hang around in the Plaza and approached every male avatar (searching for mega babes, as it seemed) suggesting private chat almost immediately to them. This seemed to be a good choice. She got Fliggyboy and FredNet into the mood, FredNet being of course concerned whether he'd find CHICKS at the party.

After 2 hours of mouth-to-mouth exploring, it was time to go the party scene. Nobody showed up.

Stop: Twists and Turns
What went wrong? Or did anything? The saying goes that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and some think that cinema (or extended more generally to drama) is basically voyeristic by nature. This brings us to the eye. Could one of the communication problems in virtual worlds, at least for beginners, result from the fact that there is no eye contact?

Leena Saarinen has created two provocative virtual figures, who go about loving and teasing fellow avatars with pre-programmed sentences. Cupido (the dirtt joker version of the god of love) and Laban (a macho rastafari) have prooved that cyberlanguage is actually physical by nature.

Similarly, regular 'party lines' such as "hey, could I have a cigarette, please?". Alternative gestures have to be found. Also, parties are normally communicated of by flyers. How does one implement flyers into virtual worlds? Mju did not come to think of the possibility of using websites as flyers.

One major difficulty arose from the technology itself. First of all, Mju had chosen a young female body, but every now and then her figure - for some mysterious reason, became a box! She noticed this too late, and was very upset. She didn't feel that a plain box could be very seductive and inviting. Secondly, I myself as a user was maybe too slow and still focusing on how to actually operate within cybertown. This drew away concentration from the actual intention.

Additionally, Cybertown is so large in scale that it is possible that many of the participants did not know where the location of the party was or how to get there. If we are to think that they act as if in real world, this helds true. Why would someone in the city centre head out to a party all the way out in Vantaa, Kuninkaanmäki? Maybe they ignore the fact that you need to travel at least 1,2 hrs to get to Kuninkaanmäki but that Metaverse/Factories/White Tower can be reached within a few seconds. Metaverse created a mental distance, not a physical one.

I am still confused about how me and my Mju should party on. Is it so, as Jaron Lanier suggests, that "agents make people redefine themselves into lesser beings". Are virtual community members still in a pre-party state of mind, just as they are preorgasmic (Stone 1994)?

On the other hand, maybe virtual reality is in itself a constant party that requires no extra hassling around. Mju set out with great plans and returned with something else, just as Morningstar and Farmer did with Lucasfilm's Habitat: "We could influence things, we could set up interesting situations, we could provide opportunities for things to happen, but we could not dictate the outcome". Mju found herself in a terrain of insecurity and surprise. Maybe the question "Where's the party, I wanna free my soul" can simply be answered by stepping in.

Definition of identity
Post-modern theory of identity has found itself cought up in a web of accusations around fading identities for whom anything goes, nothing matters or feels like anything and all that counts is your thick wallet. Sometimes identity is seen replaced by identification, refering to a more flexible self that changes according to different situations and the others involved.

On the other hand, moving from the social self toward the political self, the Aristotelian zoon politicon, we have the political front that is increasingly that of identity politics. In these views, the alienated self without identity becomes a self in search of identifications and some new communal feeling. Manuel Castells (1997) has made a beautiful analysis of today's various multiple cry-outs of identity, expressed in the voice of social movements. He, following Alain Touraine'sa analysis, points out that the power of identity and social movemenst should be analyzed by their own discourse of who they are (identity), who they are not (adversary) and what they want (societal goal).

Similarly, Castells provides us with a sociological definition of identity (at the basis of today's information society's social movements) (ibid. p. 7-12). According to Castells, identity is people's source of meaning and experience. Castells also believes that "meaning is organized around a primary identity that is self-sustaining across time and space. This primary identity would thus be something that frames all other identities, those post-modern identifications.

Castells goes on proposing a distinction between three forms and origins of identity building. Legitimizing identity is the identity that rationalizes domination. Resistance identity is based on the logic of resistance of the dominant institutions of society. Resistance identity is much in question in identity politics. Finally, Castells proposes the project identity "when social actors, on the basis of whichever cultural materials are available to them, build a new identity that redefines their position in society and, by doing so, seek the transformation of overall social structure".

From the zoon politicon there is a straight line to be drawn to the Aristotelian view of character. The drama of theatre (and why not of life in general, theatre being the Shakespearian mirror against nature) is constructed via the character's intentional goal-driven action, as in politics. The sociological definition of identity is thus parallel to the classical Aristotelian view of character construction.

Mind out!
In the grande finale of his three volume sociological masterpiece Castells declares that he does not want to be a neutral, detached observer of the human drama. We too want to take our position through the construction of character, through her strategies and positionings. She will strike to pose and play out our vision to-become of the metaphor of human being today and build space through her character. She will be an Identity functioning socio-technically in both the real and the virtual, acting as a "real" character according to her database of identity construction (comparable to the Commedia dell'Arte tradition based on a set of predefined rules for improvisation and the use of the same masked characters, see Tuomola): likes, dislikes, objects, discourses, images, history. The incarnation of Identity.

From the outside look upon her character she will gradually become a medium for seeing first the world and then the unseeable. She herself shall become the world, the space, thus denying the Aristotelian division of character and spectacle. Her mind shall become our "prophecy" of today's world, our "mirror against nature" with all its dreams and nightmares, with all its fighters against and for globalization, of techno-religion. She will create our version of a project identity, with scraps that are available to her, confusing the line between sweet smiles and bad issues. Her mindspace will try to wrap us to see, that is to see the proportions.

We wish to provide, "with whichever material is available to us", a small insight into how the gap between technological over-development and social under-development could be tackled. As Jaron Lanier puts it, "the most important question about information technology is 'how does it effect our definition of what a person is ?'". And most importantly, we wish to discover the reflexive self, the true project identity through our character, the world around her and through whatever might follow. This is the power of character, and the power of identity.

References:

Castells, Manuel (1997). The Power of Identity. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.

Cohen, Robert (XXXX). Acting Power.

Emigh, John (XXX). Masked Performance. The Play of Self and Other in Ritual and Theatre. Philadelphia: Penn.

Lanier, Jaron. Agents of Alienation. To be found (16.10.00) at http://well.com/user/jaron/agentalien.html

Maffesoli, Michel (1995). Maailman mieli. Yhteisöllisen tyylin muodoista. Tampere: Gaudeamus. (Original: La contemplation du monde. Figures du style communautaire. 1993, Paris: Éditions Grasset & Fasquelle.)

Morningstar, Chip and Farmer, F. Randall. The Lessons of Lucasfilm's Habitat. To be found (14.10.99) at http://www.communities.com/company/papers/lessons.html

Stone, Rosanne Allucquere (1994; original 1991). Will the Real Body Please Stand Up?: Boundary Stories about Virtual Cultures. In Benedikt, Michael (ed.). Cyberspace: First Steps. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press.

Tuomola, Mika. Drama in the Digital Domain: Commedia dell'Arte, Characterisation, Collaboration and Computers. Digital Creativity, Vol 10, No.3.