Honeymoon's over - meeting modern technology at home

What do your online identities do while you’re sleeping? Perhaps your Facebook persona steals pricey antiques from eBay. Maybe your MySpace face can be spotted regularly on the online poker scene. In fact, mine told me it saw yours at pokerparade.com just last night!

When one shows a print photograph to someone, there is no lurking fear that the image will change the identity of the person it portrays. Everyone knows that our online identities have no life of their own. With so many clicks, we control their actions, their words, their purchases...wait, their?

If they were really such pawns, the idea of their self-possession would feel less suspicious.

For almost every aspect of your life, there is a website to live it on. On Match.com, you can click closer and closer to your love match. At LinkedIn.com, you can type your way to having a professional network. On Facebook and My Space, you can create a cross-country social dynasty without buying a single plane ticket.

Yet this system is flawed. When we see someone in public whose online identity we came across in private the night before, do we not in our minds perform a critical comparison between the present and the online picture of them? Dare I say that our humanity is moving online – first intellectually, but now also emotionally?

All of the things that normally hang alongside one’s daily life – opinions, money, words spoken, gifts given and received – are in limbo in the presence of an online identity. The breathing, real person to whom they were attached has split off into an ideal, electronic piece and a true one. In immersing ourselves in technology, we lose our connection to that more vague, often dysfunctional thing called reality.

“News flash!” you may say. “Reality as we have known it has been disappearing since Al Gore invented the internet in the early 90s.”And good riddance! No need to hold onto the awkward self-forging of puberty, or the stiffness of a first meeting at a job fair. We have created a way around those former facts of life. Our most crucial decisions, the ones that determine our identities and place in society, have started to occur on the net. The boundaries between social and software codes have come to blend.

In this blending sits both a blessing and a danger. The prodigious posting of personal information that goes on at certain sites may betray more than a desire to share oneself with others.

Let the internet take care of your identity; then, when you’re in reality, you can relax and be someone else completely.

Within this mindset, when one’s eye is not fixed upon his/her Facebook. Myspace, or even eBay profile, one feels paranoid about what it is doing. Some malevolent electronic force may have kidnapped it into a social scene where in reality, one would never be found. There has been much controversy about intellectual property rights on the internet. Imaginative property rights have been neglected. We know how to create boundaries around our self-imaginations in reality. The frequent unwieldiness of our face-to-face encounters at present reveals our ineptness at setting those boundaries in the online world.

We have now warmed up to modern technology to such a degree that we trust it with our romantic, professional, and interpersonal image. We can no longer get by through presenting it with contrived faces while living in our own, real world dimensions.

The online world is summoning us to make its reality ours. We do now have the power to create our identities on it, but in order to successfully do so we must trust that the internet imagines us as we imagine ourselves.