Hi all, I noticed you all had
a recent thread touching upon the nature of an online self vs. an offline
self. To that affect I am looking for some information about online
non-verbal behavior specifically concerning space and territoriality.
Chris,
I, too, have just joined the list. I wish I had done so much earlier
if this is what has been discussed.
First of all, the term non-verbal behavior is problematic. In order
to discuss Internet
discourse, I believe that you must establish what you believe is non-verbal
behavior. Write me for a long-winded exposition on what I think constitutes
nonverbal behavior online. As an aside, I personally find more interesting
the way new VR-like technologies are bringing more nonverbal behavior into
the Internet.
1) Space and sense of territoriality offline seem to
transfer pretty directly to online. I suspect that there's something
deep in the reptilian portion of the human brain that accounts for that
consistency (See: Carl Sagan's,
Dragons of Eden for his ideas on the triune brain.).
2) Territoriality then becomes the identity one carves out for oneself
by means of
communication style.
For more, see Erving Goffman.) And, I think, importantly for your study,
they form the virtual self. In this sense a virtual self is no different
than a self created
for any other social context -- funerals, birthday parties, visits
home, drinking with
friends. We carry the appropriate roles around with us and are remarkably
adept at
producing them as the "space" changes. Goffman is really good at explicating
this.
3) Besides social boundaries that frame the rules of who may participate,
most
groups have cultural ways of being that they have transferred from
the off-line world to stake out their territory.
4) So, it seems that cultural non-verbal behavior can control the existence
of one's
virtual self in social spaces. In short, if you don't fit, your virtual
butt is kicked out of
the territory. There's a longer version of this argument, and it comes
out of
Denzin's Social Interactionism and Berger and Luckmann's Social Construction
of
Reality. (citations are pretty easy to find) If no one responds to
the virtual self you
think you have created, you are like the tree nobody hears fall.
A great argument for this notion appears in Steve Jones's first Cybersociety
book. I can't quite recall the author, Richard ... but I believe the title
is something about Hobb's and Leviathan.
But all this is really pedestrian. 5) Eventually you will have to confront
the question
of "Is there a real, core self, or just a shifting constellation of
socially constructed
selves, and where does the virtual self fit in?" Write me when
you get there, the
bibliography gets much bigger and the arguments much tougher.
Good luck.
Richard
--
Richard Cutler, Ph.D.
Senior Research Associate
The Tomás Rivera Policy Institute
1050 N. Mills Ave.
Claremont, CA 91711-6101
909/621-8897
Fax 909/621-8898
richard.cutler@cgu.edu
www.trpi.org