Reading Turkle's article and thinking about Mark's comment some time ago about how we tend to repeat our roles no matter what environment we transpose oursleves into, I was prompted to think about what role do I choose to play in this class and class blog?
Here are some of the roles that popped into my mind:
"The person who stirs the water being stirred?
The experimenter carrying on a personal experiment and ,at the same time, allowing myself to be experimented upon?
The connector, the cross-pollinator, the bumble bee?... who craves to be connected therefore searches for the connection?
The psychoanalyst who psychoanalyses herself, therefore tries to psychoanalyse others? (Luckily, I am not a professional, everything is just play!)
Am I the player or the game?"
Whether we choose to reflect on what role we play in life, or try to understand what role we've picked up to play on the computer, either way can be used to learn more about ourselves. But it would all be useless if we could not transfer what we learnt from one to the other. Hence, maybe if Stewart/Achilles (in Turtle's paper) increasingly built into Achilles' profile more of his real self, some of Achilles' achievements would have transferred back to Stewart?
It might have already been noticed that I tend to base my observations on my personal experiences, feelings, and sometimes a seemingly strange intellect. There's a lot of 'I', 'I', 'I' going on around. But that's the way I learn... if I can't validate it with my intellect, feelings and intuition, it's not authentic for me. Under all this lies the philosophy that the 'I' is to be eventually dropped for the 'We' and that brings us back to my original point of digression that We, humans, are ultimately the ultimate transformers. So wouldn't you say we went round and round again and came back to the"single consciousness' bit again?
Can't wait to see where Mark will take us to with 'lost identities'....
Discuss
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