You Are My Face

In this course I’ve learned that the virtual is part of the real. The Internet is an appendage of ours and we’d be wise to recognize that.
Cyberspace, cyberculture, virtual selves, network society, social networks, ict, are all very real parts of our reality.

I used to feel guilty about how often I used my computer. I knew that I used the shit out of it for school and work, but I also knew that I was allowing Cyberspace to take up a lot of my down time. I felt like I was maybe missing out on the “real” world as a result. I felt bad about it. Now I realize that the virtual self is an extension, possibly even a symbiont, of the self. We project the self as our means of interacting with the material world around us. It is a very natural part of our internal organization as living, thinking things. We direct our actions through our thoughts and interact with our surroundings. The same rules apply in Cyberspace. Only faster! And remember, as far as the general public is concerned, Cyberspace is in it’s relative infancy. It started 7 years ago, right?

When we think about how quickly the Internet has become an important part of our 360 million lives, what should we focus on?
The convenience? The implications? The outcomes? The meaning of it all?

Or should we be looking in a different location; instead of considering the impacts of our Internet use consider the possibilities our computer use presents.

In the material world I can direct my thoughts to a movement or a speech act, and interact with anything I can physically move to or actively talk about.

In Cyberspace I can direct my thoughts through a vast organization of information and space limited only by my ability to maneuver in that space.

In the real world we function by way of the mind collecting information, processing it, and responding to it. The same rules apply in Cyberspace. The difference is that in Cyberspace we have a considerably greater capacity to engage the mind with its surroundings.

In the real world, our vision provides our view screen. We see the world from that screen all day every day. On the Internet we have a computer screen, but the screen can serve multiple purposes. It’s dynamic elasticity can be used to present any number of things at any given time.

The screen is like a tableau for the mind.

We don’t get that in the real world. Our minds interact with our consciousness and draws from our biology to manipulate memory. Consciousness is complicated and hard to nail down with words, but I’m sure that we can mostly agree that our consciousness is the self.

So c’mon, say it with me friends: “My vision is the computer screen and my mind has become the mouse.”

The computer screen (or any screen that grants access to Cyberspace) is a place where the information generated through thought and through consciousness can exist as text. The screen is more of a parable for thought, than it is a parable for the language.

The sooner we really ‘plug into the matrix’ the better. We need to develop and habituate the use. We need to understand Cyberspace as an additional location for the existence of mind. We need to learn about how we displace ourselves inside the Internet, and we need to view this process from a progressive lense.

Each person in this class knows people who are both more and less cyber-savy than they themselves are. The people with little to no cybersavy, probably have no idea how useful Google is. The people with a small amount of cyversavy can use email and send pictures, but that’s it. They don’t know how to send movies, or post movies, or download and upload media – have no comprehension of the level of access users have to information, interaction, and communication. People with intermediate or expert cybersavy are living a double life, more complex, more interactive, more informative, more intellectually and culturally active, than everyone else. Period.

The real world is both worlds – virtual and material.

Computer screen, you are my face.
Facebook, you are my social network.
Internet, you are my knowledge base.
mouse and cursor, you are my focus; what I an attending to.
Sociology of Cyberspace, you are my wake up call.
Cyberspace, you are my life… too far?

Amonte, no. That’s a bad Amonte!