Virtual you

What is it that makes you...you?

It's important to note that the concept of identity has an inherently rhetorical nature. We defined this construct - identity - as our perceptions and perspectives. Then, that concept was expanded to include "cultural," "gender" or "organizational" identity.

Wow, it's shadowy. Any sophist would smile. Could you imagine the lost chapter of Phaedrus...what is identity? I don't know Socrates. How about you tell me? I can't. I'm just a midwife assisting in the birthing of new ideas.

Alright - enough making fun of Plato. Let's get down to brass tax.

The virtual self, as Bolter and Grusin notes, remediates those items usually seen as a part of identity. Relationship of self to visual surroundings? Bolter and Grusin (page 244) note six different ways to change it. For instance, "situated viewing can be seen as corresponding to cultural relativism..." (244). Vision? "Vision can also be construed as involving the viewer in the world by reducing the abstract to the visual." (p. 249). In short, "virtual reality offers a remediated definition of the self as a new kind of camera, for unlike traditional cinema, virtual reality enables the viewer to control the placement and duration of each "shot" and thus to manipulate her perspective." (248). In changing how things are "seen," we change how things are "understood," and thus virtually remediate the self.

What does this mean to digital publishing endeavors?

Folks - you are no longer structured to the rules of print media. Traditional media requires pretty straight-forward symbolism. You have text and possibly graphic. By convention, the readers move from left to right, top to bottom. Provided they have the same language education and similar identity, the graphics and text you produce will have the same meaning.

What if...
You could make them fly? The pictures move on them? They can respond as they read? There's an objective and procedurality containing rhetorical elements?

Not only have the rules for production and interpretation changed, we've monkeyed with what it means to be an audience or reader. They are participants; and there's a thin line between the page and the person. I think that's what Bolter and Gusin mean when they say:

"This is not to say that our identity is fully determined by media, but rather that we employ media as vehicles for defining both personal and cultural identity." (pg. 231)

We cannot so easily separate perspective from presentation, self from position...and digital media remediates both.

It's not a power to take lightly.