This may be of interest here; it follows a number of other texts I've wri-
ten recently. Alan.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Notes Towards Cyberspatial Identity
If identity can be considered as a negotiation between actant and super-
structure (as opposed to an _inherent_ process resulting in an "essential"
strange-attractor), then identity within cyberspace must take into account
- not only the packet, application, and interfacing substructures - but
also the relative foreclosing of each of these levels, a foreclosing de-
pendent upon limited bandwidth and the phenomenology of "personhood" pre-
sent.
I consider identity as _a bundle of threaded processes._ "Bundle," as in a
bundled software suite - in other words, a sheave or collocation of rela-
ted elements. These elements are concatenated, functioning as a loosely
organize _family of usages_ (re: Wittgenstein). "Processes," as in subrou-
tines which may be considered part-processes continually forming and dis-
solving. And "threaded," as in (among other things) the _union of the
k-ply intersection of sets of attributes_ centered around temporarily at-
tracting frameworks. By "frameworks," I mean anything from the habitus of
a _role_ (working as a short-order cook), to negotiated fragments of gend-
er. The "union of the k-ply intersection of sets of attributes" refers to
taking tagged collections of attributes (say 15), finding attributes which
are common among k of the collection (say 5), and forming a union of these
attributes, which then constitute part of the defining thread (say abcde).
Thus identity is mobile, gathered around shifters ("I," "me," "Alan") of
various (logical) types; it ranges through psychoanalytical processes as
well as localized sememes (email, other applications), and is capable of
_inhabitation,_ dwelling within any of them, absorbing their structures
(textual or not) in the form of autonomic or tacit knowledge (Polyani)..
The sememes themselves (localized applications and their user interfaces)
constitute closed domains which construct the local phenomenological hori-
zon of the subject - a horizon subject to the processes of relevance theo-
ry as described by Schutz. This is also the framework (and framework pro-
blem) in classical artificial intelligence; here, the issue is not what
can be _brought into_ the arena, but the fact that the arena appears fore-
closed.
What constitutes a foreclosed arena or application? Primarily: the norma-
tive (_unhacked_) operations within it create a coherent (non-error) uni-
verse. This is level-dependent; a programmer working in javascript, say,
would accept javascript error reports as part of the foreclosure; she
would not accept faulty floppy disk errors in the same way. The latter
interrupt the horizon; the programmer might state later that she was "in-
terrupted." These divisions are extremely fuzzy, of course.
Think of foreclosed sememes (applications and interfaces) as parts of a
_nearly decomposable hierarchy_ (such as the application of classical lo-
gic and Boolean lattice theory to the everyday objects around us). Then
identity appears to _fill_ these sememes, moving more and more of their
processes into the autonomic, and opening up the appearance of the infin-
ite within their highly-limited bandwidth. For example, lower-ascii email
is highly limited in form, but expansive as it becomes increasingly fam-
iliar; identity can, in fact, reside in the flickering channels opening
and closing between inbox and outbox.
Identity, then, performs an extended set of ontological and epistemologi-
cal leaps in cyberspace. The body returns doubly coded messages, loops
through text back into itself; the feedback is mediated. The mediation
occurs through the reading/writing/wryting apparatus of text and delay
within sememes. Epistemologically, bandwidth is always changing, always
negotiated itself. Ontologically, virtuality and the "real" (which is it-
self heavily coded, internally and externally) intersect through the same
sorts of attributive intersections of unions of attributes described above
- in this case, the real is compiled into language, and language is com-
piled into the real.
Finally, it seems (relatively) clear that identity in cyberspace is not
only internalized within the subject, but also externalized, dispersed, as
a diasphora (diffusion carried by protocol / sememe) within reasonably
well-defined phenomenological horizons. The major difference between this
externalization, and that which occurs in daily ("real") life, is that
the latter is negotiated on and off among institutions, which can be in-
sidious in their introjectivity, but are never quite as totalized as the
cyberspatial sememes. The latter, for one thing, refuse, by virtue of non-
hacked error; badly-formed addresses, for example, just won't transmit
but will return an error-message in the Pine reader.
Increasingly, images of cloud-formations come to _light._
___________________________________________________________________________