Real World Identity-Cloud Problems

I dunno...I really like my original concepts for online identity, but I'm a bit unsure about real-world application. The most it accomplishes is to bring about individual awareness to the information harvesting going on, and the manipulation thereof, but you still only use one interface at a time. Humans aren't designed for more than that.

Lately I've been chatting on the disinformation site. Within my rules of online identity, when you connect, you create an aspect of yourself, designed specifically to interface with that specific "realm" of cyberspace. In this case, you pick a username, select an icon to represent you (amusingly, the chat applets calls this an "avatar"), and you're in. Interfacing is done with the keyboard for typing and the mouse for menu selection and some drawing capabilities.

That makes up for a pretty run-of-the-mill online experience. You create the identity, use the interface to manipulate that identity, and it's a 1-to-1 representation of yourself.

Now, last night I was also using ICQ to talk to my brother. So, I had my exsisting identity on ICQ, and a different interface, keyboard for communication, mouse for manipulation, and some sound interface for event notification. While the disinfo chat ran in the background, I could watch the words scroll by as I wrote back and forth to my brother.

At this point we have two identities and two interfaces. Now, let's add mailservers. In a sense, a mailserver is an autonomous avatar -- when the SMTP server gets an email message for me, as a local user, it accepts the message on my behalf and stores it until the real-world me can stop and pick it up. My identity there is part of a larger system of users, but my identity there exists wether or not I am online. I interface with it on demand, but for the sender of the message, the letter was delivered to me without a problem. At this time, I have 5 or 6 email servers working for me, waiting to accept messages on my behalf.

That makes up the bulk of my active avatars. Beyond that, my online identity is defined through file records, entries in databases, log entries, and various other data trails.those make up _me_, but they don't have a lot of effect on my chatting or ICQ use. It does have a degree of impact on my email use, though -- the commercial database entries get me spam, and listserv subecriptions get me news and other information on a regular basis. I suppose, once h.jones becomes more active in an online sense, there will be more to tie that aspect of my identity to the rest of me. It was just created, so it is decidedly autonomous compared to the rest of my online aspects.usenet posts will remain online in archives & as quotes in threads, spam will begin to arrive at the h.jones email address, and the webpage will begin to get hits, being indexed by search engines & web indexes.

I guess I'm still not looking at the whole picture, though. Most of an online identity is made up of non-internet things, but you can't use that identity in real-time like you can on the internet. that identity is still made up of avatar interaction and is recorded by the other users, not by any sort of online storage space. That's where I'm missing something; there's a point where those two need to cross, but it's not very defined. Once that is defined, then my homunculi definition of online identity will be more real-world applicable. At this time, it's a nice definition, but it does not dictate any sort of response to be taken. Looking at TV and reading in books about examples of online interfacing, something just doesn't seem right to me. You can't just "jack in" to the internet and go zooming. Neurotechnology aside, the idea of becoming a single aspect within a computer network is exceedinly limiting and unproductive. The 'matrix' is not a big virtual space -- our 3-dimentional ideas of time & space are not only non-applicable to the matrix, but are counterproductive to it's existence.

Even, when you think about trying to represent the matrix in a virtual reality sense, why are you wasting all that computer power to turn thething virtual into an approximation of the real world? The reason we use the matrix the way we do is because it _isn't_ anything like the real world. We don't want it that way -- online distance is measured in miliseconds, time is described in MFLOPs, and temperature, weight, up, down, color, smell, etc., all are counterproductive to the system. That's why it's so hard to develop a truly real-time computer system. You have to take away from the computer's natural habitat it's ability to just do what it does. Teaching a computer that when an object falls and is stopped by another object, it's mass & energy exert a force on the other object, is very easy. Scientists and high school students use that all the time in order to predict the action of an object. But when you try to get a computer to represent that in a virtual 3-dimentional space, you have a whole lot of new things to have the computer think about besides the force itself. There are new rules for the computer to obey, besides just being able to use a mathematical equation which represents the 3-dimentional actions.

If we were to try to take the internet, and give everyone VR glasses so that they can walk around the internet like it's some mall somewhere, you have to twist the internet's current environment, bog it down with VR computations, and make into a poor approximation of what it would look like if it were created in the real world. Unfortunately, if it worked in the real world, it would have happened that way. It doesn't exist in any of the dimensions that our senses detect, which is the main reason that I don't think the "avatar" idea of online identity doesn't work. You can't just be a single autonomous identity wandering the streets of cyberspace. There aren't any streets to wander, and cyberspace is a misnomer -- there isn't any _space_ within cyberspace. The form that a real-world human takes has to conform to the rules of existence within cyberspace, not the other way around. To twist cyberspace to conform to the environment that humans are used to is a hindrance to the online world.

In order, however, to interact with the online world, us humans need to go through some real-world restrictions. We aren't multitasking, we are restricted by limitations of the laws of physics, time moves so slow, and we think in a very abstract way. This is probably where the homunculus apex is, but not really. Each of the credit cards in your wallet is part of your homunculus, any computer you sit down at, any password that you memorize, but that is not the homunculus that does anything. It's the structure, but not the substance. That substance is made up from the user's application of the structure, moving within cyberspace and creating more information and acting upon the user's needs, thoughts, and attitudes.

Following this tangent, since I think I'm getting on to something....my grandmother is going to Florida to visit relatives today. She was concerned about getting her AOL email down there. She can log on to AOL via my aunt's computer, but she wanted to make sure that it wouldn't show up as a long distance bill if she checked her email. Without going into too much highbrow detail, I explained, no, that physical location isn't an issue, as long as you have a local dialup to use. She kind of changed the subject with a comment about her email being "up there", in North Dakota. Well, when I started the thought, I had something, but maybe not.

I guess this journal entry isn't worth a whole lot -- my disjointed rantings put into text, without much of a point. I'll have to go back and read this later, see if I have any points at all....

Written 11/14/1999