In Alone Together Sherry Turkle offers a sober review of what we can expect of the connections between our analogue and digital lives. It’s a corrective to the confidence she expressed in earlier works that the screens to which we are increasingly tethered offered myriad opportunities for the exploration of identity. That may be true but the idea that the unified self is a fiction because, by engaging in endless role-playing games with innumerable avatars, we realise that none of the characters we play with is any less real than what we think is the true self, is a tad optimistic.

Now, I’m all for the shattering of the illusion that the self is a coherent, unified, subject, and using the result to modify the ways in which we live. I just don’t think that playing with multiple avatars is actually the tool that can do the shattering or that the adoption of multiple avatars can lead to the forging of a healthier self in harmony with its world. It’s a Disney World self, a solipsistic fantasy game that leads, well, to other games, other fantasies. And of course, lets not forget that Disney World is a corporation and the avatars it offers (no matter what level of customisation is allowed) are products used to generate profit. To think that a Facebook profile is not a product to sell to the highest bidder for advertising rights, is to miss an important trick in contemporary ‘social’ media.

And so to Hello Avatar: Rise of the Networked Generation by Beth Coleman which seems to be bringing Turkle’s earlier arguments up to date. Instead of multiple screens, virtual reality and RL (real life), Coleman offers X-reality (cross reality) to suggest that our online experiences are actual and fulfilling and that they augment the self in ways that are empowering. The key is in the avatar and the ways in which, with the rise of the ‘network of things’ (ie the world as a linked database), our ability to act on the world will be increased:

Coleman calls the next cycle of media technologies to enter our culture “pervasive media” and thinks that an emergent practice of X-reality will develop out of “everyday experience of augmented reality and extended sites [of] agency. This will help us to see ourselves not as passive consumers but as agents, with a capacity to change the world around us. THE Review

The reason I’m going to buy the book is not because I’m convinced by this snippet or the review of it in general. What I’ll read it for is to see if she’s able to deal with Turkle’s recent cautionary tone or to offer some counter-arguments to Jaron Lanier’s rather magisterial rant in You Are Not A Gadget. In other words, can she convince me that our ‘avatars’ are more than simply multiple choice identities which give away our precious content for nothing to aggregators, advertisers and corporations? Or that we are ‘augmented’ by these online experiences in ways that enable us to have a healthier connection to our worlds or change them for the better?

I’m not holding my breath …