Idealized Avatars, Personas, and Perfect Robot Bodies
September 11, 2009 :: Joe LoongI thought I was going to be all clever by talking about a trio of Hollywood movies (out now or soon) that share a common theme of people controlling proxies to interact with the world, then using that as a springboard into a metaphorical look at how we use our online presences… but then Popular Mechanics kinda beat me to it.
However, since their article focuses on the technologies behind controlling robot and virtual proxies through brain-computer interfaces, I’m going to charge ahead anyway.
Now, the movies in question are Avatar (a super-hyped flick by Titanic’s James Cameron that I have no idea if I’ll see or not), Gamer (out now, meh), and Surrogates (which, judging from the trailer, stars Bruce Willis’s toupee).
My knowledge of the movies is utterly superficial, though they all involve people controlling other bodies, be they robot, cloned, or belonging to someone else. In Avatar, it’s for the purposes of exploring a hostile alien environment; in Gamer, it’s for gladiatorial games, and Surrogates, it’s for living a risk-free life in an idealized robot body.
Of the three concepts, Surrogates seems to the oddest to me. After all, if you’re seamlessly remote-controlling a robot body out in the real world, with all the sensory inputs fed directly into your brain, why bother with a robot body at all — why not just cut out the middleman and create a wholly virtual environment, indistinguishable from the real one? (Because that would be The Matrix, that’s why.)
Maybe it’s addressed in the movie. After all, whether it’s via holodeck, hallucination, or virtual reality, living in an idealized artificial world is pretty-well worn sci-fi territory.
The Metaphorical Bit
Right, so here’s the part where I try to tie this back to online personas today.
Actually, we have to start earlier, back in the text-only days of USENET newsgroups, IRC chat and e-mail listserves, where people were only known by their words. For a brief time, we weren’t judged by physical appearance. Oh, we still judged each other — just not by looks (it was a good time to be a good writer) — and I’m not as blinded by nostalgia to think that this represented a time where only our “true personalities” mattered — the personality you presented online was likely an idealized version (or at least an aspirational one) of yourself, and may or may not have borne any resemblance to your actual personality (the “avatar” bit, before there were avatars).
This period lasted until people decided they might like to meet in real life (so, about a month, probably, for any given geographically-based community.)
Moving forward to today, with images and video, while on one hand it may be harder to keep people on the Internet from knowing you’re a dog, on the other hand, we still see people using images and avatars to present idealized versions of themselves.
A few years back, I came up with a theory that the hotness of your online avatar was inversely proportional to your hotness in real life (that is to say, the hotter your avatar, the less attractive you actually were), which I don’t think is going out on a limb. Again, it’s a way to present your idealized or aspirational image to the world. (When companies do this, it’s called “branding,” which is why I’m still amused by the concept of personal branding.)
Anyway, I don’t have a neat bow to tie all this together, other than to say that I’m not sure that future generations will distinguish between online and offline personas, though at some level they’ll still continue to use avatars or personas to present idealized or aspirational images of themselves to the world. (Until we get those direct brain-to-brain connections — it’ll probably be hard to hide your true self when that happens.)
Does any of this make sense? Please leave a comment, using the persona of your choice.
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