The etymology of the word ‘uncanny’ could be linked to the phrase ‘beyond one’s ken’, where ‘ken’ comes from ‘can’, meaning ‘know how to’. Thus the uncanny is not only creepy and supernatural as it is commonly believed but also or even more so ‘unfamiliar’ (Freud’s ‘unheimliche’ – not homely), thus stretching one’s cognitive comfort zone and even crossing one’s perceptive horizons (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny).

Freud’s uncanny takes us to the personal archaeological site where one excavates wanted and unwanted splinters of our past selves, which can have a disruptive effect on our sense of identity. The technological and digital take the uncanny further into the realm of the rhizomatic web where the splinters, ‘remnants of animistic mental activity’ change into ‘bodies scattered online’ (Bayne, 2010:9), traces of our online selves and half-selves (after all, to what extent can we express our full self assuming that the self is not a homogenous whole entity but a multifaceted construct?) imprinted whenever we sign up for a particular online service, in vein with Bayne (2008: 201): ‘If one wants to explore virtuality (I take the word in its broader meaning here, social web in general not only virtual worlds like Second Life), it does not seem appropriate to commit oneself to being one thing’.

So this is me online:

First, how MIT perceives me (any time I attempt to use the application the result is different, which makes me question the reliability of the visualisation but nevertheless I like it and find it strangely comforting to see how I am being reduced to a colourful bar code) can be seen here.

Now my very private take on the notion of online presence, inspired by readings about hauntology and the uncanny (Bayne, 2008 and 2010) can be found here.

These various selves shown in the vids and discussed by Bayne in her papers can of course be overlapping but also discrepant. And it is not only about us operating in different domains, let’s say professional and private (e.g. in the recent SL tutorial you admitted to having several accounts and switching between the avatars depending on the nature of your visit to the inworld; similarly, I’m thinking of having two facebook accounts, one private and another professional) but also within these domains we uncover various facets of our self (‘uncover’ not necessarily being the opposite of ‘conceal’ but rather ‘accentuate’ and ‘emphasise’ as well as ‘embellish’ and ‘distort’ – ‘Online identity constructs contain both truth and artifice, they are fractured, confused reflection of a person, never wholly unreal but never wholly real, a seeming half truth’ (Bayne, 2010: 9). The constant self-multiplication might create a kind of dissonance or ‘a crisis of the natural’, where nature stands for ‘one’s own nature, human nature, the nature of the reality and the world’ (Royle 2003 in Bayne 2008; Bayne, 2010). I’d like to focus on the selfhood here, leaving the rest of ‘ontological stammering’ (Meyer and Land, 2005) as well the consequences of such doubts and crises for education to be dissected in a separate post (Entry 19).

As said earlier, the duplicates of myself get strewn across the online landscape. What is worth considering is that they might prove hard to control or obliterate. You, or rather yous, join a powerful network and, as Bayne (2010: 9) puts it, ‘gain a kind of independence as nodes of commentary, connection and appropriation by others into new networks and new configurations’. For instance, even if you delete your facebook account, parts of your identity might be still living in other users’ accounts. Your online identity is subject to constant fluctuation, fragmentation and dissemination, no matter how persistent or non-persistent your actual presence is. In fact, your absence/inactivity can paradoxically lead to your presence too (Bayne, 2010:9, talks about ‘embodied absence’ ). To illustrate this, recently while googling my name I discovered I am 126436th in the ranking of tweetwasters, a dubious honour (and it unnerved me at first to see how my ‘I’ is meddled with) but to me indicative of how little control we have over our online footprints (or clickprints?). Once I took part in a webinar on online tutoring and in one of the slides, to my total surprise I saw a picture of my desk (the presenter was from the company I had taken a course with earlier), another time on some blog written by a person who doesn’t know me I came across my name, used in association with a particular ELT approach (at the time I was putting together an online workshop on it but I was keeping that knowledge to myself so obviously somebody else must have dropped my name in that context). Even though on these two occasions I wasn’t subjected to any ridicule, I felt a bit of discomfort, possibly because these ‘mes’ although seemingly just mere representations of the real me somehow gained importance of their own. It’s like being face-to-face with your clone, your lookalike, which somehow can replace you, obliterate you, make you redundant,  something the uncanny both in Freud’s and Bayne’s writing is related to. This way coming across our online doppelganger in the least expected moment might disrupt  our sense of being, integrity (in a sense that all these smithereens of id which constitute ‘me’ somehow hang together), wholeness, sovereignty, simultaneously, however, inducing enticing attraction, also raising questions to what extent I am and can be responsible for that ‘other being’ and to what extent I (can/should) associate myself with it, especially in a situation when our identity becomes an object/commodity and as such undergoes mashing-up, repurposing and unfortunately sometimes misuse.

As said in the section ‘SL_Selfhood’ of my wiki, there is something symbiotic about the relationship with the online ‘mes’, especially at the beginning when we need to ‘feed’ the avatar in SL or other online representations, this connection potentially being subverted later. To disclose or not disclose information and which information to disclose is a dilemma we all face when getting re-embodied online. To what extent can I reveal myself and in what ways can and do these glimpses of my soul (used metaphorically) live or even outlive me online? In order to express myself on this blog, I’ve made a couple of videos, e.g. one on liminal spaces, which aim to present my take on the academic issues covered on the course. The take is quite personal and perhaps simplistic (not to mention my amateur attempts at drawing, animation, photo-, video- and sound-processing – I have no pretence to be an expert in this matter and actually the constraints my lack of skills in this respect imposes on me are quite frustrating) – I’ve had to make the vids public to be able to embed them in my blog, a decision that was not easy. Would others, random strangers, who come across my youtube channel show ‘thumbs up’, ridicule or just shrug their shoulders? Yes, the decision to come out and publish something and thus leave a tangible trace has been disquieting but also exhilarating. I am trying to reason with myself in order to suppress the anxiety – there are conduct codes online, that if even the harshest criticism won’t matter because the critic doesn’t know me (actual me), doesn’t have access to the full me, my motives, my intentions so how would their opinion be objective (on the other hand, I am aware of those motives and intentions so I am ‘clean’ in front of myself). Then there is also a simplistic argument that I wouldn’t poke fun at anybody so perhaps I won’t be laughed at either. Perhaps naively, I have a notion of the community as complying with the conventions, giving assistance to members in maintaining their face in the event of a blunder. So maybe you are right, Clara, suggesting that we are trying to bridge the gap between the uncanny and the familiarity by filling it in with our notions of what we are and what the community is (the question however is whether such a gap exists?).

Now, this is yet again my very personal interpretation of the uncanny – my postings are very self-oriented, which I find partly therapeutic (as I have my little epiphanies on the way helping me understand myself better)but partly stifling. Being a bit of pragmatist too, I would like to see how I could apply this in a wider educational context – on to the next posting then!