If online presence involves fragmentation of the body into multiple e-presences (as suggested in the previous post), the relationships get forged between the real life me and my online representations and possibly some of my online personae also link to each other. Such a complex construct starts interacting with other net users/residents who have formed similar identities. I can imagine that the real selves and online selves relate to each other on different levels and in different configurations, the links being of different strength. I would love to be able to present it in 3D but at the moment my drawings Pic 1 and Pic 2 will have to suffice.

This is just two people getting connected online but considering the number of ‘friends’ and ‘acquaintances’ we make online, the network might grow unbelievably huge and  multi-layered. I imagine this as a live construct, dynamic in its movement and change which I am unable to represent visually. However, I could use an example - recently I have seen a fascinating talk given by Deb Roy about the birth of a word. In this talk he shows how through the use of technology and advanced analysis of data researchers have managed to capture how a child learns a language. This is an amazing piece of research in itself but what also captured my attention is the interactive 3D visualisation Roy uses to present the data (8:32 minute). The wordscape  that is built by the dynamic traces left by the child and his caregivers, a knotted bundle of ink trails, social and solo hot spots, in my view, could demonstrate our activity online, the knots being points of exchange between us/our online selves and others/their online selves as we/our online selves wander across the netscape. Roy moves on to describe how the analysis could be applied in the study of media (around 11 minute of the vid) and the interplay between the social and content graphs, another mind-blowing representation of what the networks look like and work. What  this powerful images add to my own very simplistic attempt to pin down the nature of relationships and interactions is the content contribution as it is not only people and their avs we relate to, but the artefacts scattered online!