10feb

10 February 2000

I cannot seem to detach myself from both the construction of "my place" on the web, and my own psychological wonderings about how this is changing my attitudes towards techno-developments in Education, more specifically in my own. I am drawn to representing myself more and more individually--as singularly as possible, but the more I try to do this the more contrived it becomes. My awareness of and use of further Web design technologies is limited--thus making my own identity on the Web limited, and more so, contrived. Who wants to be considered contrived, especially if one is not there in a physical sense, to defend themselves. I try hard to catch up to techno-developments, but there really aren't enough hours in the day to devote myself to the furthering of myself virtually--I cannot come to bear more devotion than what I already give, which seems like all the time anyway.

But the process and development of my place here on the web has given me more smiles than a lot of what I have done in the previous three years or so. This is truly interesting for me, even away from the purely intellectual level, and entering more on the psychological level, where this has taken on many forms, functions and familiarizations. I seem to have a dream about my presence on the Web nightly--either devastatingly horrible or erotically exhilarating. I wake up in a sweat and run to my computer to see what is going on the in world...I sometimes feel like Neo (aka Mr. Anderson) in "The Matrix." I am constantly trying to better the image I present of myself and of how I can possibly be perceived. Even though a lot of this work is for my academic classes (thus a life that seems to mean more in reality, but less in my own mind), I find myself wanting almost to feel what it must be like from the other side--from someone who stumbles upon my web page at 3 am in the morning...smoking cigarettes and drinking mass amounts of coffee. Are they my relatives? Is there some sort of "virtual" kinship that occurs when one is exposed to an-other's identity in a virtual environment? These questions can also be extended to the process of accessing and acquiring information as well--what am I actually looking for when I go out to cruise or "surf" the web? Do I have goals, or am I easily distracted by whatever seems to be advertised at the moment? I tend to find myself going for my credit card more often in cyberspace more than I do wandering around the suburban shopping mistake on 101 south in Eureka. Why is this? Once I finally narrow down the information I need, I also find that the information has connections to more information into other parts of the same thing I am investigating. I find that I am digging a hole to China, and realizing half way there, that China moved to where Canada is now. Thus we see not only a illusion of place, but we are witnessing an illusion of direction within our minds--the logical connections of the print/ocular/spatio-temporal "real" world fall apart in the "virtual world" of pure mathematical information--1--0--0--1--0--1--0--0--1--1--are we in distress?

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