Digital Self: Fiction and non-fiction on the internet

Abstract

By tradition, cognitive science uses the computer metaphor and psychological models that attempt to explain human complexity isolating the subject of sociocultural plot. Breaking with cartesian dualism, we invite the reader to consider the virtual-real continuous, in which the self is constituted as a discursive construction, social and narratively structured that emerges and develops in sequences of dialogical action established by partners located in time and space. Accordingly, we address aspects of communication and interaction on subjective relationships and intimacy we have with others while navigating on the internet. Paradoxically, in digital culture, fiction and non-fiction walk intertwined, supporting our practices with resources that allow us to compensate for the lack of a physical body. Basing on these assumptions, we investigated how the continuities and discontinuities occur in discursive ways in which people relate to themselves while transits on virtual and physical scenarios. For that, we turn to the ethnographic method. More specifically, we used: video version of the classic A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens; interview protocol about personal continuity interrelated to the film, the self and Orkut, and clippings Orkut profiles of respondents. Three subjects participated in the study: one male and two females, aged between 20 and 30 years. Paying attention to the pragmatic aspect of the utterance or speech, we chose the enunciation because it reveals the voices of the "I" positions that connects the agent of speech to the audience in communicative practices of sustaining themselves. In the analysis, we grouped the responses according to the content that corresponded, in this case, to the "I" positions in the narrative act. Thus, we identify two levels of analysis: in the first one, the subject is engaged in a process of authorship, in the second one, the subject acts as if he/her were another. In such circumstances, the positions taken by the subject allow him/her to move through the imagination, as though in space, in accordance with changes in situation and time. By this study, we concluded that: 1) affinities, likes and interests are anchors that people use at virtual world to bring them what they know of the physical world, 2) the number of singularities (other "I" s) are interconnected to affinities, likes and interests, whose associations are located in the virtual environment on the links (symbolic places) between profiles and communities (writing, photos, images, audio, video), as well as between users and developers (aid terms, security center, etc.), 3) people do not connect to the internet just because they are geographically distant, but mainly because they seek answers, seek to establish that the communicative ties closer together; 4) while communicating, the user may oppose the idea that others have of him/her, if different from the others, although simultaneously is engaged in groups that make he/she similar to and different from each other as a communal. © 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland.