March Guest Spot - Jon Beech

I’m introducing a new feature to the dysconnected blog. An end of the month guest spot on perspectives specific to social media and mental health. If you’d like to get in on the guest spot action email me at kate.brown@imhleedmind.org.uk

It’s good to talk.

Kate

On becoming your own imaginary friend[i]

Many of us have played round with other identities. I for one have welcomed the regular opportunities to subtly (sometimes drastically) reinvent myself brought about by changing jobs, relationships, places of study, moving house, the people I live with and so on.

I have used these sea-change moments as chances to reflect, to escape, to make and break promises to myself, and to try and become more authentically “me”. With predictable irony,  some of these periodic stabs at authenticity have left me feeling more alienated than I was before, but still, I store these experiences up and at brave moments try to believe my reflections on these memories might pass for wisdom.

The virtual world is one of those places where I have also invented, and reinvented myself. It’s a place where I have explored my political, gender and sexual identities, described aspects of my life, and wasted huge amounts of time, playing. It has been a place I have tried many ideas on for size and a place where I have felt visceral fear, elation, disappointment and a sense of being the best “me” I can imagine.  It has also been a place where I have had to renegotiate my relationship to actions and consequences.

I was about 6 or 7 when I discovered that Defender regenerated as fast as I could find another 10p. And when I discovered unlimited lives could be bought for the cost of an Acorn Electron, I was hooked into a cycle of disposable Avatars. (It’s only now that I reflect this awareness coincided with the dawning horror of what people at Church kept referring to as the Great Reckoning.[ii] )

I don’t remember having an imaginary friend as a kid. But I know other people who did, and have always been interested in what that’s all about. Much of what I think is going on in virtual places is a combination of this, creative play, fantasy-fulfillment, and a willing-suspension of self-belief. A willingness to hyperlink out of one’s own direct experience, and emerge as something or someone in a parallel universe. A reified Other, who is something like yourself but also not. It can be as radical as a Bowie-esque genre shift, or as bathetic as an endless cycle of Groundhog Days.

But we shouldn’t be surprised to find ourselves agreeing with Nick Yee’s view of how mundane Second Lives can be. For most of us, our online plastic surgery is more Celine Dion than Michael Jackson. We want to nip and tuck more than we wish to slash and burn. But for others, it’s a Dr Who regeneration, a Reboot or a full-scale reimagining.  What continually surprises me is how relaxed we are with these authorial tactics in fiction, but how “deceptive” some people find it to encounter someone doing the same thing online.

After a number of 1-ups I’m still learning how to be virtual. Ascii is not a friendly medium for someone who still relies on a twinkly eye beneath an arched eyebrow.  And I’ve lost count of the emails I’ve sent that have gotten me into bother. But I’m glad of the chances virtuality gives me to work out who it is I am, and who I might want to be. Even if that me turns out to be my imaginary friend.

[i] This piece started life as a rather ramshackle Frankenstein’s monster of French theories roughly sewn together with techno-speak. But after a while I started to bore myself. I’m no critical theorist, or a Wachowski Brother, and nor do I wish to be.  So instead, I thought I’d stay true to the spirit of Web2, and blather on about myself instead.

[ii] And it’s also just occurred to me whilst writing this,  if my anti-RIPA 2000 sentiments were an equally futile fist-waving  against the possibility of a Virtual Apocalyse

Jon

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