Thoughts on self, emotion and Naviblog

* Doing some thinking of late. Thinking that what we are is not what we do, not what we make, nor what we show. Cogito ergo sum, yes, fine with that. But this is a simple existential check... what defines who we are?

Are we defined by what we do at work? No. We bring past experiences, skills and ideas to the workplace, then meld them with others to produce real-world constructs. Maybe we polish some skills to the point of artistry, maybe we learn a few more. Maybe we learn about people. But at the end of the day, this is a concretized instance of my thought process, not its origin.

I realized that rather than what we do at work (however cool it is!), we are defined by what we do outside work. The type of people we meet, the type of books we read, the clothes we wear, the sports we sweat at, the chance encounters, the hikes in the wilderness, the mountaintop views, the broken rudder sailings when out at sea. These are the things that make us what and who we are.

School of environmental influence? Maybe. It just strikes me in the same way that searching for information on the Web offers me no emotional relation to the circumstances there, in the white window rendering HTML code to me. In the adimensional space called the Web, there is no up or down. There is only a purpose, an aim, a goal that must be fulfilled. Similarly in a recent McKinsey Journal article, German banks are surprised at the lack of loyalty of high-street customers when presented with a very high-quality transaction system to deal with their savings. Again, punch in a few numbers, shuffle around the numbers, print out a receipt and off you go. No need for emotional bonding, conversation or any other interaction. Just mechanical action and reaction.

As I said when we had our Naviblog launch party last August, "I hate the Internet". Not for its intrinsic networking capability, but for its incessant proximity in everyday life yet complete absence of relation. It's possible the difficulty the older generation has with computers is how to relate to its disembodied mechanicality, for a virtualized machine it truly is.

Naviblog vows to bring the sociality of information sharing and online relations in virtual worlds and overlay it with software engineering's mechanical versatility. With the omnipresence of data extensions of the self, it is time we were able to delist computers as data processing terminals and finally employ them as social tools capable of leveraging the powerful functionality of software languages with spatio-temporal patterns of recognition natural to human evolution. For then we would be truly augmenting ourselves, that is, drawing experiences and lessons to our selves not only from the physical "outside", but also from the virtual "outside".

With time, I hope we will make the technological constructs transparent and humans will be able to revert to communion with each other on an expanded spectrum of emotional communication technologies. To truly fuse the physical "outside" and the virtual "outside" would be the single greatest expansion in visual expression since the advent of film and video, and the greatest advance in virtualized data manipulation since the advent of the computer mouse.

An interesting article here recollecting our collective shift from the preeminence of cultural oral interaction, the "Logos", to the cultural printed interaction through the "Biblios": maybe we have come full-circle in the last 4,000 years and are witnessing the birth of a Biblogos. A dynamic culture of informal virtu-real oral/sensorial interaction, backed up by a cumulative culture of formal multimedia-print interaction.

Regardless, a new selves beckons, from just over the horizon.