This article originally appeared in the September, 2000, Number 12 issue of *spark.
I was curious, so I entered my name in a few different search engines to see what would come up. (Oh, like you’ve never thought of it.)
My name came up “about 78” times on Google. I thought, “Wow. Hot stuff.” When I went through the list, though, I found there were actually only 59 entries to my name. As if that wasn’t ego-deflating enough, some of the entries were in Swedish (I think). Does anybody know what Nayman means in Swedish? Removing those, there were only 33 entries with my name on them, less than half than were originally promised. Google was quite thorough: it had links to both of my *spark-online contributions which were online at the time, in both their zine and printable versions.
By way of contrast, MSN Search returned only 18 legitimate hits for my name; Yahoo 14; Lycos 12. In many cases, Lycos didn’t link directly to anything by or about me; it linked to pages on which my writing could be found (for example, the *spark-online home page rather than my individual articles). An Alta Vista search returned 109,164 hits, all but a few on the first page being utterly useless.
Searching for your name on the Internet can be a humbling experience. Most hits on the various search engines were articles that had been written for the Web or for a print publication that archives its material on the Web. I knew these things were online, so I wasn’t surprised to find them. There
were, however, two links to material of which I was completely unaware. One, found through MSN Search, was the outline for a course taught at the University of Maine on distance education. One of my articles that can be found online is about my experiences getting my master’s degree entirely through the Internet; it was written for a magazine called Educom Review.
Apparently, this was required reading for the U of M course. This allowed me to get a little bit of ego back.
The other, found through Google, was a discussion list for a course on online education. Half a dozen of the posts to the list were on the subject “The Ira Nayman Experience.” I assume this has something to do with the article on online learning, but I can’t be sure: I don’t have access to the posts on my own life.
My ego will never recover.
This got me thinking about the postmodern concept of the de-centred self. (Note how I use the very pre-modern rhetorical device of changing the subject.) We think of ourselves as a single, coherent personality centred around a single set of experiences and housed within a finite body.
Postmodernists argue that the personality is fragmented by modern media. We are multiple (since we are now the sum of all of the images of us, our voices on audio tape or through the telephone and words which we have written which are in circulation) and no longer centred in our physical bodies (since these pieces of us could be anywhere in the world). In fact, the unitary personality was always a convenient fiction.
Think about how differently you act with your friends, with your family, at work, etc.; it’s as if you become a different person in various social situations. What’s really happening is that you allow different parts of you to determine your behaviour in social situations. However, most of us prefer to think of ourselves as having a single set of characteristics, which are grounded in our bodies.
According to theorists, electronic technologies such as the Internet challenge the assumption of the centred self in two ways. When we work at a computer screen, we are not only in our bodies, but our consciousness is dispersed throughout the network. Hey, look: this Web page is in Moscow. I click, and now I’m in Tokyo. Even while the network allows me to zip through the world, I remain at my computer.
This may be true on some deep level, but I must say that I have never consciously experienced this. I am barely aware of where Web pages originate from when I am surfing, and even when I do notice, it’s just a momentary awareness. “Oh,” I say to myself, “this page has a .jp extension. Neat. Now, is there anything here I can use?” At all times, I’m not really relating to information stored in some distant computer; my relationship is with the screen that is in my immediate vicinity.
The other way electronic media are said to de-centre the self, one that is more relevant to “The Ira Nayman Experience,” is in the way they make it possible for our words (or images) to travel throughout the world. People who know me only from my writing for *spark-online, for instance, see only a single side of me, a side much different from my friends or people I work with.
Two thoughts occur to me on this subject. First, there is nothing new in this. When I mention something I am working on which makes my parents swell with pride, they tend to tell their friends and some relatives, creating images of me in their minds that are beyond my control. I imagine this has been going on since people could first speak: “Guess what Og do? He fingerpaint on wall, now!” Electronic media may have made the process more obvious, especially since they leave traces by which it can be measured in a way that oral cultures do not, but the process was ancient long before electronic media existed. (Do books de-centre their authors’ identities?)
Second, to people online, I literally am my words; but, to me, my words are not who I am. A lot of artists think of their work as children; as painful as they may be to gestate, once they are in the world they are on their own. It may be true, therefore, that multiple, partial versions of me exist on the Internet, even some of which I am still completely unaware, but this isn’t a serious challenge to my illusion of myself as a single person centred in my body since I don’t think of them as parts of my identity.
Or, at least, that’s the way things look from inside the Ira Nayman experience.
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