In our ongoing conversation here about – about the meaning of the internet for the individual? (is that what we’re talking about here, Carol?), I’d like to play a bit with Carol’s last two blog entries (Ikiaqqivik Means Internet and Traveling Through Layers and Identity: Two-Bit Wit, Memes and Zen). Let’s see what I can come up with.
The internet
More and more I like the word “interwebs” – it has more evocative appeal: Webs upon webs intricately connected with each other, an immense neural network. “Net”, to me, sounds like it is just one big net – maybe it was like that in 1985 but it’s certainly more complex today.
Ikiaqqivik #1: Layers
Ikiaqqivik is the Inuit word for the internet. Literally, it means “travelling through layers”. It comes from the concept describing what a shaman does when asked to find out about living or deceased relatives or where animals have disappeared to: travel across time and space to find answers.
What a great word for the internet. While “interwebs” evokes the strands in each web, ikiaqqivik points to the multidimensionality of the internet. Both the words “net” and “web” conjure up two dimensions.
One example of the layers would be the different purposes we want for the internet; in this post, Carol talks about the uses that marketing and politics want for the internet: a transmission machine for simple, clear-cut messages. Others want it to be a tool for social change, for making friends, or for publishing. (For more on the purpose of the internet, see here, here, here and here).
Ikiaqqivik #2: Travelling / Wandering
The internet (interwebsiaqqivik?) is not about being static. It’s all about travelling back and forth and crisscrossing the many strands and layers of interconnected information. I wonder, though, whether “wandering” is a better word. A great deal, if not the vast majority, of the connections we make on interwebsiaqqivik happen not because we set out to make that connection but because our curiosity leads us down a path that just minutes ago we had no idea existed. “Wandering” seems to capture this better than “travelling”, which has a bit more of a purpose-driven connotation.
Zen: Where Is The Self in the Web?
Carol says,
Seems like the theory of who and what we are, wish to be and will be, is being constantly tested and transformed by the myriad circumstances of the world around and within us. There can be no one person in the midst of this change, and the search for that one person or one identity has been the work of mystics and thinkers down through the ages. So I leave the question of internal or external identity, of internal and external spaces, domestic and public, private and public to the French philosophers (and others).
Let me just pose as a Buddhist French philosopher here for a minute and expand on Carol’s words and ask, who is that person-self that is wandering through interwebsiaqqivik? To what degree do we freely determine our identity in cyberspace? Are we one person or many? When we are more than one, do we consciously shapeshift like a shaman or scatter our identities depending on the spaces we occupy (e.g. Facebook vs. online learning vs. blogging)? Or maybe “scatter” is the wrong word and “adapt” would be better? And once again, how do our online identities relate to our offline personae?
For today, I’m going to leave you with these questions.
A friend of mine said recently, “Growing up means being able to live with the loose ends.”