10 years of living life digitally: embodiment, authenticity and isolation

10 years ago a health condition that I'd had for a number of years (ME) suddenly became very severe. Overnight I became housebound no longer able to go to work, to socialise with my friends or even just do the weekly shop. One of the hardest things to deal with is the social isolation -  being housebound means that there are often weeks at a time when I see noone other than my husband.

 

For this reason many of my interactions with other people are now digital, whether this on Skype, through social media or via texts messages.  There's a lot of worry these days about the effect of our ever increasing digital lives (much of it documented in Sherry Turkle’s book: Alone Together): the shallowness of the communication, the lack of attention to those around us, the worry about adverse effects on our mental health, the pressure to portray yourself as someone that you are not - the list goes on.  But what if your only option is digital? Frances Ryan’s recent Guardian articleexplored how social media is a lifeline for many disabled people and this certainly chimes with my experiences. Digital communication and social media have certainly had enormous benefits, enabling me to develop friendships, to find support, to be part of different communities and to feel connected to others.

But can digital communications ever really replace face-to-face interactions?

One of the central worries about social media is that people are not being their true authentic selves but rather putting a curated version of the person they would like to be or think they ought to be, online. This may well be true: I think twice about posting very negative posts such as how I'm really feeling when I'm struggling. I'm also mindful of posting really positive news knowing that many of my friends may not be having such a good day.  But isn't this true of real life as well? Does it even make sense to talk about a single authentic self? In every situation whether we are with friends, family, work colleagues, parents or partners, we are one version of ourselves, subconsciously filtering our responses. Perhaps the issue is that while we can be different versions of ourselves in different face to face interactions with different people, on social media our audience contains so many and such a wide variety of people that it is hard to know who we are really talking to.

And yet as a person with a chronic illness it sometimes feels that I can be closer to my authentic self when online, communicating with others who know what it is like, people who understand both the small joys and the sadnesses, who will celebrate when I manage  to wash my hair, or commiserate when I have to cancel a longed for outing.

There's a certain anonymity, in online forums particularly, that allows you to express yourself while also building personal relationships with people you've never met. Yet these are not really strangers. I find that we often have friends in common - we are part of the same network, a community of people connected by our shared experiences, even if in many cases we are separated by physical distance.

I think that digital communications, if carefully designed, can even overcome this physical distance and enable a sense of embodiment, of being present with others.  I've had a few recent experiences of this: at a reunion of university friends and when giving seminars for the Vet School and the Medical Education forum at Edinburgh  In both cases I was too ill to attend in person but was able to have a digital presence through a Skype call. And in both cases the laptop was passed around the room so that I could interact with different people. This had the  rather unexpected benefit of increasing my feeling of embodiment - I was even able to see the view out of the window, (thanks Sharon!). I saw the room from multiple perspectives giving me a sense of scale, depth and perspective very nearly equivalent to being there in person.

My WoW character

Another, particularly vivid experience I had of this was when playing World of Warcraft as part of a module on the Digital Education MSc. When playing the game for fun one Sunday afternoon I somehow wandered into an area that was a few levels above that of my character. This meant that every creature I encountered was able to kill me and I had no way of escaping - I was doomed! Luckily one of the tutors (thanks Clara!) was online at the same time with a very experienced character and she kindly came along to rescue me. This shared experience is as real to me as meeting someone for coffee. We were both there sharing in the same space at the same time, involved in the same interrelated set of actions while experiencing the scene from our own slightly different, bodily perspectives.

Do these experiences help with the isolation of being housebound?

To some extent yes, I have certainly had very meaningful interactions with both friends and colleagues. But there is still something missing and it is hard to articulate exactly what that is. I have recently been interviewing students at the University of Edinburgh about their use of lecture capture (recordings of the lecture). When asked whether they prefer to watch the recordings or to be in a live lecture they overwhelmingly say they prefer to be present in the lecture, yet they struggle to articulate why this is the case. There is something about the 3D experience of being present in a shared space and shared time, of hearing a pure voice unaltered by the digital conversion to 1s and 0s reconstituted and broadcast through computer speakers, the unspoken words communicated through eye contact and body language, that is missing from my online communications.

Often in this debate communications that are ‘In Real Life’ (IRL) are contrasted with those that are ‘digital’. My experience has certainly been that digital communications are just as much a part of my real life as face to face ones. But that doesn't mean that I don't still miss simple things that only face to face interactions can provide, like the physical contact of a hug.

Image is by JonathanMcCabe on Flickr and is CC BY 2.0

 

10 years of living life digitally: embodiment, authenticity and isolation  by Anna Wood is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.