Hybrid Beings: Multiple Selves
I taught a college course Spring of 2021 about how nowadays we all have two personas: our physical/real selves, and our digital selves. Dive into the synopsis of this course.
Teaching COLL 139
It was an immense privilege to be able to teach a course in college, I was no professor, nor assistant professor. Before teaching though, I completed a course on teaching methodologies. The course description is available for the world to see. I co-taught this course, when deciding what to teach it was the peak of the coronavirus pandemic. We chose to focus on the increasingly relevant theme of dual existence in both physical and digital realms, whether you have thought about it or not. The default realm is the physical realm - how you’re born and how you die, a human that interacts with other humans through physical means such as conversations, body language, writing. The most recent realm of the last couple dozen years is the digital realm - how you present yourself on the internet, your @, your gamertag, your Instagram feed, your newsletter. It’s a surprising amount of work to exist in both of these realms simultaneously, you constantly upkeep 2 versions of yourself that are inherently different.
Admittedly, my co-instructor and I were ill equipped to teach a semester’s worth of content up to par with other student professors. Nonetheless, we felt a duty to help others be keenly aware of their lives becoming more digital, and less physical. I ultimately wanted to teach a sense of awareness of this concept, and present different ways to reconcile, or cope, these different versions of ourselves. In the following paragraphs I’ll share how I define the digital and physical self, the hybridization of these, and some closing thoughts.
What does it mean to be a hybrid being?
In this course I emphasized that although we have two versions of ourselves, there is a certain amount of overlap that causes these two selves to intertwine, there is an amount of hybridization we may not avoid. When you create a social media account, or we can go earlier, when you create your first email account - you begin to create and mold your digital self. Are you firstname.lastname@hotmail.com? Are you catluvr33@gmail.com, or are you firstname@personalwebsite.com? From the moment we began to browse the internet we defined our physical selves on some aspects of ourselves, whether you knew it or not. When you post to Instagram these picture are parts of your life that you choose to share. Or for those of you with secret accounts (often folks of marginalized communities) your digital self is a more real version of you than how you present yourself, such as folks who grew up in a very conservative household who find their more liberal communities online. Consequentlye, how you interact with the digital world influences how you go about your life - that one podcast that is teaching you about cold plunges, or the reddit post that taught you that octopus are most likely sentient.
Today we are all hybrid versions of our digital and physical selves and it’s important to understand the implications!
The Digital Self
We all have at least one online persona, or version of ourselves. If you’re reading this your email is the simplest version of this persona. I think it’s worth exploring why these personas exist in the first place.
Practicality
There are various reasons we have created digital versions of ourselves for practical reasons - we need an email to contact people, or to create an account somewhere. In this scenario we don’t necessarily want to digitize ourselves, but we had no choice.
Anonymity
There are communities on the internet that can bring real comfort and security to the folks in it. I’ve had friends growing up who truly felt themselves in these communities, whether it’s a discord server, a niche forum, or simply a reddit thread. There is beauty if being able to be yourself, and in this case it happens online. I’ve seen this play out for folks who feel it uncomfortable or dangerous to be themselves in the real world, people with a homophobic household who can be themselves online. Political activists who must hide their criticism of their government by sharing it online only. This, to me, is a good outcome of digital versions of ourselves. Of course, an in ideal world one must not be anonymous under a pseudonym to be oneself but the fact that it’s possible is great.
Anonymity: the dark side
Just as someone feels that they can be their true selves and find caring communities online, there is the twisted side to this. Folks who seemingly live normal lives, but once at home in the comfort of their office and computer turn into monsters. There are far too many extremist communities out there, 4chan as a common example, who harbor these fringe members of society. It’s more than likely a lot of the folks in these extremist communities began as lurkers, but as they dove deeper into the depths of this world became indoctrinated. These people live lives outside of the internet that becomes dangerously influenced by their time online.
For fun!
To me this can be creating your snapchat or instagram account! It’s a fun thing, sharing your memories, chatting with friends, talking to that one cousin you really miss. I think this side of our digital selves is the most common and the most overlooked at the same time (because it’s so normal). I know very few people without any social media, or with a small digital presence. It’s so normal nowadays to have multiple accounts and never question it. You actually get questioned more deeply if you don’t have social media. Just like these companies, you and I did not make an instagram or titktok account knowing that years from that date your body creates an addiction to it due to its short dopamine bursts and FOMO.
I think this is one of the most dangerous forms of our digital selves because it’s so ubiquitous we don’t question it, it’s a gateway into more psychological problems, and you’re looked down upon if you’re not on social media.
There are far more reasons why we digitize ourselves, the above are the ones I think most about.
The Physical Self
This needs a lot less explaining but it’s who you are as you are the moment you are born and the moment you die. This is the self that you internally fight, and love, and cherish, and who is the initiator and on the receiving end of the effects of an existential crisis. This is the version of yourself that you present to strangers, not just your friends and family but to the people you’ll never meet again. This is the version that made the choice whether or not have a digital footprint and how deep this footprint to be.
The physical self is the one you can’t entirely modify, the digital self can be wholly made up but the physical self has some limitations. You were born of a certain race and sex that you did initially control. To me, this is the purest, and most delicate version of ourselves as there is only so much of it that we can fabricate. Because it tends to be the real version of ourselves it’s always in a form of conflict with our digital selves, no matter how deep this conflict.
I won’t dive deep into this but the version of yourself that decided to open up this email is your physical self.
The Hybridization of these two selves.
All of these versions of oneself does not exist in a vacuum. There are examples of two selves intertwining before the social media age, to make this section easier to ingest. Have you ever tried to bring two friend groups together? Have you tried to bring your friends to a family function? These are no different than how you subconsciously reconcile your digital and physical version.
The moment these two versions meet are when a potential conflict can arise. The two selves are supposed to feel the same, but in more ways they are different. When you post something on instagram your physical self is debating how much of itself to show the digital world. When you make an anonymous reddit post your digital self is deciding how much to be itself. It’s also self explanatory that these selves are different, you don’t always give your entire life story to strangers you meet on the street, so why would you to the internet? The nature of social media and the internet means you get to choose what to show.
There is an argument to be made that humans have evolved to be able to change how they behave around certain people (you submit to a leader, you love your partner differently than you love your friends or family) so having more than one version of yourself is not biologically complicated. Therefore, we must be able to reconcile these selves right? I would think otherwise as a digital self is unnatural to how our brains work, our digital selves are inherently fake, all made up. Outside of pictures, you can create an entire life of yourself online that is not real. Even with pictures you could have edited them to be different than their reality.
The older I get the more I realize that when I wake up and go to bed, your physical self is the one you have to sit with. There is a lot more to be said about how our physical self affects our digital self and vice versa but then I’ll start to sound like the Ancient Aliens guy.
Closing Thoughts
We will never not have a digital self. Hell, the Apple vision pro overtly converts your physical self to a digital version. The choices we have are:
Whether we want to reconcile these two versions of ourselves. Do we want these two versions of ourselves to be inherently different, or for there to be some semblance? Do you show your true self online, whatever that means?
Whether we want to dive deeper into one or the other (you can’t choose both, and if you find a way, let me know), some folks livelihoods depend on their digital selves being more “active” as well.
To skim over this entire article at all.
Do we embrace their differences or seek coherence?
The choice I’ve made is to embrace the physical realm as deeply as I can as it’s ephemeral. The digital world will always be there, but the smell of some flowers, the dopamine rush from some amazing barbecue, and the unconditional love my wife and pets give me - that’s real. It’s what my body was evolved to understand, I can feel my friends’ and family’s love, I can’t feel likes.