A Redefined "Self" for the Electronic Age?
Some scholars have argued that the new computer technologies and especially online communications like MOOs and MUDs are ushering in an age in which the self is being redefined. Most prominent among these scholars is Jay David Bolter, who argues that we are experiencing a redefinition of the self in this electronic age in which the new technologies – particularly those associated with "virtual reality" – are challenging and undermining the autonomous self that Bolter associates with the Enlightenment and with print technology in particular. I agree with Bolter that these new technologies may indeed be influencing our conceptions of self in profound ways, but I disagree that the result is a "new" self that differs fundamentally from the prevailing Western sense of self that I have been discussing in this webtext.
While it may be true, as Bolter (1996) asserts, that "there is a growing dissatisfaction with the notion of the enlightened, autonomous Cartesian ego" and that new technologies are playing a role in "replac[ing] the autonomous ego as a cultural ideal" (111), I would argue that these "new" versions of the self to which Bolter refers are various shades of a fundamentally intellectual self that operates and exists as separate from the physical world. In other words, these alternative conceptions of self that Bolter associates with computer technologies are really just contemporary manifestations of the prevailing Western self, which is a fundamentally intellectual being. Whether autonomous and enlightened or fragmented and contingent or some other "redefined" self, all these exist in separation from the physical world and thus are not understood to be inherently a part of what David Abram (1996) calls the "more-than-human world."