Abstract
This paper examines the prevalent assumption that when people interact online via proxies—avatars—they encounter each other. Through an exploration of the ontology of users and their avatars we argue that, contrary to the trend within current discussions of interaction online, this cannot be unproblematically assumed. If users could be considered in some sense identical to their avatars, then it would be clear how an encounter with an avatar could ground an encounter with another user. We therefore engage in a systematic investigation of several conceptions of identity, concluding that in none of these senses can users and avatars be identified. We go on to explore how current accounts of identity-as-selfhood online might resolve this problem by appealing to narrativity or authorship, ultimately concluding that as these accounts stand they are unable to provide grounds for the claim that users encounter each other online and so supplementary work is required.
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Notes
Questions about tele-transportation and personal identity (for example Parfit 1984) are contentious. Whilst Parfit holds that it is clear that a person could survive tele-transportation, those who hold that no reductive criterion of personal identity can be given may well disagree with this intuition (see for instance Lowe 1996 or Merricks 1998). It is not the aim of this paper to settle this controversy here; it suffices for current purposes to establish that such cases do raise questions about the persistence conditions of persons.
Transitivity is a formal property of the identity relation. Transitive relations are relations such that if something x bears a transitive relation to something y, and y also bears the same relation to something else, z, then x must also bear that relation to z. Being-taller-than, for instance, is a transitive relation, as is identity. Loving, for instance, is intransitive—just because John loves Jane and Jane loves Janice, we cannot infer that John loves Janice (although, of course, he might—but not just in virtue of his loving Jane and her loving Janice).
It might be argued that there are no genuine cases of Synchronic multi-user avatars, and seeming cases of this can actually be reduced to very complex patterns of the Diachronic case.
It should be noted that we do not take the relative successes or failures of these positions to unify user and avatar as identical relative to the sortal person to speak to the wider debate regarding these positions—the question of just what is the correct account of personal identity is a question beyond the scope of this paper.
The claim that avatars lack beliefs, desires, memories and the like at least seems to enjoy a very high degree of prima facie plausibility. We note that perhaps this claim could be disputed, but confess that we find any literal ascription of psychological states to avatars hard to motivate.
It is not our intention to argue against these positions themselves—simply to note that they cannot substantiate a relative identity thesis in this case.
We thank an anonymous reviewer for bringing our attention to the following case: certain instances of technologically mediated communication, such as those conducted via telephone or VoIP applications such as Skype, do not seem to fit the four-place relation model suggested above. Rather, such instance might be better conceived as involving two three-place relations, one by which User One encounters Avatar Two and through it, User Two; the other by which User Two encounters Avatar One, and through it, User One. Furthermore, it seems fairly uncontentious that we encounter others when we talk to them on the telephone or via Skype. If what has just been said is correct, then one might wonder whether this model can be extended to all online interactions: whatever the case, we simply have two three place relations as described above.
It does not seem to us, however, that this model can be so extended. The cases mentioned above—the telephone; VoIP—share the following feature: the acts of communication they involve are merely recorded and broadcast (as voice or voice plus image) from one user to another. But a broad and interesting range of cases are not like this (think about interaction via social networks, MMORPGs and the like). Rather, in these cases, both users’ actions are mediated by and through their avatars, and so it is simply not clear that it can be uncontentiously asserted about these latter cases that they involve encounters between users.
We are concerned here with narrativity since it presents a particular problem for understanding encounters online. As suggested by one of the anonymous reviewers, the Levinasian notion of the encounter-with-the-face-of-the-Other might go some way towards the settling the question of how encounters can be taken to occur between users in avatar environments. For example, Cohen (2000) employs the work of Emmanuel Levinas to advance his claim that information technologies can ground face-to-face encounters in a morally significant way. The main thrust of his argument is beyond the scope of this paper but Cohen’s claim that we cannot hide behind screens, refusing the encounter on the basis that it is indirect and mediated, offers a potential solution to the problem at hand. It consists of the primacy of the moral seriousness of being in an encounter with another person over the always deferred epistemological question of that encounter, and that information technologies are simply tools such that whether we directly see the other person or not we are nonetheless brought into a relationship with their face. Such a Levinasian account might be supplemented with a radical conception of semiotics such that the avatar becomes a visceral sign of the user (see Hill 2013) in order to more fully explain how this indirect communication constitutes an encounter. Nonetheless, we set such solutions aside for now in order to highlight the problem of encounters in narrative accounts of identity online since such accounts are currently influential and since the setting out of this problem—too rarely recognised—might help frame future solutions.
It is important to note that although Schechtman and MacIntyre see narrativity as inseparable from moral life—Schechtman argues that ‘weaving’ stories about our lives is what makes us persons and that to enter moral commerce with other persons one must share the same (i.e. narratival) sense of self as others; MacIntyre argues that to consider oneself as a narrative is ‘normal’ and that the unity of life consists in the narrative of a quest for the Good—such positions are by no means uncontroversial. See Strawson (2004) for an argument against (1) the universality of the narrative notion of self and (2) the moral claims that are made of it.
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Carruth, A.D., Hill, D.W. Identity and distinctness in online interaction: encountering a problem for narrative accounts of self. Ethics Inf Technol 17, 103–112 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10676-015-9364-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10676-015-9364-y