Cyberpsychology:
Principles of Creating Virtual Presence
Dr.
Leon James
Professor of Psychology
University of Hawaii
Original: 1994 Revised: 2000, 2003, 2009
Email
contact: leon@hawaii.edu
Contents
Cyberpsychology: Principles of Creating Virtual Presence
Acquiring Cyberspace Citizenship
Avatar Psychology and Cybercultures
Articles and books by Leon James
The prefix "hyper" is
defined as "above the normal" so hypertext denotes an online method
of reading text that is in a fourth dimension relative to normal printed text.
Accessing text in this fourth dimension means that we can jump from place to
place by an electronic means such as clicking on a word with the mouse arrow.
This new technological ability creates an entirely new approach to text
presentation in its various venues -- in instruction, communication, and
information retrieval. Hypertext is especially important because it applies to
multi-media objects treated as "text" such as in line images and
voice recordings.
Hypertext
technology in the 1990s, like the World Wide Web on the Internet, is rapidly
creating a massive, universally accessible, new medium of exchange known as
cyberspace or virtual reality. As the Internet is globalizing, it will become
more and more important to understand the structure and growth of hypertext
space. Here are some issues to be researched, as viewed from the early
vantage point of 1996:
(1) In what way does hypertext
reflect the human mind? By committing ourselves deeper to cyberspace reality,
are we going towards traditional and universal human ideals or against them? In
what way is hypertext like the mind?
(2) What creates hypertext space? What are virtual roads and highways? What
mechanism creates a navigation stop zone or parking space? Do hypertext
edifices need maintenance?
(3) How do people find things in hypertext? Does it take training? How do
people navigate or get around in hypertext? How do they use hypertext?
(4) What is the social or philosophical significance of hypertext? Does it have
a spiritual connection?
One reaction to the growing presence
of cyberspace is to see it as a threat to the traditional human value of
social, face to face exchange. Glued to the screen, chained to the keyboard,
alone at the workstation, the addicted hacker is the very picture of a lone
individual enslaved by the machine. Yet this is
a false appearance. Note the feverish pace of the hands typing.
Nothing to be alarmed about, for it is the eagerness to communicate and the
desire to be heard by another human being that activate those fingers. The fact is that when we use computers we are having an
exchange with other humans, through the machine, not with the machine.
The computer is not more mechanical
than a letter we write to a loved one, a diary we dictate to a tape recorder,
or the telephone through which we conduct a business transaction. There is a
close social relationship between the software designers of a word processor
and its users. The programmers had to anticipate our needs, wants, and desires
when typing, and they have had to anticipate how we think in order to make the
functions or capabilities visible to us. Online computer use through a network
is even more obviously a social activity as it involves frequent e-mail
exchanges or direct, synchronous chat groups. Since computers have become
widespread, the level of communication between people has risen dramatically.
Courses that use computers for online networking or other news and discussion
groups generate a very large number and variety of exchanges on a scale never
experienced before in human experience.
In fact computers are
convenient and powerful extensions of the human mind. Cyberspace is the virtual reality created through
computers. Because of this, the form and characteristics of cyberspace are
necessarily similar to and congruent with the mind. Every
characteristic of the mind can be expected to show up as a property of
cyberspace. Here are some examples.
Cyberspace, like mind, is not in physical
space, but in virtual space, without extension, distance, or mass. Weighty
thoughts may be serious, but they don't tip the scale. Heavy moods may be
exciting, and great thoughts inspiring, but they can't be seen under the
microscope or be repelled by a magnet. As you think and generate many thoughts,
do you ever run out of space? Does a thought about the moon take longer than
the vision of my refrigerator? The point is that thoughts and feelings, which
form the content and substance of mind, are not in physical space as they are
not physical objects. Hence mind is not a
physical object in time and space.
Similarly,
virtual reality has no physical form or mass. The brain is needed within which
mind can exist, or through which it can act in the physical world. The hard
drive is needed within which cyberspace can exist, or through which cyberspace
is reached and navigated. But the size of the brain is not related to the size
or content of the mind. The size of the hard drive
is not related to the size or content of cyberspace . Virtual reality is
created by interactivity -- its number, direction, and type. On the
Web, the simplest form of interactivity is a clickable title or word called a
hyperlink (or just link), that has the power to whisk you off to another corner
of cyberspace. Other methods of accessing text and multimedia on the Internet
include search engines, organized directories or databases, archived discussion
group files, newsgroups, online chat groups and conferences, and e-mail
delivered listservs and subscription services. Later
developments include dynamic pages that compose personal elements tailored made
to the visitor on the basis of prior registration and identifiers such cookies
and search queries. e-Commerce and digital signatures are current cyberspace
activities that are expanding rapidly. The near future will bring online
voting, online traffic schools, and a lot more more
distance education and testing. Intelligent robots, software, agents, and
electronic assistants are also coming soon, as are in-car communication systems
(see our book on driving).
Additionally, new ways of bringing the "invisible Web" to
people are being developed for the massive amount and variety of databases
available online that are not part of the current Web search engine territory.
Medical informatics is another important development allowing doctors across
the globe to consult with each other at a distance and view and retrieve the
same information (see Rex Jakobovits home site for more information). And see our
DrDriving site for or Driving informatics.
It is clear that these
varieties of networked activities vastly increase the number of interpersonal
interactions giving no credence to the idea that spending time on the computer
is not spending time with humans.
Online communication is marked by its high frequency of exchange. To give one
example, an active professor and researcher may receive a dozen pieces of
"snail" mail a day, including letters, subscriptions, announcements,
advertisement, and books. On e-mail, this same individual may receive hundreds
of messages a day from various sources, and on the same day on the Internet,
may see dozens of different advertisements, announcements, full text articles,
and magazines. The pace of communication has substantially increased, and the
variety of sources, and the speed. Equally or more important is the fact that
the time delay between exchanges has been cut drastically so that a project or
joint activity can proceed much further and much deeper within the former time
period. One week by snail mail is hardly enough for two exchanges to take place
on some issue between two people. Online, one week can easily translate into
dozens of exchanges on that project or issue, and not just between two people,
but with hundreds and and thousands of people. Thus, cyberspace is a bottomless cultural resource. The
more exchnages takes place the more the resource
grows and becomes valuable. With off line print medium and snail
mail, it is difficult to have several rounds on the same subject. For example,
even with popular topics, there is a quick limit in how many views can be
published in the Letters to the Editor section of newspapers and magazines, and
even less so in professional journals. But online it is easy. One topic
discussed for several days may generate hundreds of messages (possibly
thousands), so that there is ample opportunity to examine topics in depth. This
is very beneficial. More angles are explored, more voices are heard, more minds
express themselves. Technology, within democracy and freedom, thus becomes a community-building force.
Face to face relationships are built
on attraction or mutual interest. At work, we interact with the people with
whom we need to have transactions. Off work, we strive to see people whom we
find attractive or interesting more than others. Cyberspace is a virtual
reality that facilitates communication and encourages the formation of real
communities. We participate in activities with others who want to share a
specific interest, need, or pleasure. We visit Web sites that we find exciting,
absorbing, or delightful in some way. We enter a discussion when we are
affected by some emotion or intention, or we lurk in the background,
vicariously enjoying others' interventions or performances.
Cyberspace is like
mind in two important respects -- interactivity and organization. Minds interact through organized content. That is, our mind
communicates with other minds and the content of the exchange is organized by
topic and by attitudes towards the topic. Cyberspace is made up of topics and
access doors to these topics. Topics create zones of networked interactions.
Popular sites on the Web or Portals become whirlpools of information exchange
with hundreds of thousands of people examining the same set up
simultaneously. Cyberspace is in effect the communal
mind.
Cyberspace has a form, though a
virtual one, not physical or three-dimensional. The shape of this form is
determined by the density of interaction in any topical zone and the type of
ongoing activity. For example, the name of a USENET newsgroup such as "alt.driving" or "unix.faq" describes the
topical zone or subject of discussion, while "usenet
newsgroup" describes the type of activity, namely a special-topic
asynchronous electronic communication network (i.e., a discussion group on some
specified topic). Activities such as registering your vote on a Form, leaving an
e-mail message on a Page, or copying and downloading an image or music file,
create a common focus marked by shared interests and intentions. Topics and
activities in cyberspace create their own virtual zones that become accessible
to others across time and space. Using and
participating are the mechanisms by which virtual reality grows and evolves.
On the Web one accesses documents,
drawings or audiovisual tapes that are indeed physical objects located on some
computer hardware in some geographical location and traversing some physical
wires or satellites at the speed of light. The target object is physical and
needs to be created by someone and located on a network accessible computer
system called a server that can respond to telephone calls by other computers
called clients. But while the hard drives, transmission lines, and operating
systems are physical, the Web navigation through these physical objects is
virtual, not physical. A hypertext link on the
screen and the act of clicking on it with the mouse are physical, but the
meaning is mental, having to do with intentions and interests.
Constructing a Home Page on the World Wide Web is a physical method for
creating a virtual gathering place in cyberspace. Thousands of people at a
time, scattered throughout the globe, may be looking at the same audiovisual
display and text message on a Web Page. They may be each looking at a common
segment of it as well as each being a target of some unique "pushing"
of information components (like dynamic adds on search engines that display
information relevant to the search query terms).
Or they may each engage in the same
activity, for example, clicking on a link that allows them to download the same
software application or file they each want on their own computer at
this time. This is not a sinister 'group mind' Big Brother control system.
Every one of these downloading decisions is independently achieved by each
person involved, in freedom and out of self-interest or desire. This is the
communal mind, achieved in cyberspace out of mutual interest and reciprocal
benefit.
Dense zones in cyberspace are those
that grow faster than the hardware which is needed to contain its virtual
extension. If enough people click the same link at the same time, the server
which delivers the ftp requests is sunk, goes down, refuses requests, resists
all attempts to access it. This means that the virtual zone becomes
non-existent for those who are not yet in it.
The
famous second law of thermodynamics would lead us to the expectation that
virtual reality tends to collapse on itself when successful. To keep this from
happening, the physical body of a well traveled cyberspace zone needs constant
maintenance. A large Web site identified by a single URL address, can contain
thousands of sub-directories and millions of files and links. Numerous files
and links need to be updated on a daily basis. Hundreds of thousands of people
create traffic hurricanes in the form of massive numbers of simultaneous
electronic ftp exchanges across billions of possible pathways in a global
network. Within the site, the navigation process operates in a similar way,
even if on a smaller scale. Provisions and corrections need to be made in
response to the human demand that creates uneven traffic flow. In this case the
evolving physical hardware requirements is driven by the traffic density of
virtual zones in the communal mind.
The
communal mind exists and grows in cyberspace. It does not belong to any person
or group. Ownership is located in the hardware, the copyrighted software, or
the intellectual property rights to textual and audiovisual creations. But
these are not the communal mind. Consider virtual traffic patterns created by
high interest in an activity, as indicated by hits or number of visitors on a Page,
and by link popularity, which is indicated by the number of links to a
particular Page that one can find on the Web as a whole. Pages that are
"cited" by many other Pages through live links can be reached from a
variety of locations. These cross-connections create identifiable patterns of
interconnectivity. This interlinking is what creates the communal mind. It is
not any one's legal property, and cannot be. No one
owns virtual reality. It is free, like mind. The communal mind
fosters virtual communities.
People gathered in one place become
an audience when they achieve a joint focus such as watching some dramatic
action going on, either real or simulated. Ethnic celebrations, story telling, opera, staged theater plays and the
published novel, have been familiar tools for creating virtual reality zones
prior to the computer age. Cards, board games, and all sorts of team play also
create joint focus, hence virtual reality zones. Multi-User Dungeons (or MUDs)
are popular online games that allow people to adopt a fantasy character through
which one interacts with other virtual characters, people whose real identity
one may never know.
In my experience, students using the
PLATO computer system for course-integrated socializing, were given the choice to logon under their real name or
some "persona name" of their choosing which the instructor promised
never to reveal to the other students. Semester after semester none of the
students elected to logon under their real name. Socializing under a virtual
identity appears to be a very attractive situation for young people, perhaps
because it affords them greater latitude in their responses to each other.
Newspapers, magazines, radio talk
shows and television programming have created mass audiences that are not
co-present physically, yet react to the same social stimulus at the same time,
as well as across time in the form of re-broadcasts. Virtual reality zones are
created by mutual interest and communal concerns, such as national disasters or
popular personalities. The global electronic network greatly strengthens
people's ability to create and mine virtual reality zones.
Joint focus
appears to be the crucial mind process that creates virtual reality. Tools for
producing joint focus include a recognized topic (or subject of
discussion), a mutual intention, or a common interest in carrying
out a particular activity. Virtual reality is thus what gets created when two
or more minds are in communication through a topic, intention, or interest.
These virtual objects (topic, intention, interest) are communal, which means
that they are produced in joint activity. Cyberspace is virtual reality
produced by navigating the global electronic information network. Cybernauts navigate by expressing their intentions and
interests through links they decide to use for teletransportation.
Interests and intentions exist in the mind and are the mind. Cyberspace zones
are created when these mind states or energies are expressed by many
individuals in the form of choosing particular hypertext links that create mass
traffic patterns.
|
Some
Student Reports under Dr. James' Supervision Cyberspace and Mind Netizen And Citizen Relationships "TinySex and Gender Trouble": A Chapter Summary from
Life on the Screen by Sherry Turkle One Life, Two Minds--An Out of Body Experience Social
Psychology of Web Architecture Cyberspace: The Final Frontier Getting Hold of Cyberpsychology Cyberspace: In the Eyes of
the Beholder |
Traffic on the net is regulated
through universal resource locators called URL locations. The address of a
document or other retrievable object on a network is determined by the physical
structure of sub-directories on computer drives. For instance, my Home Page URL
address (http://www.soc.hawaii.edu/leonj/leonj/leonpsy/leon.html), contains the server's domain name
"www.soc.hawaii.edu" which identifies it as a computer system within
an educational institution in the State of Hawaii. Note the dots separating the
items. The continuation of the address uses slashes and is an exact map of the
sub-directory path created on our college server's computer drive. The last
sub-directory (leonpsy) contains the home page file
readable by an Internet client that uses HTML code.
Large networks can thus be mapped
through their URL addresses. The navigational map of a Web site exactly
represents the physical location of sub-directories and the file names they
contain. Though it would be a complicated display, it is theoretically possible
to map the entire Internet, which is a physical and geographic entity. However
it is not possible to map out the information highway that people use to
navigate the Internet. This is a virtual reality, cyberspace itself. It is not
physical. The brain in which the mind operates is physical and limited, but the
mind within it is functional, virtual, unlimited in size. Similarly, the
physical network system that embodies the Internet is limited in size and
shape, but the virtual reality within it is not limited in size or shape.
Consider
a Web site that expands and grows as users join in with various activities,
including adding numerous sub-directories as they create their own home page
sites. My home page site is an example of this virtual growth phenomenon in the
building of a virtual learning community, or cybercommunity.
Every semester a new generation of students puts up their own home pages, each
filled with reports and activities. In face to face relationships we create access
links to one another so that we can initiate a conversation or joint
activity. For instance, meeting someone often means being able to call that
person on the phone, or having lunch together. In a cybercommunity,
the equivalent of meeting someone is to place a hypertext link in one's own
document. The hypertext link creates a virtual highway between the two
locations. A mutual link in Web documents brings a new traffic pattern into
existence.
Hypertext links
are navigation vehicles and roadways in cyberspace. Links are naturally
occurring community activities having social properties and functions that need
to be studied and uncovered by research. Some links function as transit
stations placed there for travelers, visitors and searchers. If you type in
a subject or name in a Web search engine window, and hit return, almost
instantly you obtain a list of links relating to your desired object. These
links have a transit function. Their sole purpose is to allow you to get
somewhere else. It is common to find groups of links on a Page under the
heading "Cool Links," "Hot Links," "New Links,"
"Favorite Links," and so on. They function as transit stations and
gateways, greatly affecting traffic patterns. (For additional observations on
types of links, you can consult another article on home page architecture. See also:
Some links function as structural
pointers to documents. In the print medium, we use footnotes, table of
contents, citations, and indexes as structural pointers when one piece of a
text is connected to another piece. A quotation, for instance, connects two
pieces of text from different authors. Hypertext technology greatly facilitates
the ease with which one can interconnect pieces of text. It goes beyond
convenience and efficiency and allows the creation of new objects not possible
with prior technologies. One example is the virtual book.
Consider creating a Page which is
rendered as a Table of Contents of a book and its title. You can click on each
chapter and section and read the book in sequence, and you can learn from it
and enjoy it. Yet the book does not exist in the ordinary sense of a book that
was written by someone. It is not catalogued anywhere. No one has published it.
No one claims it. No one even knows of it. The Table of Contents of this book
is made of hypertext links to pieces of text appearing in all sorts of
documents around the world. The reader may not be aware that the book does not
exist.
How many such books are there? The
Internet in 1996 already contains billions of words, sentences, paragraphs.
There is no calculable limit to the number of virtual books one can create out
of this textual mass, now growing at an unimaginable rate. Hypertext is a
virtual electronic library without walls, without limits, uncatalogable,
forever growing as a representation of the communal mind. Virtual books are in
effect navigation vehicles in hypertext.
Consider a virtual Home Page site.
Physically its embodiment is minute, no more than 100K on a computer drive. But
virtually it may be a huge site put together through links that bring in text
and audiovisual presentations from other places. This virtual Web site does not
actually exist anywhere, only its modest shell, which in actuality is a list of
links. No one owns this site, though the physical elements and components located
on the other sites have legal owners by copyright and intellectual
property. How many such virtual Web sites are there? They are numberless,
growing within the interstices of cyberspace. Navigating cyberspace is an
endless journey. The communal mind is vast in comparison to the individual's
mind.
The virtual library, the virtual
book, the virtual site, and the virtual community -- these are the products of
hypertext. They give rise to virtual families and friends, virtual universities
and conferences. Consider a Home Page that sells Kona coffee in an electronic
shopping mall on the Web. Where is the store? It is not on the farm on the Big
Island in Hawaii where the coffee beans are grown, harvested, packaged, and
stored. The hypertext file and the e-mail Form for ordering, are located on a
commercial server in Seattle, WA. They relay the orders to the coffee farm in
Hawaii by fax. The customers are from all around the United States and
elsewhere. The coffee store exists only in virtual reality.
All
of us are novices in designing objects in virtual reality. Constructing
cyberspace objects requires attention to three basic properties: appearance,
content, and access. The object's visibility, its very existence, is determined
by its access routes. Various methods, tools, and services exist for creating
access routes to a cyberspace platform that hosts a Home Page, an electronic
shopping mall, a virtual college campus, or a Web database or chat room.
Creating Web interconnectivity is like marketing a product or facility.
Interconnectivity is access, access is visibility, which establishes virtual
reality. Web search engines and automated news filter services generate a
continuous stream of access links in response to a query anywhere on the net.
For additional views on this issue, see my article on the social psychology of Home Page architecture.
Second by second, 24 hours a day,
every day, these electronic demons and robots, crawlers and gophers, tunnel
their way to sub-directories of sub-directories on millions of computer systems
and generate billions of hypertext access links. This feverish activity builds
and expands cyberspace at a dizzying tempo. The sheer number of roadways and
platforms in cyberspace is so vast that it is easy for a Web site to get buried
in an obscure corner of virtual reality. There are online services that allow
you to register your site with search engines and navigation databases and
indexes. I get regular unsolicited e-mail from site owners or promoters
offering to reciprocate links ("I'll put a link to you and you can do the
same for me").
There may be millions of cybernaut travelers every hour, yet traffic in one's
cyberspace neighborhood may be only potential rather than actual. For instance,
in one online social psychology course I teach, students are assigned a generational
Web database to manage for a semester. Their mission is to create visibility
for the database so that visitors landing on the site might leave behind an
e-mailed contribution relating to the topic of the database (e.g., "Things
I'm proud of" , "Spiritual experiences", "I can't stop
speeding", etc.). I introduce the students to Web site registration
services, special topic newsgroups, and e-mail solicitation strategies. The
results are sobering, showing the difficulty of establishing a reliable virtual
presence in cyberspace. The most typical result after 16 weeks of activity as a
novice Web database manager, consists of about a dozen contributions by
classmates and friends! You may see their trials and tribulations here.
It
takes a while to understand the principles of creating viable virtual presence
in cyberspace. It takes an interest in cyberpsychology, or the study of
navigation in virtual reality zones.
At first the novice Web managers act
like or believe that site appearance is the chief method for achieving
virtual presence. Most of their efforts are directed at constructing beautiful,
classy looking Pages with dramatic audiovisual support and entertaining
language. Like children on a quiet farm road selling lemonade, the student
managers wait hopefully on their invisible cyberspace platform, every day
inspecting their site counter for new 'hits', and checking their e-mail to see
if some traveler left a story behind. At the end of the semester, they leave
behind a beautiful store front in cyberspace that no one looked at. In virtual
reality, what doesn't get used, does not exist. I predict that this will change
as cyberpsychology gives us the knowledge and wisdom to create viable, vital
virtual presence.
Having drawn a connection between
cyberspace and mind, one is led to investigate the spiritual implications of
virtual reality since mind and spirit are closely related, as shown by the root
word "psych-" or "psyche" which refers to both mind and
spirit. Virtual presence is created through access and usage which are
determined by interests and intentions, both of which are spiritual acts. When
we choose to click on a hypertext link we are performing a spiritual act. Our
virtual traveling creates a trail with visible consequences affecting others.
The
act of clicking creates virtual reality, shapes it,
makes it more dense, more visible, more accessible to self and others. A
popular Web site is a spiritual beacon for netizens,
visible around the globe, attracting children and adults, men and women,
individuals and groups, communicating with them, bringing them together through
the communal mind of shared information and activities, thus transcending
demographic and ethnic identities. Clicking in hyperspace is equivalent to
one's spiritual practice in daily life. This is because clicking is at once a
moral, ethical, economic, and psychological act. (This document made it to
someone's Web list of Worst Pages. I inquired from the owner why my article has
merited his ire. He replied that it was because of my idea that clicking is a spirtual act. However he admitted that he had not read the
entire article and was merely reacting to the surface idea.)
A rapidly growing market of the
Internet software industry owes its success to the fact that clicking is a
spiritual act. These programs allow information managers such as servers,
teachers, and parents, to control the clicking acts of users. Some specialize
in filtering out unsuitable sites so as to bar access to certain cyberspace
zones and virtual activities and services. Other filtering programs are
intended as guides and pathfinders to various specialized topics. The idea of
controlling access to communal mind is quite familiar in education, law, and
spiritual discipline. Teachers forbid swearing, county by-laws forbid
obscenity, polite company forbids taboo topics. These social controlling
mechanisms are motivated and justified by moral and spiritual considerations.
In
my view, cyberpsychology
and spiritual psychology
are allied fields. They can share a methodology and facilitate each other's
theories. Their connection is through mind.
You can check out some student pages on Spiritual Experiences here. Generation 5a students wrote two interesting reports on
cyberpsychology and its relation to mind and spirituality -- check it out here.
See also a Home Page on Cyber-Psychology maintained by Dr. John Suler,
Professor of Psychology at Rider University, and the online
articles by James Sempsey.
Cyberpsychology studies mind through virtual reality as it evolves on the net.
Spiritual psychology studies mind through self-witnessing of one's thoughts and
feelings on the daily round of activities. They overlap in their focus on
interests and intentions. Clicking acts, under the influence of
interests and intentions, create communal mind in virtual reality. This is
cyberpsychology. Similarly, in spiritual psychology, self-witnessing of one's
interests and intentions, creates the opportunity for moral self-assessment,
for repentance and a change of heart, for a new direction in living and
becoming.
Not-clicking
is a moral act
Refusing to click is a judgment.
Virtual communities are created and maintained by the continued willingness to
click. Preventing someone from clicking is an ethical issue. Promoting clicking
by making a link available and attractive is not only an economic and legal
act, but moral as well. A link is made attractive through its appeal to
particular human interests and intentions, of which there are many varieties,
some that merit our support, others that we would avoid or condemn in spirit.
Some people allow net browsing of
their bookmarks file not realizing that this document is a fossilized or permanent
record of their moral choices in clicking. New site management software
applications allow detailed monitoring and record keeping of cybervisitors -- the URL address of the computer system you
are using, how long you keep a Page on the screen, which links you click on, in
which order and how often. A permanent file can be kept on your logon identity,
giving the cumulative record of your visits and revisits. Unknown to you, a
user profile is set up on you which is then sold to interested advertisers, companies,
and paying customers.
An
individual's cumulative lifetime bookmarks or history file constitutes a
spiritual biography of that person. As technology improves, global clicking
patterns can be recorded and analyzed. Through the growth of cyberspace new
research is now possible on the mind of individuals and the planet's communal
mind, its content, development, and direction of evolution. Can we shape our
future with more precision and greater wisdom? Can people's lives be changed by
the forces of virtual reality? These are important questions which cyberspsychology will be expected to answer.
Spiritual psychology is deeply
involved in assuring our success in the global information society by creating
the motive and method for assessing and managing the growth of the communal
mind. Virtual reality has the potential of creating good and evil forces for netizens and cybercommunities. It
is a spiritual fact that both good and evil forces or environments exist in
mind. Information and activity in cyberspace can generate forces of addiction
and persuasion that can influence our decisions, judgments, and actions online
and off.
External
methods of controlling access and activity are being tried such as using
filtering mechanisms to intercept or block clicking. Firewalls, filtered
access, sub-nets, monitoring, and other methods are being used to manage
people's clicking activity in cyberspace. I believe that we also need to
develop more internal methods that encourage self-control in freedom. Spiritual
psychology looks for methods of internalizing control through self-witnessing
and self-modification motivated in freedom by principled choice and educated
preference. What is chosen in freedom is chosen from love, and this is
internal, remaining with the person forever. Interests and intentions define
and reveal mind or spirit.
With spiritual psychology, in
collaboration with cyberpsychology, society gains the ability to direct its
future into chosen directions. Freedom is essential to assure the
internalization of self-control through guided self-modification techniques.
Cybercommunities need to follow practices that encourage the activity of
leaders and heroes who set the pace, the norm, the standard of excellence and
honesty for others to admire, support, and emulate. Leaders can be given
recognition, awards, and privileges, not only for their own sake, but for the
sake of all in the community whose ideals are legitimized when admired netizens are rewarded for their virtual activities which
benefit the cybercommunity.
Online networking is fast becoming
like talking, writing, and driving -- a very complex skill that every citizen
is expected to know how to do. Attention to communicative competence and computer literacy now spans the entire educational enterprise, from
pre-school to continuing education. In the teaching professions the idea used
to be that we can instruct people to acquire literacy skills, then once these
skills are acquired, the literate graduate walks out of school and into
productive work life. This model no longer fits the reality we know.
Today
it is apparent that the information age and the computer environment require a
learning to learn literacy, not a fixed knowledge base with pre-defined target
skills and content. As the online environment globalizes and incorporates more
and more of mind, that is, of our daily thoughts and feelings, interests and
intentions, it forces upon us a new potentially hazardous affective state,
namely that of being a perpetual novice.
Lifelong
novicehood increase the potential for
stressful lives and needs special attention from cyberspace educators,
information managers, site designers, and software engineers. In my college
teaching set up at the University of Hawaii, I teach new groups of 20 students every
16 weeks. They go through the process of acquiring skills to navigate
cyberspace and to construct virtual reality platforms for traveling netizens. I have thus discovered a number of spiritual
symptoms brought on by cyberstress. Among them are technophobia
and resistance to information seeking.
Information literacy, computer literacy, and prolonged online experience are
not effective in eliminating technophobic attacks or the momentary loss of
ability to read instructions or figure out how to do something. See this article for further discussion.
Maintaining a distaste for reading
help instructions or guides, endlessly postponing or avoiding certain online
tasks, refusing to ask for help, or rigidly sticking to some ineffective
procedure -- these are the symptoms of technophobia, a dissatisfying and
intimidating state of mind bringing us down to low-self esteem and learned
helplessness. I found that I need to use collaborative learning
techniques to overcome technophobia and resistance to information seeking. I
created the generational curriculum
and the community classroom.
Every semester's class is designated
as a cybercommunity generation,
starting with G1, G2, G3, and so on in a series. Each generation stands on the
shoulders of the prior generations. they use the cyberspace zones created by
each generation and they tunnel through all the sub-directories creating new
hypertext roads between their generation and all the previous ones. They thus
get a picture of themselves being involved in building a generational cybercommunity that evolves with each subsequent crop of
Web designers and managers. The product is a virtual super-document, growing in
both size and interconnectivity, forming an ever growing virtual platform
intended for use by netizens for their education,
science, and entertainment.
Being part of something real,
something virtually permanent, sets a social environment that is motivating and
empowering. Students are now officially authors, publishers, scientists, designers,
managers, Internet coaches, netizens. Each of these
new roles all at once exert a motivating impact that arouses deep interest,
sustained effort, and intellectual intentionality. For a teacher, it is a
delight to see and witness this transformation, for which students are grateful
and supportive.
However, the generational curriculum
by itself was insufficient and needed the community classroom atmosphere. In my
case, a face to face discussion group once a week was possible because all the
students were on campus. For distance education courses with scattered
participants, some online conferencing may serve as an equivalent social
experience. The important interpersonal elements to provide include regular
opportunities for sharing and caring.
Sharing frustrations and fears
allows spiritual renewal in the form of relief and taking heart. Students can
overcome their learned depression when they can say "I'm glad I'm not the
only one who feels this way." This seems to make the experience endurable
and worthwhile. It is transformed into a redeeming sense of "the
challenges of the good old days, remember when..."
Caring for how others fare in the
learning phase turns the experience into group adventure, a virtual learning
game. Who can discover what how soon. One's reputation in the group is at stake
and there is incentive created for being an innovator or serving as an agent
for information diffusion. Giving away what you've learned and discovered on
your own, becomes a social motive involving students in each other's progress.
The online generational curriculum
within the community classroom atmosphere has served me well as an instructor
of many cohorts of students over the years. I believe it can serve as a model
for training netizens and maintaining the orderly
development of cyberspace in the next century.
Cyberculture, cyberspace, and the communal mind are
becoming more visible as more and more millions of people are acknowledging
their avatar body. Acquiring an avatar brings on a new consciousness that has
been called the "Imago Effect." The digital image on the screen
becomes part of oneself through immersion and interaction. The
social-biological technology creates a virtual intersubjectivity. People become
networked through their avatar. They become immersed in a virtual world shared
by thousands of others in real time. Distributed computing has brought together
individuals from around the world operating their keyboards in real time,
online, inworld. People in a chatroom are typing away at each other in real
time, which is midday for some and midnight for others. All real life (RL) time
is local time and all local times are given up for the sake of inworld time.
People from all time zones congregate together in relation to the virtual world
time. In the virtual world of Second Life inworld time coincides with Pacific
standard time zone (PST).
Virtual intersubjectivity is created out of the
interactions between avatars in a socio-technical information environment. In
Second Life the user generated immersive environment replicates many of the
primary features of RL environment. Avatars go to places by walking, flying, or
teleporting. Avatars who put themselves in any location are visible to other
avatars in that location. Bumping into an another avatar causes it to be
displaced like a real life bump to your physical body by an aggressive
pedestrian in a mall. The avatar in a virtual room with locked doors cannot
exit. Any place on the virtual world map that an avatar can visit is private
property, as in a real life city or shopping mall. Wherever your avatar is
located, other avatars may show up and engage you in chat. If you are attending
a class or workshop with your avatar you are witness to what is going on, what
is being said through multiple avatars present, and who is sitting quietly or
else acting up by changing into an odd appearance or flying about. There is a joint
awareness of social events going on in the shared environment. Norms and
expectations can be met or violated. The virtual world is an avenue of
constructing and evolving the virtual intersubjectivity, and thus, the communal
mind.
Evolution and biology play critical roles in the
deployment of the virtual world within the social-biological technology. Human
organisms--that is, human feelings, thoughts, and sensations, are symbiotically
hooked up to electronic machinery. The avatar body is an information concept
that moves around in an information world that is as solid to it as the office
wall is to our physical body. The word "avatar" has a Hindu origin
meaning "incarnation" or "embodiment." Our avatar is an
embodiment of our consciousness. By being electronically hooked up to our
digital avatar we enter a new world of experience. Our new consciousness is now
constructed out of new sensations that are initiated by events in the virtual
world. We see and hear only what is within the visual and camera range of our
avatar. Our noticings consist of information events in the virtual world such
as what other avatars are doing, what the street or shopping mall look like
when walking around, or who is dancing with whom in a virtual jazz club. We
share conscious awareness of the environment and events with others who are
present with their avatars. By interacting with others and establishing a
social presence 'inworld' we are becoming part of a growing mega-verse of
virtual intersubjectivity.
Avatar psychology is the scientific study of avatar
mediated human behavior. It is therefore a specialized branch of general psychology,
which is the study of human behavior. A primary focus of avatar psychology is
how the virtual world experience is connected to and forms part of human
behavior. Consciousness through our avatar body is connected to our consciousness
through the physical body. Both contribute to our overall self, along with our
other mental bodies--the dream body, the imagination body, the rational body,
and the celestial body. Each offers a solid reality for our senses in its
particular world. The dream body gives us the ability to roam around the dream
environment as a solidified fantasy where everything appears real to the dream
body, thus giving us the consciousness of the dream's reality. Our imagination
body takes us into a solid environment constructed by our loves through the
inventiveness of our thoughts. Our rational body gives us conscious access to truth
in its endless variety, giving us the ability to reason logically and
representatively through symbolism and correspondences. Our celestial body
takes us to the consciousness of the mental heaven that every human being is
anatomically connected to, and when diseased, takes us to the consciousness of
the hells that to which every human being is anatomically connected. Every
individual is born with these seven avatar bodies.
Avatar psychology is therefore centrally related to
mental anatomy within the perspective of substantive dualism. We are born with
seven avatar bodies allowing us abilities and consciousness in seven discrete
worlds that are unrelated to each other yet each is operating from the same
laws of correspondence. An event in one world is connected by the laws of
correspondence to an event in the next world, down the sequence of initiating
causes. The first cause or source is the Mental Sun of Eternity, which is the
nexus or exit point of God from the Divine infinity into finite creation. The
effect at a lower level is the ordering and activation of events in our
celestial body. This creates the mental heaven of eternity in the human race,
thus anatomically in every individual of that race. Since individual freedom is
essential for humanity, the consciousness of heavenly experiences and loves can
be inverted and converted into their opposite by the exercise of our freedom that
God maintains and guarantees to every human being. By having both heaven and
hell in our mind we can be maintained by God in a moral and rational balance.
This is necessary for human mental development.
By having an anatomical heaven and hell in our mind we
are able to learn, develop and evolve as moral beings. God manages the thoughts
of every individual to insure freedom of thought and to maintain the person in
a moral balance. If God were to cease that management for a few moments we
would lose our freedom to think in accordance with our rational abilities. We
would be pulled away from rationality by our biases and undisciplined desires. We
would justify murder, theft, cruelty, and deception in order to satisfy and
fulfill our hellish loves, which are selfishness, egotism, arrogance, and
aversion for truth and good, hence intelligence and wisdom. Insane thinking is
the opposite of freedom of thinking since it binds our ideas to unreality,
delusion, illusion, falsities of all kinds. rational thinking gives us freedom
to choose heavenly order in our desires, emotions, thinking, speaking, and
doing.
The seven avatar bodies are described in this
online book located at http://www.soc.hawaii.edu/leonj/leonj/leonpsy29/avatar-psychology-g29.htm#_Toc228430678 or
http://bit.ly/24fezN
The book also contains sections on research
methodology in avatar psychology.
Avatar Psychology and Mental Anatomy
Links to Online Books by Leon James
Half a Century of Science in Psychology: Neologisms
Coined by Leon James
Directory
of Available Articles by Leon James
Quotations from the Works of Leon James with links to the original
Sayings and
Aphorisms of Leon James, Emanuel Swedenborg, and Jesus of Nazareth
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Articles on Cyber-Psychology, Internet Literacy and the Online Generational Curriculum |
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Notes I have written for
psychology majors learning to become netizens in
cyberspace. |
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Introduction to the Generational Curriculum within Community-Classroom. |
With Dr. Diane Nahl, this is our long standing educational experiment in
collaborative learning since 1975. |
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With Dr. Diane Nahl, this is our summary of principles and techniques
written in 1979. |
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Contains a full description of
the The Hawaii Online Generational Community-Classroom,
with tables, results, case histories, and taxonomy of online skills (1997). |
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Talk given to a faculty group in
1997. |
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Guest lecture presentation in
1997. |
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An article describing an earlier
experiment in teaching. |
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Two articles describing a
current experimental course on the World Wide Web. |
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Analyzing Linkage Structure in a Course-Integrated Virtual Learning
Community on the World Wide Web |
INET '95 Conference Paper -- An
article and Kevin Bogan presented at the World
Internet Conference in Honolulu, June 1995. |
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Affective and Cognitive Processes While Learning the Internet |
This is a pre-publication copy
of an article with Diane Nahl summarizing the reported experiences of students. Three levels of
Internet adaptation were discovered. |
Email contact: leon@hawaii.edu