Cyberpsychology:
Principles of Creating Virtual Presence
Dr. Leon James
Professor
of Psychology
University of Hawaii
Original: 1994 Revised: 2000, 2003, 2009,
2012
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 that 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 denser, 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.
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 influence 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. Clicking or not clicking has become the big moral
issue for everyone on the Internet.
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 want to avoid or even
condemn in spirit.
Some people allow their bookmarks file to be
public, possibly not realizing that the bookmarks 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 cyber-visitors -- the IP address of
the computer you are using, how long you stay on a Page, which links you click
on, in which order and how often. A permanent “cookie” file can be kept on your
logon identity, giving the cumulative record of your visits and revisits to
particular site. 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 cyberpsychology 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 the human 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.
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.
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 and
theistic science. 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.
1. The Conjoined Pair in Love and Marriage: How to Become Soulmates and Best Friends in this Life and in the Afterlife (2012) by Dr. Leon James. Available on the Web at: http://www.soc.hawaii.edu/leonj/leonj/leonpsy34/conjointself.htm
2. Leon James. Avatar Psychology and Mental Anatomy: The Body as Mind or the Mind as Body. Online Book, 2012 [This book is available free on the Web at: http://www.soc.hawaii.edu/leonj/leonj/leonpsy35/avatar-book-g35.htm
3. Conjugial
Love and Eternal Marriage: The Biological Theory of Mind and Immortality
(2012) with Diane Nahl http://goo.gl/USxvs
4. Avatar
Psychology and Mental Anatomy (2009) http://goo.gl/G5q0J
5. Organic Mind:
Discovering the Mental World of Eternity (2008) http://goo.gl/PZCOI
6. The
Spiritual Significance of Neologisms by Leon James (2008)
http://goo.gl/LAaCQ
7. Lecture Notes on Mental
Anatomy (volume 1) (2007) http://goo.gl/X067t
8. Lecture Notes on Mental
Biology (volume 2) http://goo.gl/R43yc
Lecture
Notes on Correspondences (volume 3 http://goo.gl/0KLp5
9. Principles of
Theistic Psychology (18 volumes) (2004-2007) http://goo.gl/1aLP7
10. Unity Model of
Marriage (2001-2007) http://goo.gl/uftf2
11. Moses, Paul, and
Swedenborg (1999) http://goo.gl/2MIYO
12. Swedenborg Encyclopedia of
Theistic Psychology (1996-2007) http://goo.gl/RzxUC
13. Best Friends
in Love: Natural and Spiritual Dimension of Marriage (2000) http://goo.gl/gbSh3
14. Songs About Driving Cars
on Roads and Highways Spiritually Understood (2007)
http://goo.gl/mpH36
15. Half a Century of
Science in Psychology: Scientific Neologisms Coined by Leon James between 1958
and 2008 http://goo.gl/BUeXv
|
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 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