One consequence of the digitisation of nearly all aspects of our lives is the increasing sense that we live through our computers, that they are extensions of our selves.
Ouch. Does this explain the sense of panic that has overtaken me whenever I've lost my internet connection at home? Like it's an emergency and no kind of normal life is going to be possible ('you'd better just steel yourself and adjust, do you hear? Oh, oh, oh!') for... for as long as it's going to take. Does it explain the sense of partial disembodiment I have when away from home and for one reason or another cut off for, ooh, hours at a time from the possibility of getting online? If so, it's worrying. I don't want a bit of my self locked up in some machine. I want to be an integral being, contained within my skin, as it were - in my head and my hands and my legs and, well, all the other bits of me. If my computers - and now my iPhone - are an extension of my self, then I am less than myself. I mean, the I that I used to be before computers is less than a full self and I am diminished. And if I am no longer me, but only a bit of me, even a large bit, who is it that is now the full me? And am I still in charge or is he (assuming the full me is male)?
But hold on. I can turn off the machines just so. Without a care. I can go for hours at a time out there in the non-virtual world and not feel the slightest pang or even twinge. I can walk, I can talk, I can go about, I can see people, I can read. I can sleep. I can open my mail and throw most of it away. So long as I know I can get back online when I, er... need to. I am, then, still authentically me. I am the author of my actions. After all, no one thinks that a concert hall, cinema or sports stadium is an extension of his or her self just because they visit it a lot. Our friend Gillian hasn't lost part of her being to the Bridgewater Hall. Before I was a blogger, nobody suggested my self was to be parcelled out between me and my cricket books.
I am me. I am my self and vice versa. I am myself and nothing else. Phew!