Cyber Authenticity

The new cyber universe gives us unprecedented access to information but also unprecedented opportunity to truly construct our own selves in a world of our own choice. Experts and studies warn that social isolation is approaching record levels even while people spend hundreds of hours per month in virtual worlds. So which is more Authentic, the person in the physical world, or the person in the virtual world? In the physical world identity is a combination of beliefs, attitudes, thoughts and physical characteristics, location, and socioeconomic status. Sartre said, "Existence precedes essence." We have an understanding of what this means in the physical world; that once we come into the physical world the formation of Authentic selves depends upon us. In Existentialist thought, Authenticity is the idea that while we have a duty to act morally, our actions are only Authentic if they are based on beliefs that we choose for ourselves, not based on unexamined teachings or influences from others or from society. The key to Authenticity is in our examination and choice of beliefs, ideas, and attitudes.

In the Existentialist view, we are all responsible for determining our own beliefs, values, and personality. Through our own choices, we create our own natures. But our choices in the physical world are based on outside factors that influence us, possibly without us even recognizing their influence. If you are raised in religious household, and become nonreligious as an adult, your early experiences with religion will inevitably have influenced your decision to be nonreligious. In the physical world it's impossible to escape certain outside factors that will influence our decisions about whom we are.

In the virtual world, those outside factors don't exist. In the virtual world we can re-create versions of ourselves without those mitigating influences. In online games like Second Life, the physical world is re-created in virtual form, and you can re-create your life the way you would choose if the limitations of the physical world didn't exist. In the physical world you might be a person who works in an office, sits in a cubicle and is a corporate drone for eight hours a day to pay the bills. You might not have any good career prospects, and might end up sitting in that cubicle for years. But in the virtual world, you can be a rock star or artist, a successful business person or poet, or anything else you might choose to be if there were no restrictions on your ability to achieve these things like there is in the physical world. The vacuum of the virtual world gives us a playground to try out all kinds of fantasies and identities, which might all be facets of whom we are in the physical world. In the virtual world, we truly are a product only of our own choices because we have the opportunity to create ourselves in virtual form without any of the limitations of the physical world. In the virtual world we can have careers, have love affairs, travel, and do all the things we can do in the physical world, but how our virtual selves interact with others is usually much different from how our physical selves interact with others. We all know people, sometimes ourselves, who act very different in the virtual world than in the physical and would say and do things virtually they would never say or do in the physical world.

It would appear on the surface that the virtual world would provide the most personal authenticity, since that world allows us to choose our essence arbitrarily, independent of external factors, but the authenticity of the virtual world is as much as illusion as the virtual world is. In order to be authentic ourselves, we must respect the authenticity of others. We do not exist in a vacuum, and so we can't treat others merely as objects without becoming objects ourselves. While it seems on the surface that games like Second Life, message boards, chat rooms and other virtual worlds and virtual means of communication give us the opportunity to choose our natures and live more authentically it actually is not the case. Real authenticity can only be achieved from making choices in the physical world. The Authentic ideas, attitudes and beliefs we choose will be carried over into the virtual world, but in order to create virtual essences for ourselves, we must first have an essence in the physical world. If you're not living Authentically in the physical world, your virtual self won't be Authentic either.