Chosen Bodies: Musings of the Self in Cyberspace, the Bronco Chase, and Future Anthropology

A little over a year ago, I was horrified to browse through my son's MySpace page. The false and almost pornographic sophistication of his middle school friends was a huge eye opener, and his account was shortly thereafter deleted. But, in perusing that labyrinthine virtual landscape of MySpace that I had theretofore completely and unabashedly ignored and dismissed as pedestrian and aesthetically and intellectually void, irrelevant, posthuman plastic drivel, I noticed unmistakable patterns within the style and superficial aesthetics of the endless avatars, visual 'comments', and 'pics.' I then began pondering the very nature of the avatar.

The traditional meaning of 'avatar' refers to the terrestrial bodily persona (usually chosen) of an evolved, non-terrestrial-based, godly being. It's a necessary human body-costume inhabited by a sublime visitor, in order to partake of and experience the earth plane. The writer Neil Stephenson famously first appropriated the term 'avatar' in his cyberpunk novel Snowcrash, for its now common usage-signifying personal bodily representation within cyberspace. This religious or sacred terminology cannot be dismissed. Note too, the word 'icon'-traditionally signifying religious portraiture-is also commonly used to signify cyber representations.

Why the sacred language? It may be a way to carry something long-established as meaningful into a brand new, cold, largely unexplored and definitely inhuman landscape. It's fairly easy to ascribe a sense of whimsical narcissism to the usages, but that may be shortsighted. It's only easily dismissed because we are currently quite steeped in it, and therefore any pertinent oddities and ironies are cancelled out by ubiquity and constant reference. Meaning is gathered best with a bit of cultural distance.