Things used to be further away in some popular sense. The world is getting smaller, and not, explained Alan Partridge, due to global warming. Technological progress has resulted in modes of transportation which can move objects like me a long way, quickly. But despite how cool planes are, that whole clunky process of actually moving things around seems a little quaint these days.

Our grinning, binitarian stampede towards digitisation has meant that a hell of a lot of the stuff people actually care about is represented by somewhat soulless 1s and 0s. It’s been boiled down to dry information, replicable almost instantly almost anywhere. I don’t really know where all that data is. Is what it represents somewhere? My music? My pictures? They have a location of sorts – I know how to get at them – but I can’t help but feel that not any of that stuff is anywhere except when I listen to it or look at it, and at those times it’s wherever I am. The data, the 1s and 0s, if you wanted to dig them out, might be apparent somewhere, in something plasticy. But that’s not my music. I can hear music, but I can’t hear the bits. The stuff I care about is nowhere until it is actually produced from the relevant threads of information.

Despite the move from letters to emails, it seems that the stuff we care about is here (there?) in the real world - not in amongst some collection of digits. However, that way of thinking doesn’t always seem to work.

Playing Halo 2 online recently, my team-mates and I had to fight though our opponents and, as usual, take from them a flag. The four of us made a careful approach to the enemy position. We crouched behind the final corner before our target, readying ourselves to start shooting and so on. It was then that I wondered “Where are we?” I knew where I was (or so I thought). I was on my sofa, in my lounge, in Leeds. Two of my team-mates were Australian, though, so I guess they were over there somewhere. Quite far away from me really.

Here, a problem arose: it seemed obvious that we were located in our respective houses, but it seemed just as obvious that the Australians and I were in the same place. We were crouching next to one another behind a crumbled wall, near to some rocks. Furthermore, that wall and the rocks were not really items of those kinds. They were, at best, representations of a wall and some rocks. As such, they were not nearby – no nearer at least than my music and my pictures. The Australians, however, were within earshot. Certain of the interactions I could have had with them were only possible due to this replicated proximity. Without even describing the actual game so much, these interactions included talking to one another and having our representations show up on the others’ TVs. In the game’s terms, we could be seen on each other’s radar and hit one another. Either way, we were in the same place.

And those actions I perform when playing – shooting, running, jumping – define me in some sense. The impression I give the Australians of myself – my online personality – is described only in those terms. No other means are available to me. But those acts are nothing outside of the game. In my living room, I do none of them. My fingers twitch; that’s all.

So perhaps my presence online is not really me. But then again my personality certainly extends into the simulated world: the Australians can get to know me by those in-game actions. So perhaps it is me, but it certainly isn’t a bit of me which is visible in my living room - the twitching of my fingers is no more what I am doing than the 1s and 0s are my music. When I am in the game, I am all over the world – and nowhere, with the rocks and the music.

Categories: Reality, Human, Technology, Future, Perspective, Internet, Robokku