The Invention of the Soul

In a YouTube video I recently watched, the creator spoke of how it had been so long since she’d ‘logged out’ of anything. This is an interesting idea, but it becomes even more meta when we consider this video was a vlog – a word presumably derived from the combining of the words video and log – and as such was a snapshot of the content creator’s life at that moment.

There is something of an ironic postmodernist element to broadcasting online the phenomenon of existing offline. Laurence Scott writes in ‘The Four-Dimensional Human’ about the internet existing within a new dimension – the fourth, amazingly – and how human beings are continuing to occupy ever more space within this new frontier. It’s from this angle that the vlogger’s perspective becomes understandable; it is weird to ‘log out’ when part of ourselves occupies the 4D world.

Of course, we cannot be plugged in all the time. At some point there is sleep and showering and lunches that require us to be present in the physical realm. In the days when the internet flowed through telephone wires concepts of the digital world such as Tron or fantasy tropes such as The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe offered reasonable parallels to the physical disconnect between ourselves and the online space.

Today such ‘doorways’ do not seem to exist, and the internet in the form of Wi-Fi surrounds us constantly. Maps to the digital Pangea exist as phones in our pockets; the skull and grey matter need not be the cage of a stray thought. It is easy, therefore, to believe we are as much an online entity as we are an offline entity.

However, unlike the words video and log, we cannot combine with our online selves, no matter how similar we believe them to be, as there still exists a sacred disconnect between our physical 3D bodies and the 4D space. When we click that almost defunct ‘log off’ button, we remind ourselves of the doorway we must step through each time we wish to enter the virtual world, a doorway you might think vanished through frequency of use and ease of access.

The nature of the online space is inherently self-centred. That’s not necessarily a problem, as it makes the scale of the internet more manageable and the content available tuned better to us. However, it also engrains a belief that our logging off creates some sort of irrevocable void in the social media streams of our online companions. This sense of self and self-importance is not helped by the extension of account names and passwords to almost every service on the web, which in turn cultivates a sense of ownership.

The feeling of absenteeism when logging off not only speaks to the self-centeredness of our online systems; it speaks volumes when considering how little is perceived to be of import in the real world. I find myself thinking of the notable disconnect between finance and the ‘real’ economy, but that’s not for debate here.

Because it is our 3D selves logging off, and because we cannot truly be one with our 4D variant, we are inclined to feel the world is cut off from us. Of course it is really we who are cut off from that world - the online one - whilst the 3D world and ourselves remain in the same state as we were moments before clicking that ‘log off’ button. My question is what is our 4D self when three of those dimensions have decided to depart for a while?

A word that has fallen out of fashion on the web is avatar. In the earliest days of online communication, it was not irregular for one to be represented by an avatar – some sort of digital icon that could be used to uniquely represent you. This avatar’s design was limited by the coding of whatever site the avatar was being built on. Still, a sense of self must have made its way into the pixelated figure.

Since the days of the avatar this blurring of lines has become a tearing of pages; the online world functions and encourages us, not avatars, to populate it. Facebook and Twitter are no longer tools for fun or back-up communication; they are a crucial part of our social identity, which very much extends into the ‘real’, physical world.

To be branded as weird for not having Facebook is as much a statement of one’s social ineptitude as it is one’s technological. ‘Logging off’ is even worst; it is to choose to abandon the 4D self, rather than to merely not have 4D replica to begin with. In the days of the avatar this was not an issue, as the avatar was merely a token of you in the online space, with limitations in coding restricting how accurately the avatar could represent the ‘real’ self. When it is ourselves occupying the 4D world abandonment – or logging off – might be considered some kind of self-lobotomy.

The sacred disconnect between the 3D body and the 4D entity is gone. The internet has invented a soul for each of us. The mobile phone has become a vital organ of the human body – is it not a component of you that you carry wherever you go, that is never shut off, that you would hate to lose? As Baudrillard writes, “From a classical (even cybernetic) perspective, technology is an extension of the body.” The only flaw in this argument might be the disposable nature of a mobile phone (and technology) when an upgrade is readily available.

But this flaw adds credence to the 4D self being representative of the 21^st century soul, for no matter what phone or computer or tablet you own, those accounts and passwords that grant ownership will still be used to access your Facebook page, your Twitter feed, your 4D self. This self does not leave you in part because of the permanency of data online, but in part because of the social requirement to carry it with you.

Is there a weight to this soul? An argument for ‘logging off’ might be to seek relief from carrying it around constantly. But I think this is unlikely. Firstly, it leads us into dark, Faustian parallels that I think are unjustified. Secondly, this idea suffers from the same lack of understand that a film such as Tron, in hindsight, is guilty of.

The internet is not really a new frontier, but a product of human creation. This creation continues; indeed, the internet might represent the single largest infrastructure project ever undertaken by man. To treat the 4D soul as something that, over time, may become malign, is to forget that the image we craft of ourselves online is as much the image we craft of ourselves in the mirror every day. The reason avatars were effective, but ultimately unsatisfying, is they could not be truly representative, and added to the belief that the internet was an alien world, which it is not.

Like we might withdraw from the world after a day at work or a party, so too might we withdraw from the online space. In recent years, so called down time has revolved around going online, but as the internet evolves and the presence and importance of the 4D self develops into something that is not alien but in many aspects human, ‘logging off’ might become some sort of paradoxical respite from the noise and traffic of the 4D world.

Stepping back from the 4D space need not be rejection of the fourth dimension, but instead an opportunity to check in with the other three dimensions that are just as valuable to the soul. The 4D soul is, after all, simply a projection of ourselves in the 4D space. It has always existed, but where the physical world and our physical selves make the soul hard to see, the online world and our physical selves contrast, and the soul appears.

As such, to ‘log off’ is not to abandon the 4D soul, but to merely consider the entity of self within its other dimensions.