![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Self. Ish.
2 May 2007 00:35Self-image. Maybe the most damning of all character traits.
It was the Scottish poet Robert Burns who once wrote:
“Oh what a gift that God could gi’e us.
To see ourselves as others see us”
That wish was no longer an unfulfillable thing. In fact, every single person with a jack faced it everyday. There were a few turns of phrase for it. Residual self-image, the mirror effect, ego mask, personality form, a few others. Books had been written about it.
When the Twonet first started up but before it hit the market, people in charge were thinking about what to project into it, what ‘skins’ to inhabit when walking around cyberspace.
There were ideas that were growing more and more complicated about how to do just that before it was released to the public. Hooking the brain’s senses into something silicate and programmed was a monumental task.
It was turning out to be a much more difficult process than anticipated.
Until Dr. Malaika had that stroke of simple genius, no one was gaining on a solution.
Dr. Malaika, in what she later claimed was an accident, jacked in to the lab’s onboard computer to see what she looked like without a preprogrammed skin. She had a prototype difference engine set up, using her own sense of self to mimic a skin through a feedback loop.
She stood in front of the virtual mirror, was disappointed at not seeing anything unusual, hit record, jacked out and printed a copy of the image.
She insisted that the picture was an accurate depiction of her. The other scientists in the room disputed that fact.
Her eyes were not as green in real life. The image on the printout had much larger hips. She was paler on paper. The woman on the piece of paper seemed to posess an amount of sass and brightness that Dr. Malaika lacked.
The interesting part was that even when looking at photographs of herself or her image in the mirror, she insisted that the printout was correct.
Being a scientist, she eventually took their word for it, but only after they had all jacked in and experienced the same effect.
People that thought they were hideous were actually ugly in cyberspace. People that thought they were beautiful were actually attractive in cyberspace.
A completely different form of society evolved in those interconnected black boxes.
Research continues on making a multi-leveled animated avatar that matches the detailed complexity of what the world gets for free from the average human brain but that research is dwindling. People are used to what they’ve been seeing.
It’s been a real eye-opener to say the least.
Four new fields of psychology have sprung up and ‘jacking in’ is now part of most psychological screening processes and police interrogations.
There’s a lot about a subconscious self-image that cuts to the chase.
tags
It was the Scottish poet Robert Burns who once wrote:
“Oh what a gift that God could gi’e us.
To see ourselves as others see us”
That wish was no longer an unfulfillable thing. In fact, every single person with a jack faced it everyday. There were a few turns of phrase for it. Residual self-image, the mirror effect, ego mask, personality form, a few others. Books had been written about it.
When the Twonet first started up but before it hit the market, people in charge were thinking about what to project into it, what ‘skins’ to inhabit when walking around cyberspace.
There were ideas that were growing more and more complicated about how to do just that before it was released to the public. Hooking the brain’s senses into something silicate and programmed was a monumental task.
It was turning out to be a much more difficult process than anticipated.
Until Dr. Malaika had that stroke of simple genius, no one was gaining on a solution.
Dr. Malaika, in what she later claimed was an accident, jacked in to the lab’s onboard computer to see what she looked like without a preprogrammed skin. She had a prototype difference engine set up, using her own sense of self to mimic a skin through a feedback loop.
She stood in front of the virtual mirror, was disappointed at not seeing anything unusual, hit record, jacked out and printed a copy of the image.
She insisted that the picture was an accurate depiction of her. The other scientists in the room disputed that fact.
Her eyes were not as green in real life. The image on the printout had much larger hips. She was paler on paper. The woman on the piece of paper seemed to posess an amount of sass and brightness that Dr. Malaika lacked.
The interesting part was that even when looking at photographs of herself or her image in the mirror, she insisted that the printout was correct.
Being a scientist, she eventually took their word for it, but only after they had all jacked in and experienced the same effect.
People that thought they were hideous were actually ugly in cyberspace. People that thought they were beautiful were actually attractive in cyberspace.
A completely different form of society evolved in those interconnected black boxes.
Research continues on making a multi-leveled animated avatar that matches the detailed complexity of what the world gets for free from the average human brain but that research is dwindling. People are used to what they’ve been seeing.
It’s been a real eye-opener to say the least.
Four new fields of psychology have sprung up and ‘jacking in’ is now part of most psychological screening processes and police interrogations.
There’s a lot about a subconscious self-image that cuts to the chase.
tags