Cyberreality

Do I have a cyberself?

While I have read and watched and listened about Gardner Campbell's Personal Cyberinfrastructure I realized something I have but did not know. I started thinking about if I maybe have a completely different personality in the cyberworld. Everybody knows we are different in different environments like  family and home, work and place of work or friends and recreational facilities. Why not being different in a cyberspace and how real is this part of my life?



cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by Kiba Tachikawa

Gardner Campbell as an educator may not be interested in particular to answer these questions, but he certainly must have thought about them sometimes.
Gardner's main interest is to teach young college students how important it is to have a personal space in the world wide web, but he does not reason by telling them it has to do with becoming a good grade for creating this space. His idea is to position his students within a learning environment and/ or make them a responsible-minded global citizen.
I first understood what he meant when looking at an example he presented during a discussion with students. My view was always the one of an artist, who has to present his creations to become known and as someone who wants to learn about art, especially digital art and storytelling.
Gardner again presented a the page of an female student who learns about the engineering sciences. This reminded me of myself and that I definitely would have learned more about science if I had been able to be creative in the way this page shows us. It is personal, it is creative and it is a bit of ingenious. This way I adopted the idea  of having a personal cyberspace as particularly worthy for anyone and for a global development in general.

This way due to her page the young student also became a personality to me and I presume her personality within her non-cyberenvironment is rather different from what I imagine of her.

I started diving into being a cybersoul during the spring ds106 course of 2013. I was quite myself and not very successful with this, but my determination to learn all about ds106 and to post whatever I am able to create, finally gave me some consideration. Still, I have to say I tried being a cyber personality earlier, but did not get any concern until I have found the ds106 page, where a community exists, which is unusually open to newcomers.

Still, the point to be more interesting to people in the ds106 cyberspace remained, so I started creating a new avatar.

former

new   

The grey one is nice and amiable, but among all the brightness and creativity of the avatar landscape it may not be realized easily.

Still, I asked myself: which is more me?

A long time I thought the grey one it is. My answer today is: the bright one. The reason for this is by creating a new avatar I have become more of this even in my everyday life, which I like and which is essential for not drowning in everyday occurrence.

Yes, I have a cyberself, and moreover I have a cyberlife. Yet, I am sure both everyday life and cyberlife influence one another. This way I agree with Gardner: by helping students creating their own cyberspace and cyberpersonality you help them with their personal development, which was always the intention of educators, apart from giving marks for good results.