Community

My blog is supposed to focus on identity but I intend writing about community here. Who makes the rules about what I write – I do. Besides I will end up talking about identity anyway so there’s enough justification – huh ?

Community and online communities – what’s the difference? They are similar in many ways. Both have a factor of participation – you participate in a community and are then part of it or you don’t and are outside it. You have an identity (told you so) in both . People have a perception of you both as an online participant and as a real person within your local community. Both provide the opportunity to participate in different communities (e.g. I am a member of my local street community, of the game hunting community and the counselling community. Online I am a member of the Runescape Gaming community, the SecondLife Virtual community and the Facebook social network community).

A paper I have been reading (no I am not going to go look it up right now) is suggesting that the Internet is bringing about a revolution in our society, a revolution in the truest sense of the word. That it may lead to changes that cannot yet be foreseen. The primary reason for this is because the Internet increases our accessibility to each other and accessibility is a key factor on building communities. Before the industrial revolution communities were small and isolated due to lack of communications media and rapid transport. Your community was the village you lived in – period. Then the industrial age arrived and suddenly it was possible to travel and communicate over large distances. Suddenly accessibility went up by a large factor. Now it was possible to work outside the village. Possible to trade outside the village, town, city and country. The telephone provided the first enormous jump in communication accessibility. However, there were still real physical limits for most people on how many people they could actually interact with on a regular basis.

The Internet has changed all that. It is now possible to regularly communicate via email, text, voice and video with anyone in the world that you can find using the search engines being implemented in online communities. It is well known that the industrial revolution changed the way we live in ways we could not imagine at the time. The Internet promises further uncharted changes in our society, possibly more radical than we experienced during the industrial upheaval. There are undoubtedly ways the Internet can be used for the benefit of all people on the planet and of course just as many ways in which it can be used in negative harmful ways. The corporate power elites and their political arms were slow to awaken to the potential of the Internet but now they are aware and trying to control it as we are seeing in the US and other western countries. Being a distributed environment under no one entities control, they have not yet succeeded in wresting power from the people. We should be mindful of this incredible gift that gives us all a voice and the freedom to connect and unite in ever increasingly different ways. See http://youtube.com/watch?v=Y0r71L7cojE for Bill Moyers on protecting our freedoms.

Copyright Protoruru 2008!

Relationship in Therapy

A thought just occurred to me which stopped me in my tracks ……. I’m a mental health therapist and I believe that my success with face to face (f2f) clients is due largely to the relationship I build with them The relationship building process – what is it about me and my client that helps or hinders the process. I’m not sure if there is much research on this aspect of therapy (its pretty qualitative stuff huh ?). My own hunches are that its related to my ability to be “real”, show unconditional positive regard, to be empathic, to listen well, to attend to my clients nuances of body language and tone of voice etc (attunement) …. AND this adds up to my PRESENCE in the room. It would seem that my f2f presence is certainly good enough for the many clients I see. There are some clients obviously where my presence is not a good enough fit for what they are looking for. Thats OK and will always be so.

I’m looking at developing an online practice. Doubtless the relationship building will be just as foundational to therapy as in f2f. So what was this “stopping in the tracks” thought I had?

“I don’t know a thing about what my online presence is like!”

Following on from this is –

• What if …. it’s not good enough ? (to retain clients long enough to do useful work with them)
• How can I determine this? (Before building an online practice and the investment of time and money associated with this ?
• How can I improve my online presence? (Are there any online presence trainers !?)

OK so I need to find out more about this. A few links:

Presence in Cyberspace

http://www-usr.rider.edu/~suler/psycyber/textrel.html

http://www-usr.rider.edu/~suler/psycyber/showdown.html

http://www-usr.rider.edu/~suler/psycyber/emailrel.html

http://www-usr.rider.edu/~suler/psycyber/hilucy.html

http://www-usr.rider.edu/~suler/psycyber/texttalk.html

Transference Among People Online

Changing Perspectives

My, it’s a while since I’ve been here. Still feeling the writers block associated with knowing that I will self-censor what I write because I don’t have total anonymity here.

This weeks work had me musing on the differences between IRL identity and online identity. Especially interesting was the idea of how online identity may contain “performative ambiguity” and contain projections of our inner fantasies. With our IRL identity we tend to conform more to societies norms and are constrained to behave within the  shell of personality that others expect of us. This constraining force is not nearly as powerful in cyberspace, (a weak force?), and allows us to experiment with who we might be and might become. Cyberspace then becomes something of a sandbox to try out new combinations of our parts of self.   A place to  work through our issues, resistances and blocks. Constrained to be a macho male IRL? Try out getting in touch with those gentler sensitive parts of your psyche by changing your online gender and notice how differently we are treated by male online participants.  Need to develop some assertive skill IRL – go try some different player behaviour and see what reaction you get from others within the safety of a game environment.  The virtual world is unique in its potential to explore parts of ourselves that couldn’t be explored at all before or if they could carried an associated real risk of some loss (e.g. job, partner…) or other consequence (e.g. ostracism, marginalisation) .

Masks

Todays chat meet was different for me to last week. I felt a little jaded today and felt I wanted to stand on the sidelines and watch rather than participate. I was aware of my wanting to be seen in a certain light, as an active, intelligent participant.  But I didn’t feel involved. I couldn’t be just me. I wore a mask and the real tired me tried to be a virtual upbeat me. We all wear masks IRL of course and this is healthy in that we often need different aspects of self to come to the fore to cope with the demands of different roles we have in life. The “counsellor me” is different to the “parent me”.

If we wear different masks IRL then I guess we probably wear different masks on-line. I know this is true as my business mask is more “warrior-like” than my student mask. (My business is IT writing). My “helper mask” looks more accepting than how I appear when taking Telecom to task when my broadband service is down!

Masks = parts of self. If it is easier to get in touch with parts of self (identity) then are we are likely to see more of our clients parts of self during online counselling ?

Random thoughts

Todays group text chat gave me some food for thought. In no particular order :

1. I noticed that identifying who was making a “post” to the session was difficult as the only cue is their login name. IRL we locate the spatially from the direction their voice comes from, the tone, accent and quality of their voice and their visual image when we look at them. It seems a visual image is important in identifying a contributor. If the text entry submitted by a contributor included the contrbutors image (avatar) this would enhance presence. Of course video would be best but even an avatar would be better than nothing. If the avatar was a photo of the contributor then even better.
2. Allied to this thought above, I noticed that one contributor (I’m keeping this strictly private – aren’t I just so ethical ?) changed her avatar during the session from a clipart avatar to a photo of herself. This increased presence for me. She became more present for me.

The speed of the interaction of contributors influenced presence. The faster the text entries appeared, the more real the conversation became. Though there was a limit to this – which resulted in overload and having to read the entries that had appeared in order to re-orient to what was being said. This contributed to the idea that the conversation flowed in a way that could be compared to dancing with someone or dancing in a group. If the group gets out of “sync” then we all stop and get back to our places to start over.

There are no cues in the “silences” as to what someone is doing or even if they are still there. Compare this with a phone conversation. The silences are not as cueless in that we can hear background noise in the place callers environment, maybe hear them breathing.

How important is this difference? Well, in f2f counselling all those cues – body language, tone of voice, facial expression, movement, breathing are there to allow the counsellor to “be with” the client – to be more empathic. In a chat environment the counsellor would need to compensate for the paucity of cues. Not sure yet how this can be done utilising whats available in the chat environment. Enhancers would include:

• emoticons
• client being able to txt some of their reactions (e.g. laughing, crying, tense)
• animated “talking head” images (see CrazyTalk)
• emoticons that produce sounds (e.g. sighs, crying, or that say a phrase – pre-recorded)
• webcam
• voice

How could the counsellor enhance the presence by other methods ?

Move to WordPress

I’ve moved here because WordPress seems to be easier to get along with and I like the look and feel.

My Focus – Online Identity

Decided that my focus will be “online identity”. Haven’t yet researched anything about this and thought I would just see what I might know about this already. I did a mind map of some of the thoughts I have had about this.

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I notice that there is a wealth of information that we use when we form an image of the identity of another person – the “external perceived identity”. Internal identity is something quite different it seems; almost unrelated to our external perceived identity.

Whats it all about ? (Alfie (;-))

So what is this all about ? Blogging. Why would I want to share my innermost thoughts and feelings with the whole world ?  Having been a life long journal writer (though not a regular one) the idea of sharing my private thoughts with anyone have been something I would regard as quite abhorrent. Journals are private.  That is how I have always viewed the matter. Why ? Judgement. Many things may be thought but not expressed. Many things will not be socially acceptable or acceptable to parents or to a partner. A journal is a good place to make thoughts concrete by writing them out of myself and then being able to reflect of what has been written. This is how I have always thought about the role of a journal. The thought that someone may discover my journal and read it has even caused me to censor what I write! Why? I think it is that the consequences of being identified with “unacceptable thoughts” could be significant. Could damage relationships, could isolate one socially, could  even put one behinds bars perhaps (but of course that doesn’t apply to me (;-))

What then if I could write anonymously. There could be no consequences from any stranger reading what I have written. What if they could comment on what I had written? The feedback could be helpful, unhelpful, critical, rude, threatening….. but I would be isolated from it. I could block those who made unhelpful, critical remarks. Blogging provides all this. In addition I might gain a great deal and discover new perspectives, more about the blindspots in my johari window (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johari_window) and even find fellowship with others via my blog.  Provided that I can remain anonymous. What then if I should find friendship via my blogging friends and we mutually shared our darkest secrets? Would it then be possible to meet in real life (IRL)? Would it be possible to discard our anonymity? If we trusted each other enough perhaps it would. Would it be necessary? What makes IRL any different to the virtual world of the blog? 

 I’m still exploring as you may intuit. There’s something about fiction writing that ties in here too – about exploring parts of ourselves that cannot be given birth to in real life. As I learn best by doing then perhaps I have to blog to learn what is possible and what is illusory.

 

 

Fledgling feeling

This LiveJournal is frustrating stuff. Its rare for me to feel frustration with a computer application but I’m finding myself blocked here from doing what I want. Perhaps I should read the manual (is there any?) but I cannot help feel frustrated at the interface here. I want to change the look and feel of my blog space but can I find the place to do this (and I’ve been there last week).  How do you find friends of like minds ? Manage friends – you have to have some. Find ….Interest – how do you specify multiples ? Plus it seems slow – very slow – frustratingly slow. maybe I should try MySpace ….

Reading “A Blogging Cure” paper at present re the therapeutic value of blogging. Beginning to understand  the potential for mutual support in the virtual community. The virtual  community offers so much more variety of contacts with those who are like minded than we could ever meet in real life before the internet.

First Blog Entry

Having meticulously typed my first blog entry I hit some key and it all disappeared ? And me being a mature computer user !
Try again – I’m excited about this. I’m exploring my online presence here and wondering what I might discover about myself from others. Re-adjustment of my Johari window ? Finding out a little more about myself and how I come across to others in the constraints set by email, chat and Skype phone.