CFP: Who am I Online?

A two day workshop at Aarhus University in Denmark, May 10-11th 2010

As time and technology progress, how we interact with the world and each other becomes increasingly complex and articulated. The quantity and diversity of information in our environment, and the ease with which we can access that information and integrate it into our daily lives, have increased exponentially over the past decade. For many of us, the environment with which we interact has changed to make possible entirely new ways of working with information and being with others. Interest in these topics has recently been amplified by the advent of the so-called “Web 2.0”, a (continuing) expansion of interactive venues such as social networking, blogging and microblogging such as Twitter, and “pro/sumer” activities in which consumers of media content such as music and videos are simultaneously its producers.

Psychologists, sociologists and anthropologists have for some time been interested in the ways in which changes in our informational environment might affect us and our self-conceptions. The relevance of new technologies to our lives has attracted academic attention in large part because it appears to raise questions about how new kinds of interactions with others and our environment might alter, shape or otherwise affect our self-conceptions, our thoughts and other aspects of our cognitive, emotional and moral lives. And the project of ascertaining which properties of ourselves and our activities make essential contributions to our moral and mental lives and personhood is one in which philosophers are traditionally engaged. Yet these topics have, thus far, been relatively neglected by philosophers. This is especially strange when considered alongside the emphasis in recent philosophy of mind on the essential contributions that the embedding environment and our modes of interaction with it can make to our mental lives. If it’s possible that our informational environment and our capacities for interaction with it can constitutively shape our mentality and our moral conduct, we should consider whether radical changes in that environment and its interactive affordances may have implications for the character of our mental and moral lives, and perhaps for the sorts of persons we are.

What implications do new informational environments and affordances have for philosophical and ethical views of personal identity? What light, if any, can existing philosophical work on personal identity shine on the conceptual issues that arise when talking and thinking about agents, environments and interactions that span or blur the real/virtual and online/offline divides? The workshop will address these issues.

We welcome proposals for papers on the construction of personal identities online. Please submit extended abstracts (between 1500 and 2000 words, including bibliography, preferably in MS Word format) for papers suitable for 30-minute presentations to Dave Ward (D.Ward2@herts.ac.uk) by 31st of March 2010. Successful submissions may be further selected for publication.

Panel Session on Personal Identity Online, Rome, May 27th 2010

As part of our project, there will be a panel session on the personal identity online at the 2010 Identity in the Information Society workshop, to be held in Rome from May 26-28th.

There will be four short presentations on the relevance of interaction with online environments to our thinking about personal identity, by:

Professor Giorgio Bertolotti (Milan)
Dr. Ezio Di Nucci (Essen)
Professor Luciano Floridi (Hertfordshire)
and Dr. Dave Ward (Hertfordshire)

The presentations will be followed by a roundtable discussion.

Some more information about the workshop and our panel session is available here.

Call For Papers

CFP: Personal Identities, the Embodiments and Environments

A 1-day workshop at the University of Hertfordshire (UK), 2nd July 2010

Keynote Speakers:
Professor Eric Olson (Sheffield)
Professor Galen Strawson

1st Call for Papers (deadline: 15th April 2010)

In recent years, the philosophy of mind and cognitive science has increasingly attended to the possibility that agents’ interactions among themselves and with their environments might play an essential role in supporting and shaping their mental lives. It has become common to argue that capacities for experience, agency and understanding might depend constitutively on each other, on embodiment, on the embedding environment, or on some combination of these factors. This one-day workshop will investigate the relevance of these issues for philosophical work on personal identity. Special attention will be paid to the nature of the environment in which agents are embedded, including social, artificial, digital, or virtual realities.

Approaches that tie personal identity to the body, or to capacities for agency or experience have a long and distinguished history. How might such traditional approaches benefit or suffer from the various possibilities of explanatory dependence between those capacities, embodiment, and environmental interactions? And if we allow a role for environmental interactions in an account of personal identity, what is the significance of the fact that our interactions with others and our environments are becoming digitally mediated and progressively transformed as time and technology progress? In a society in which agents spend an increasing amount of time online, how is this affecting their self-understanding, the shaping of their own personal identities and the capacity to maintain coherent yet diversified, individual profiles in different spaces and at different times?

We welcome proposals for papers both on classic approaches to the philosophy of personal identity and on topics dealing with artificial, virtual or digital embodiments and embeddedness. Please submit extended abstracts (between 1000 and 1500 words, preferably in MS Word format) for papers suitable for 40-minute presentations to Dave Ward (D.Ward2@herts.ac.uk) by 15 April 2010. Successful submissions will be further selected for publication in a journal’s special issue.

The workshop is the second in a series of meetings organized as part of the AHRC-funded project “The Construction of Personal Identities Online”.

An Introduction

This is the blog of the AHRC-funded project "The Construction of Personal Identities Online". Welcome!

The project began in September, when this blog was created. Since then, we've been writing some papers, organising some conferences and workshops, and planning journal special issues. Though, as you can see, we haven't been doing much in the way of blogging. But that is changing, as of now! Via this space, you'll be able to keep track of what we're up to - the topics we're thinking about, the events we're organising, and the various tidbits of Online-Personal-Identity-Relevant information we come across, and think worthy of sharing.

But first, a little bit about what the project is all about. In broad terms, it's about whether or not various branches of philosophy can inform our ways of thinking about our interactions with information and with others in online environments, and conversely, whether philosophy can learn anything from thinking about such online cases. For example, might traditional philosophical disputes about personal identity, or about where to draw the boundaries between ourself and the world, or about the sorts of activities which might be essential to us as persons, benefit from considering the various ways in which people create personas, interact with others, and manipulate environments and information online? And might our ways of thinking about these online environments, of the nature of our interactions with and within them, and of their relevance to us and our lives, be usefully informed by existing philosophical work on persons, their minds, and their interactions?

We hope to answer 'yes' to both of these questions. Part of the task of philosophy is to describe the way we are in the world, and how best to think about it - to provide a useful map of the features of our world and our interactions with it that are of most importance to us as people. And, for many of us, online resources and environments are a key part of our world, allowing for projects, relationships and possibilities that would be unavailable to us otherwise. For many of us, the interactions we take part in via online interfaces are just as immediate, effortless and important to us as many of our interactions with our non-virtual environment. It's clear that the rapid development of these interactive possibilities in the last twenty or so years has changed the way many of us live. But are these changes that philosophers should be paying attention to?

Whether we answer that last question 'yes' or 'no', I think that in answering it we can't fail to learn something important both about philosophy, and about the technology we're considering. Showing that the moves we make online, or through some digital interface, are somehow of secondary importance to our lives would require us to have a convincing theory of the features of a person and their interactions which determine whether some aspect of them or their conduct is of 'primary' or 'secondary' importance. Conversely, showing that such moves could make some fundamental difference to us that should interest philosophers requires us to have a convinving view of the nature of those moves, and of the ways in which interactions with an environment can contribute to an agent's personhood.

Clearly, this is broad-brush stuff. But I hope it's enough to suggest why we think that the topic of this project might be of relevance to various branches of philosophy, and also of general interest. We hope that keeping you updated about our thoughts and activities on the project will make this an interesting blog. Please comment away with your thoughts, and let us know about any news, resources or ideas you think we should be interested in.

More soon!

Welcome

Welcome to the Blog of the AHRC-funded project The Construction of Personal Identities Online (2009-2011).