The Construction of Personal Identities Online

信息和通信技术（ict）正在构建一个新的栖息地（信息圈），子孙后代将在其中度过越来越多的时间。因此，个人如何构建和维护其在线个人身份（PIOs）是一个日益重要和紧迫的问题。今天，作为一项正在进行的工作，可以创建和发展pio，以提供丰富的经验，扩展，改善甚至帮助修复与他人和世界的关系，或实现富有想象力的预测（“站在别人的立场上”的体验），从而培养宽容。然而，个人信息也可能被错误构建、窃取、“滥用”，或导致心理或道德上不健康的生活，导致与现实世界和真实人物的接触减少。个人信息的构建影响着个人如何理解自己以及他们所属的群体、社会和文化，无论是在线上还是离线。pio越来越有助于个人的自尊，影响他们的生活方式，并影响他们的价值观、道德行为和伦理期望。这是一种具有巨大实际意义的现象，然而，至关重要的是，个人和团体似乎对自己在信息圈中的身份缺乏清晰的、概念性的理解，以及成为一个有道德责任感的在线信息代理意味着什么。这是不能令人满意的。不理解拥有PIO意味着什么会导致混乱和僵局。它导致道德准则和法律要求的不确定性。本研究试图通过解决以下问题来填补我们在哲学理解上的这一严重空白：人们如何着手建设、发展和保存PIO？我在网上是谁？我和其他人如何在网上定义和重新定义自己？在虚拟环境中，成为那个特别的我（而不是你，或者是拥有不同PIO的另一个我）是什么感觉？一个人是否应该关心自己的PIO发生了什么，以及他/她的PIO在网上的表现如何？pi线上线下是如何相互反馈的？可定制的、可复制的和一次性的PI是否会影响我们对离线PI的理解？我们如何解释多个PIO的情况，或者某人的PIO可能比他或她的离线PI更重要，甚至不兼容的情况？当线上和线下的现实在一个“线上生活”的连续体中交织在一起，线上和线下的个人信息必须协调和协商时，我们的自我理解会发生什么变化？研究的第一阶段将比较和评估PI的标准方法，分析它们在多大程度上可以扩展到解释PIO。要测试的假设是，经典的PI方法可以有助于我们对PIO的哲学理解；然而，当从离线环境导出到在线环境时，它们中的任何一个都不会完全令人满意；这个缺点可以帮助我们完善我们对PIO的理解，并开发一种新的PIO方法。研究的第二阶段将处理私人调查处提出的问题，以补充现有的私人调查处方法。需要测试的假设是，PIO的构建提供了证据，支持对PI的动态、互动和分布式（即依赖于社会或网络的）解释，将其作为一种关系属性而不是实质性属性；这种新的、互动的方法将是系统的，而不是单一的、面向主体的；并且这种方法可以在解释PI方面成功地与其他方法竞争，同时克服它们在PIO方面的局限性。研究将部分是描述性的，以便分析PIO的组成，部分是规范性的，以便确定PIO应该是什么。它将使用一种新的、非常规的方法，用《第二人生》中的计算机模拟实验取代思想实验。

Information and communication technologies (ICTs) are building a new habitat (infosphere) in which future generations will spend an increasing amount of time. So, how individuals construct and maintain their personal identities online (PIOs) is a problem of growing and pressing importance. Today, PIOs can be created and developed, as an ongoing work-in-progress, to provide experiential enrichment, expand, improve or even help to repair relationships with others and with the world, or enable imaginative projections (the 'being in someone else's shoes' experience), thus fostering tolerance. However, PIOs can also be mis-constructed, stolen, 'abused', or lead to psychologically or morally unhealthy lives, causing a loss of engagement with the actual world and real people. The construction of PIOs affects how individuals understand themselves and the groups, societies and cultures to which they belong, both online and offline. PIOs increasingly contribute to individuals' self-esteem, influence their life-styles, and affect their values, moral behaviours and ethical expectations. It is a phenomenon with enormous practical implications, and yet, crucially, individuals as well as groups seem to lack a clear, conceptual understanding of who they are in the infosphere and what it means to be an ethically responsible informational agent online. This is unsatisfactory. Failing to understand what it means to have a PIO causes confusion and impasse. It leads to uncertainty about ethical guidelines and legal requirements. The research seeks to fill this serious gap in our philosophical understanding by addressing the following questions:How does one go about constructing, developing and preserving a PIO? Who am I online? How do I, as well as other people, define and re-identify myself online? What is it like to be that particular me (instead of you, or another me with a different PIO), in a virtual environment? Should one care about what happens to one's own PIO and how one (with his/her PIO) is perceived to behave online? How do PIs online and offline feedback on each other? Do customisable, reproducible and disposable PIOs affect our understanding of our PI offline? How are we to interpret cases of multiple PIOs, or cases in which someone's PIO may become more important than, or even incompatible with, his or her PI offline? What is going to happen to our self-understanding when the online and offline realities become intertwined in an 'onlife' continuum, and online and offline PIs have to be harmonised and negotiated? The first stage of the research will compare and evaluate the standard approaches to PI by analysing how far they may be extended to explain PIO. The hypotheses to be tested are that classic approaches to PI can contribute to our philosophical understanding of PIO; that, however, none of them will turn out to be fully satisfactory by itself, when exported from offline to online environments; and that this shortcoming can help us both to refine our understanding of PI and to develop a new approach to PIO. The second stage of the research will address the questions raised by PIO, in order to complement the already available approaches to PI. The hypotheses to be tested are that the construction of PIO provides evidence in favour of a dynamic, interactive and distributed (that is, socially- or network-dependent) interpretation of PI, as a relational rather than a substantive property; that this new, interactive approach will be system- rather than single, agent-oriented; and that this approach can successfully compete with the others in explaining PI while overcoming their limitations when it comes to PIO.The research will be partly descriptive, in order to analyse what a PIO consists in, and partly prescriptive, in order to establish what a PIO ought to be. It will use a new and unconventional methodology, by replacing thought experiments with experiements in silico (simulations) in Second Life.