The Construction of Personal Identities Online

信息和通信技术正在建设一个新的栖息地(信息圈)，子孙后代将在其中花费越来越多的时间。因此，个人如何在网上构建和维护他们的个人身份(PIO)是一个日益重要和紧迫的问题。今天，可以创建和发展PIO，作为一项持续进行的工作，以提供经验丰富，扩大、改善甚至帮助修复与他人和世界的关系，或能够进行想象力的预测(“设身处地为他人”的经历)，从而培养宽容。然而，PIO也可能被错误地构建、窃取、滥用，或者导致心理或道德上不健康的生活，导致失去与现实世界和真实的人的接触。PIO的构建影响到个人对自己以及他们所属的群体、社会和文化的理解，无论是在线上还是线下。PIO越来越多地促进个人的自尊，影响他们的生活方式，并影响他们的价值观、道德行为和道德期望。这是一种具有巨大实际影响的现象，但至关重要的是，个人和团体似乎缺乏对他们在信息圈中的身份以及作为一名道德上负责任的在线信息代理人意味着什么的清晰、概念性的理解。这是不令人满意的。不理解拥有PIO意味着什么，会导致混乱和僵局。这导致了对道德准则和法律要求的不确定性。这项研究试图通过解决以下问题来填补我们哲学理解中的这一严重空白：如何构建、发展和维护PIO？我在网上是谁？我和其他人如何在网上定义和重新识别自己？在虚拟环境中，成为那个特定的我(而不是你，或者另一个拥有不同PIO的我)是什么感觉？一个人是否应该关心自己的PIO发生了什么，以及一个人(和他/她的PIO)在网上被认为是如何表现的？在线和离线PI如何相互反馈？可定制、可复制和一次性PIO是否会影响我们对线下PI的理解？我们如何解释多个PIO的情况，或者某人的PIO可能变得比他或她的线下PI更重要，甚至不兼容的情况？当线上和线下的现实相互交织在一起的时候，当线上和线下的个人投资必须协调和协商时，我们的自我理解会发生什么？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解释PIO。需要检验的假设是，经典的PI方法可以有助于我们对PIO的哲学理解；然而，当从线下环境输出到在线环境时，这些方法中没有一个本身会被证明是完全令人满意的；这个缺陷可以帮助我们完善对PI的理解，并开发一种新的PIO方法。研究的第二阶段将解决PIO提出的问题，以补充已有的处理PI的方法。需要检验的假设是，PIO的构建提供了支持将PIO作为一种关系而不是实质性财产的动态、互动和分布(即，依赖于社会或网络)的解释的证据；这种新的互动方法将是面向系统的，而不是单一的、面向主体的；这种方法可以成功地与其他方法竞争，解释PIO，同时克服它们在涉及PIO时的局限性。研究将部分是描述性的，以便分析PIO的构成，部分是规定性的，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》中的电子模拟实验取代思维实验。

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.