Bill MacKenty

Technology strengthens, deepens, and broadens our learning...

The Tethered Self

From New Scientist Tech (warning: weird redirect thingy) comes this fantastic article (pdf here) about the tethered self.  This op-ed piece talks about some of the social aspects of things like myspace and facebook. A quote:

Our new intimacies with our machines create a world where it makes sense to speak of a new state of the self. When someone says “I am on my cell”, online”, “on instant messaging” or “on the web”, these phrases suggest a new placement of the subject, a subject wired into social existence through technology, a ethered self. I think of tethering as the way we connect to always-on communication devices and to the people and things we reach through them.