Spectrum of Virtuality

In this book, Devin Proctor argues that the Internet is a social space, co-produced through our interaction with both the human and non-human agents – bots, AI programs, algorithms – who exist there with us which shapes our identity and community. Proctor argues the internet is not making us stupid and lazy or subjecting us to algorithmic domination, as we are so often told. Rather, it’s changing the way we perceive our bodies and our social worlds. Arguing for a return to spatial understandings of the digital, this book is about what it is like to be in the internet. Tracing progressive levels of virtual emplacement, from video calls to anonymous chat forums, along a spectrum of virtuality, and within a field of internet presence, this book explores the embodied forms we take in multiple digital contexts, and the ways these forms influence communication and identity. Informed by several years of digital ethnographic fieldwork among the Otherkin community, a group of people who largely socialize online and internally identify as non-human, this exploration troubles conventional notions about our relationships with the virtual, our understandings of the Self, and even what it means to be a human.