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Interaction versus Integration 151
As demonstrated by the AAAS exercise, the idea that the ‘rights’ of
avatars need to be protected is again a function of their low visibility, and
the fact that no kind of ‘other’, be it a person or an authority, has a com-
mitment to an avatar. Very weak identification with others is experienced
between Internet avatars. There is a very low level of recognition between
them as they lack ‘off-line’ contexts of recognition which can provide
wider bases of identification. Often recognition is limited to text-based
interaction, in which the identity of an other is confined to what he or she
can construct with text.
However, it need not be the case that Internet avatars are deprived of
reciprocity. They could associate at another level of interaction, by being
members of the same institution, or by revealing a social world in which
they could relocate their identities, their character, and their reputation;
or, finally, they could meet each other. Any of these other contexts would
enable a triangulation of each interactant’s identity. Nonetheless, the
sheer volume of traffic within sub-media of the Internet ensures that most
interaction is between avatars.
In cases where, from the point of view of a given interactant, inter-
action is entirely internal to CMC, the kind of identity which is formed
may be described as constituted at a merely ‘intellectual’ level of abstrac-
tion which promotes a certain kind of solipsistic ego formation. Insofar
as an interactant can discontinue a relationship at any time without
its having repercussions in any kind of socially constituted field of recog-
nition, CMC is well suited to the generalization of an autonomous
individualism which has long been characteristic of intellectual culture.
Instrumental control and liberation from the flesh is at the core of such
individualism (see Sharp, 1985). Interactants who do not like the
responses they get from interlocutors do not have to confront them at all.
They can control the kinds of interaction they have by minimizing ran-
dom contact and only continue those relationships in which their
ideational reflection shines the brightest. Ultimately, such means of con-
trol result in avatars having conversations with no one but themselves,
particularly given that their identity is a self-contructed-for-others which
engages with a myriad of other ‘selves-constructed-for-others’. This is
not to say that such selves are not ‘real’; on the contrary, they are consti-
tuted ‘cybernetically’, as it were, and willingly participate in a system
which mutually reinforces the maximization of each interlocutor’s own
reflection.

The levels of integration argument

Thompson (1995) points out that for most of human history commu-
nication has been face-to-face. Most human institutions have evolved
within the scope of face-to-face relations. The emergence of new types of