Contrary to popular belief, the internet is not making us stupid or lazy or subjecting us to algorithmic domination. Devin Proctor contends that it is instead changing the way we perceive our bodies, our social worlds, and our identities along a spectrum of virtuality.
Proctor conceptualizes the internet as a social space, arguing for a return to spatial understandings of the digital. The reality of this space, he posits, is co-produced through our interaction with human and non-human agents – bots, AI programs, and algorithms – that exist alongside us in a field of internet presence.
From video calls to anonymous chat forums, Proctor traces progressive levels of virtual emplacement to interrogate the embodied forms we take across digital contexts and the ways in which these forms influence communication and identity. He draws on years of digital ethnographic fieldwork among the Otherkin community – a group of people who largely socialize online and internally identify as non-human – to complicate conventional notions about our relationships with the virtual, our understandings of the Self, and what it means to be human.