The Ontology Of Internet User Interactions

Abstract

Internet communication, like traditional mediated communication, places a barrier between the message’s sender and receiver. However, where traditional mediated communication (television, magazines) is unidirectional, internet technologies provide for one-on-one communication albeit with a high degree of mediation. The basic ontology of this interaction has yet to be fully explicated. Traditional communication theory focuses on interactions that are face-to-face while mass communication theory looks at communication situations where feedback is delayed or completely absent. Internet interactions are both interpersonal and mediated and, at the same time, are neither of these. The paper will use the framework of self- and other-informed theories of Edmund Husserl and Mikhail Bakhtin to understand how users construct “faces” for all parties involved in the internet communication interaction. In addition, the paper will use the theories of Nicolai Hartmann to discuss how this ontology is, on the one hand, stratified and, on the other hand, unified. The paper will discuss how the user actively constructs a self-identity which is then portrayed to other people involved in the interaction and how the individual deconstructs the identities of other users.