Avatar Anxiety …? And Ways to Overcome It!

Somebody just brought an interesting article to my attention: ”Sharing is Creepy” by Nicolas Carr. In a nutshell, in it Nicolas discusses the supposedly soon-to-be-recognised psychiatric syndrome ”avatar anxiety”, or the anxiety that sometimes people may experience if they:

- either refrain from behaving online under the form of twittering, posting information on their online profiles, and engaging in online discussions, or

- they overtly and abundantly engage in such online behaviours.

http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2009/01/sharing_is_cree.php

Apparently, the fact that online behaviour is somewhat removed from the self and so does not let its genuine expression leads some people to experience anxiety to quite extreme degrees.  In my opinion, this is not because there is something wrong with those people but rather because of the set-up in which they live or have created for themselves.

Twittering, posting on online profiles like Facebook and LinkedIn, sharing photos and engaging in online discussions can greatly optimise how we live life yet are not life, our life, ultimately. What motivates online behaviours of any sort is the desire to be with, communicate with, share things with people per se, in other words, desire to see and get to know people. In this sense being online can optimise our being ourselves, yet it can not be our being ourselves. 

Online communication is limited in how much it can convey. Online communication only makes sense in the context of other forms of communication as the latter gives us references and clues with regards to how things stand between us and other people. The latter forms of communication tell us how much to give away and how much to not give away when we communicate online. I guess this may be something to not loose sight of when engaging in online behaviours.

In other words, ”avatar anxiety” has a solution called ‘’seeing the big picture”.