The Interactional Self and the Experiences of

Internet Mediated Communication as Seen

Through Heidegger, Mead, and Schutz

Marcelo Vieta (vieta@sfu.ca)

School of Communication
Simon Fraser University, Canada

Abstract
This paper presents an emerging concept called the interactional self to
illustrate how there are no clear phenomenological distinctions between the
so-called “virtual self” (the self online) and “real-world self” (the self offline).
The paper uses Martin Heidegger’s, G.H. Mead’s, and Alfred Schutz’s
philosophies of experience and wordly encounter to argue that subjective
conceptualizations of the online and offline self and Internet sociability are
instead rooted in and are part of the same socially situated, multi-dimensional
life-world.

Introduction
I would like to propose in the following pages that the Internet,
while imbued with powerful and efficient asynchronous and
synchronous technologies for interpersonal, inter-group, and
distributed communication, should be mainly viewed as a collection of
mediational technologies used in the normal course of everyday
personal, organizational, or mass communication. I would also like to
propose that a socially situated self, not a virtually fragmented self,
helps us better understand the Internet’s impact on sociability in
everyday contexts. Further, this socially situated self, I maintain, is a
self that is conceptualized by its interactions with others mostly rooted
in known social networks of affinity and conviviality; this is a self
primarily embedded in the world of embodied flesh-and-blood, not
splintered bits-and-bytes. I would like to call this socially situated self
the interactional self. In addition, because of the claim I will make for
the instrumentality of the Internet and its inherent technologies – as
opposed to recent postmodern theories of “cyberspace” and its
autonomous and overtly deterministic impacts on self and society – I
would like to term this online interaction between individuals Internet
mediated communication (IMC1).

1
With the term “IMC” I am borrowing from and adapting the acronym for
computer mediated communication (CMC).

1
 As such, this paper will explore how this technologically
mediated Internet sociability interplays with one’s sense of self and
self with others. Rather than the recently popular and dichotomous
postmodern theories of cyberspace and cyberselves pitting the “virtual
reality” (VR) of an “online world” against the “real world” (RW), I’d like
to ground my exploration in the too-often overlooked philosophies of
experience and the emergent self of Martin Heidegger (1962/2001),
George Herbert Mead (1934), and Alfred Schutz (1973). I am
convinced that these three philosophers of experience are foundational
for understanding the Internet as an intimately connected part of one,
multi-dimensional, socially-embedded life-world. In other words, they
help us see, I will argue here, that the Internet and the sociability that
is mediated by it is best thought of as the world online – part of our
already always and embodied situated world – not a separate “online
world.” Consequently, I hope to show how an emergent and
interactional self built on Heidegger’s hermeneutic phenomenology,
Mead’s symbolic interaction, and Schutz’s sociological phenomenology
is ultimately more useful in helping us understand, on the whole, what
happens between the screen and the self and other selves behind
other screens.
Within the rubric of these philosophers’ conceptualizations of the
subjective and socially-rooted self, this paper will ponder the following
questions:

• Does IMC create a new social reality – a virtual reality – or is it,

as Castells (2001) and Wellman (1999) posit, situated in
everyday life?
• What happens between the screen and the self and other selves
behind other screens?
• Is IMC a new way of doing new things or a new way of doing old
things?

In addressing these questions I will paint an emergent and

conceptual picture of the interactional self online consisting of six
postulates. In so doing, the hermeneutic ontologies of Heidegger will
be my brushes and palette; the social philosophies of Mead and the
intersubjective phenomenology of Schutz my paints and textures; and
the embodied world my social-world easel and canvass. Inspired by
Heidegger’s call to get to the “essence of truth” by applying “aletheia”
(Inwood, 1999, p. 13), the aim of this paper is not to definitively show
the way the world online is but, rather, to ponder possibilities for how
the life-world and IMC might be.2 In this spirit of disclosure, the

2
Aletheia is Greek for “‘truth; truthfulness; real, actual…the not hidden or

2
emerging theoretical image of the interactional self will reveal a
socially situated self that uses IMC instrumentally as part of its
embedded and embodied world, not as a separate virtual world.

The postmodern position: Virtual realities and “cyberselves”

Since the popularization of the Internet in the mid 1990s, the
postmodern position has dominated the popular press and influenced
academic interests in IMC research with accounts of a “place” called
“cyberspace” and the subsequent establishment of a new society, a
“virtual society.” It is claimed that in this society “a new mode of
information predominates” (Webster, 2002, p. 2). Mark Poster claims
that this new age of hyper-information has brought with it “profound
consequences for our way of life” (Poster, 2001, quoted in Webster,
2002, p. 250). In this virtual space/place, Poster and others see an
altered “network of social relations” (p. 250) enabling a new type of
community. Virtual community guru Howard Rheingold (1994),
cultural theorist Sandy Stone (1995), and psychoanalyst Sherry Turkle
(1995), together with Poster, claim that this new cyber-community is
now ruptured from locale – rootless yet highly inclusive and
emancipating in its diversity of access points and asynchronously
dispersed infrastructure. Indeed, Internet technophiles like John
Perry-Barlow (1996) go as far as proclaiming that cyberspace is
intrinsically a democratic and empowering community of communities.
More brazenly, Turkle, Stone, and others claim that a new self – the
“cyberself” – is able to emerge through the pixels of the screen and
the computations of the network. We are now decentred, fragmented,
diffracted, with emancipated and playful multiple personae of choice,
turning the Enlightenment project of a stable and knowable world on
its head (Stone, 1995; Turkle, 1995).

The social interaction position: Situated practices

While these postmodern views enthrall the imagination, a
growing body of social interaction research, grounded in the human
philosophies of experience, is showing that perhaps “cyberspace” is
more mundanely placed in our daily lives.
Social network theorists Barry Wellman (1999) and renown
urban sociologist Manuel Castells (2001), in their recent respective
overviews of dozens of online sociability studies, both agree that, from
the perspective of social network theory, “[the] Net is only one of
many ways in which the same people may interact…it is not a separate

forgotten’” (Heidegger, in Inwood, 1999, p. 13). According to Heidegger,

aletheia encourages us to approach the essence of truth from “‘reflection on the
ground of the possibility of correctness’” (p. 13).

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reality” (Wellman & Gulia, 1999, p. 169) and that “the uses of the
Internet are, overwhelmingly, instrumental, and rooted in everyday
life” (Castells, 2001, p. 118). Castells concludes that “role–playing
and identity-building as the basis of online interaction are a tiny
proportion of Internet-based sociability” (p. 119), forcefully pointing
out that the over-reporting of studies advocating a new kind of human
interaction emerging out of hypermediated technologies “distorted the
public perception of the social practice of the Internet as the privileged
terrain for personal fantasies” (p. 119). Instead, Castells emphasizes
that the Internet is “an extension of life as it is, in all its dimensions,
and with all its modalities” (p. 119). Both Castells and Wellman
suggest that the reality of IMC, for most, seems to side with
explanations that lean more on social interactionist sign-posts, not on
accounts relying on fringe or marginalized behaviours of experimental
cyberselves, as the postmodernists are wont to advocate. This
growing evidence begins to sketch out the first preliminary conceptual
images of the interactional self on our social-world canvass,
suggesting to us our first postulate:

• Postulate 1: The interactional self’s offline affinities, on the

whole, dictate its online activities.

Heidegger, Dasein, and “Being-in-the-world”

Using the interpretivist brushes of Martin Heidegger’s
hermeneutic phenomenology outlined in his classic text Being & Time
(1962/2001), the sketch on this social-world canvass begins to outline
an emerging image of the interactional self made up of intertwined
notions of selfhood and the world of mundane everyday experiences.
To re-appropriate Feenberg’s (1999) recent statement concerning
citizens’ encounters with the technologies in their lives, most people
encounter information technologies “as dimensions of their life-world”
(p. x). In this light, therefore, rather than a separate “cyberworld” or
“virtual reality,” Heidegger begins to show us that the “online world” is
actually the “world online” which is, as Castells and Wellman already
pointed out, not a separate reality but a part of our everyday life.
Through Heidegger, I argue, we can begin to say that IMC is just one
way of encountering our multi-dimensional life-world.
Heidegger’s life’s work concerned the meaning of existence
(Being) as he, according to Dourish (2001), asked: “How does the
world reveal itself to us through our encounters with it?” (p. 107).
Heidegger’s “practical intentionality” was wrapped up in his notion of
Dasein, “his essence of being human” (p. 118).3 Dasein is constantly

3
Inwood (1999) tells us that Dasein literally means “there-being” (p. 42) or,

4
directed towards the world, Heidegger tells us, and is continuously
encountering the world in an ontogenic state of “Being-in-the-world”
(Heidegger, 1962/2001, pp. 78-90). My analytical construct of the
interactional self, then, begins from a Heideggerian perspective
through his interrelated concepts of Dasein and Being-in-the-world.
From this ontological beginning we can think of the interactional self
as, first and foremost, an entity in constant and interpretive
interaction with the world; Heidegger claimed that Verstehen, or
interpretive understanding (Gadamer, 1989, in Moran & Mooney,
2002, p. 311) was the principle disposition of human existence
(Heidegger, 1962/2001, pp. 5-58). “The ontology of life,” wrote
Heidegger, “is accomplished by way of a private Interpretation” (p.
75). With Heidegger, therefore, the foundation for the interactional
self is firmly situated in his concept of “Being-in-the-world”: a
fundamentally hermeneutic and continuously self-interpreting entity
making sense of itself and its world in perpetual and existentially-
driven encounters with the things and others of everyday life. As
such, the interactional self is continuously contingent upon the world
for coming to know itself, the world, and its place in the world.
Heidegger further tells us that these continuous worldly
encounters are often mediated by the things of the world. In fact, to
be human within Dasein is to be in constant mediation with other
selves and other things, the objects of the world (this brings to mind
the aphorism “we cannot not communicate”); as we search for unity
within Dasein the very entities of the world serve as mediating
conduits for Verstehen. It is here where the technologically mediated
realm of Internet sociability enters the picture as part of the
interactional self’s multifaceted world. If we were to connect Dasein
with the intersubjective Schutzian dimensionalized life-world (as I will
do shortly), we come to understand that how one encounters the
“virtual world” and the “real world” are interlinked acts within one
multi-faceted life-world; the world of bits-and-bytes and the world of
flesh-and-blood are both parts of the greater world that humans in
Dasein negotiate with. In other words, the interactional self, informed
by Dasein, interacts with others both online and offline in various
modes of mediation depending on the situation and the tools
(“equipment”) at hand and needed to successfully consummate the
interaction (Heidegger, 1962/2001, p. 97).
Dasein accomplishes its goals, Heidegger tells us, through the
practicality of the act of encounter (pp. 91-98). In his discussion of

according to Heidegger himself, “‘to be there, present, available, to exist”

(Heidegger, in Inwood, 1999, p. 42) and “has no plural. It refers to any and
every human being…” (Inwood, 1999, p. 42).

5
“equipment” (das Zeug) Heidegger distinguishes two ways that Dasein
practically interacts with the objects of the world: through the “ready-
to-hand” (zuhanden) and the “present-at-hand” (vorhanden) (pp. 96-
98). Taking a cue from Winograd & Flores’s (1986) and Dourish’s
(2001) uses of Heidegger’s notion of equipment for HCI research, I
argue that this aspect of Heidegger’s philosophy is particularly central
to understanding the place of IMC for the interactional self.
Heidegger explained that the choice of which objects and which
orientation to encounter the world with is practically intended based on
the “equipmentality” (or fit) (p. 97) with the task to be done – that is,
in phenomenological terms, with the practical intentionality of the
object and the act (Dourish, 2001, p. 108), what Heidegger called the
“in-order-to” essence of the equipment (p. 97). When an object or
tool is said to be ready-to-hand our awareness of the tool “withdraw[s]
in order to be ready-to-hand quite authentically,” Heidegger writes, so
“that with which we concern ourselves primarily is the work”
(Heidegger, 1962/2001, p. 99). For example, think of how we
manipulate things on the Web, such as moving a cursor, moving or
closing and opening windows, manipulating programs and downloading
objects into files, surfing, clicking on links, filling in CGI scripts and
fields, etc. In these acts, we rarely think of the mouse that moves the
cursor that clicks on the objects on the screen, let alone on the
millions of computations being calculated by our microprocessors and
the network. Instead, we focus on the people or files we are
interacting with or on the intended results of our actions; that is, we
focus on the links we click on, not on the act of clicking; on the words
we’re typing, not on the fingers tapping the keyboards; etc. In these
examples the interactive tools we surf the Web with can be viewed as
being “ready-to-hand” meaning that the online tools we’re using at
any given time – the tools we’re encountering the world online with –
withdraw from awareness and become, perceptually and literally,
extensions of our hands, our bodies, our thoughts, and, most
importantly for the interactional self, mediational extensions of
communication for facilitating the relationships we’re engaging in.4
These tools, alternatively, become present-at-hand once our
interactions are somehow interrupted and the previously withdrawn
and concealed tool is made aware to us. Using Heidegger’s famous
example of the hammer, we engage with the world in a state of
presence-at-hand, for example, when we stub our finger in the process
of driving a nail, or when we fix the hammer’s broken handle, or
consciously lift it from the toolbox to examine the thing as an entity

4
McLuhan also has much to say about how technologies extend the mind and our
bodies but is beyond the scope of my discussion here.

6
called a hammer. In our Web example, our interaction with the tool
and the world online would become present-at-hand if our browser
were to freeze thus realizing the cursor’s and perhaps the monitor’s
presence, becoming aware of the mediational objects of interaction
making up the “self-computer-Internet-world” equation.
In summarizing our first exploration of the interactional self in
IMC from the perspective of Dasein’s Being-in-the-world, I make the
argument that Heidegger’s notion of practical worldly encounters that
are mediated and either ready-to-hand or present-at-hand is a crucial
first step in understanding fully what happens when the self engages
with the things of the world. The application to IMC is that, rather
than a new “cyberself” emerging from “cyberworlds,” or a new virtual
self being created, online interactions are fundamentally extensions of
a part of embodied beings as either ready-to- or present-at-hand. As
we use a hammer to extend our arms to drive a nail in order to build
something from wood, we use email (or ICQ or a blog) to engage with
a world and others when the practicality, appropriateness, and
availability of the intended social act deems IMC equipmentally fit for
us to use. Thus, Heidegger’s approach adds phenomenological weight
to Wellman’s and Castell’s claims that the Internet is interwoven within
our everyday activities. Heidegger’s subtle brushes of Dasein begins
to fill in the sketch on our social world canvass and we arrive at our
second and third postulates of the interactional self:

• Postulate 2: The interactional self is in a constant state of

interpretation of itself and its world, practically using the world,
online and offline, as a conduit to communicate with others and
for self-understanding.

• Postulate 3: The interactional self is fully embodied; the body

being the juncture where the self is both incited by and incites
the world both online and offline.

I now dip the brush of Dasein into the paints of social interaction
theory, adding the intersubjective social colours offered by Mead’s
social philosophies and Shutz’s phenomenological sociology. Their
views are coloured by the concepts of social emergence and
intersubjectivity as both sociological philosophers asked, in separate
circumstances: “What does it mean to be social animals, to be human
with others?” Their common themes include complementary notions
of the intersubjective (Schutz) and socially constituted self (Mead).

Mead, the “generalized other,” and IMC

George Herbert Mead (1934) was one of the original

7
Pragmatists, a founder of the Chicago School of sociology, and a
pioneering philosopher of social psychology. Mead argued forcefully
that a self removed from society could not exist. Indeed, without
communication with others, Mead tells us, the self would even lack a
consciousness (Joas, 1985; Ritzer, 2000).
The idea that our individual personality reflects the norms of the
group or our known society is what Mead called the “generalized
other,” that part of ourselves that actions or mirrors what society or
the group expects of us. Central to the theory of the generalized other
and inspired by Hegelian dialectical thought are his Jamesian notions
of the “I” and the “me” (Ritzer, 2000). The “I” is the creator or the
doer of actions within us. It is the part of the self that is impulsive and
passionate, contributing to the makeup of the group and the society it
resides in (Mead & Morris, 1934). Ritzer interprets this to mean that
the “I” houses “our most important values…[constituting] something
we all seek – the realization of the self” (Ritzer, 2000, p. 401). The
“me,” in dialectical contrast, is the receiver of how others perceive us,
internalizing the action of others and continuously assessing how to
appropriately interact with others (Mead & Morris, 1934). The more
impulsive “I” dialectically reacts to the “me” (Ritzer, 2000, p. 402).
The “me,” on the other hand, is socially bound, receptive, and passive,
similar in ways to Heidegger’s socially infused “das Man” of Dasein
where our humanness dissolves into the Being of “others” (Heidegger,
1962/2001, p. 166; also see Joas, 1992, p. 192). Through the
continuous dialectic of the “I” and the “me” we intersubjectively work
within our societal realites to both assimilate and disseminate societal
and group expectations as mutually agreed upon guidelines that
maintain social order and group cohesion. The symbolic conventions –
or “symbolic interactions” – of interpersonal communication, in turn,
provide the interpretive keys for deciphering the practical meanings of
daily interaction. These symbolic conventions, communicated through
Mead’s concept of the “conversation of gestures,” language, and socio-
cultural norms, is how we come to know the socially emergent
component of the interactional self (see Joas, 1985, pp. 90-120).
Studies using aspects of social interaction theory are consistently
showing that prevalent Meadian social practices, rather than
postmodern identity play, abound online. Like more traditional offline
social settings, studies such as Correll (1995), Wynn & Katz (1997),
Ward (1999), Baym (2000), Hine (2000), and others are showing that
Internet technologies facilitating online sociability (email, chat, ICQ,
blogs, etc.) seem to involve, in Meadian-inspired Goffmanian terms,
predictable “performative spaces and performed space” (Hine, 2000,
p. 109). One example of this is offered by Hine (2000) in her recent
book Virtual Ethnography. In it Hine reports on a study looking at

8
different online communities (newsgroups) and personal homepages
dedicated to the same topic and finds a similarity in “styles of
interaction [within the community], such as the practice of quoting
parts of previous messages to maintain continuity” (p. 109).
Alternatively, she also found that between different newsgroups, the
styles of addressing each other differ in the language used, member
hierarchy, and other rules specific to the group (p. 109). In a similar
study looking specifically at feminist BBS support groups, Correll
(1995) showed, as did Hine, that members of such online communities
constantly generalize the other by assimilating what in essence are
symbolic gestures as socially organizing modes of address that
maintain group order (pp. 275, 297). These symbolic online
interactions may include practices such as using emoticons,
abbreviated “e-words” (“FYI,” “BTW,” etc.), or unique plays with
language such as not capitalizing in emails. Rather than playful free-
for-alls, both Hine and Correll went on to find that inter- and intra-
group boundaries and order between group members were
communicated and secured through symbolic styles of addressing each
other which, in turn, solidified the rules of membership to a particular
group. In dialectically Meadian terms, by the simple fact that each
member generalized the other in the newsgroup the right balance
between group cohesion and individual freedom of expression was
ensured (see Hine, 2000, pp. 109-146 and Correll, 1995, pp. 294-
299).
Where postmodern thinkers have theorized that online self
presentations are in many ways categorically different than offline
ones, the light of more sober symbolic interactionist-inspired studies
propose that online sociability is interrelated with offline social
behaviour vis-à-vis group dynamics, inter- and intra-group boundaries,
and social cohesion. Moreover, as Correll (1995), Wynn & Katz
(1997), Ward (1999), Baym (2000), Hine (2000) and others have
discovered, it seems that this predictable social behaviour is more
often than not deeply entrenched in offline settings.
Returning to our social-world canvass, then, the following
colours begin to fill in our metaphorical portrait via Mead’s generalized
other, arriving at the fourth postulate:

• Postulate 4: The interactional self emerges within a social

context by projecting itself onto others and also being projected
upon through symbolic interactions.

Schutz, intersubjectivity, and the “life-world”

I argue that Alfred Schutz’s socio-phenomenological contours,
complementing Mead’s generalized other, are also very relevant to

9
IMC research because his theories can be seen as dimensionalizing
Mead’s symbolically intreractant self as well as layering in a social
dimension to the interactional self’s hermeneutic Dasein. Schutz’s
phenomenological sociology is centred on the question of how
individuals interpret social actions as meaningful in the “life-world” and
how this everyday, intersubjective life-world is constituted (Ritzer,
2000; Schutz & Luckmann, 1973).
For Schutz, most completely articulated in his posthumously
published 1973 summa The Structures of the Life-World, the social act
of perceiving, anticipating, and experiencing others sees the self
projecting onto others and being projected upon in shared,
intersubjectively attenuated and overlapping life-worlds. These life-
worlds, at the same time, are spatially, biographically, historically, and
temporally interconnected. That is, these interactions occur in
dimensionalized “gradations of immediacy” (Schutz & Luckmann,
1973, p. 65) or, in other words, degrees of intimacy or dimensions of
sociability of “lived experience.” In other words, like Mead, this self is
socially emergent; with Schutz, this social self, however, emerges
more explicitly in intersubjectively encountered life-worlds. These
dimensions of sociability occur within a spectrum of social actions
spanning from, at one end, anonymous “thou-orientations” (that is,
strangers known to us by inference and unmet contemporaries) (p.
62) to various dimensions of intimate “we-relations” (or the range of
relations from those strangers we acknowledge to friends and loved
ones) (p. 63) at the other end. This thou/we spectrum, in addition,
complements Mead’s generalized other and Heidegger’s Dasein by
adding a dimensional layer of sociability to Mead’s projective/reflective
elements of sociability and Heidegger’s “Being-in-the-world.” In this
way, Schutz can be said to add “perspective” to the portrait of the
interactional self, leading to my fifth postulate:

• Postulate 5: The interactional self is intersubjectively

dimensional within degrees of intimacy.

Wellman’s (1999) social network theory could be used to

illustrate a Schutzian view of online sociability. While Wellman uses a
more positivist approach in his methods than that envisioned by
Schutz, I believe Wellman’s research findings nevertheless exemplify
Schutz’s concept of the degrees of intimacy found within the life-
world; both theorists have compatible conclusions: In Wellman &
Gulia’s (1999) well-known chapter and paper, “Net-Surfers Don’t Ride
Alone: Virtual Communities as Communities,” the authors state that
“the ties people develop and maintain in cyberspace are much like
most of their ‘real-life’ community ties: intermittent, specialized, and

10
varying in strength” (p. 353). If we look at Wellman’s online social
network theory with a Schutzian eye, online interaction is situated
within a spectrum of sociability somewhere between narrow, special
interest relations containing low entry barriers, much anonymity, and
low “degrees of intimacy” (such as FAQ sites, expert forums, online
purchases, some online live chats, games, etc.) and broad, multiplex
relations having high entry barriers and deeply intertwined degrees of
intimacy needing fully divulged identities (such as family websites,
emailing family oversees, ICQing friends and family, online support
groups, etc.).
It also seems, as Schutz suggests and as IMC research such as
Wellman & Gulia’s (1999) evidences, that the closer to a broad,
multiplex and intimate relationship one experiences online, the more
that online social acts tend to push themselves into face-to-face
encounters. For those experiencing close, proximate social ties in the
world of flesh-and-blood IMC tends to be instrumentally used to
support the situated relationship instead of being the only medium of
interaction (similar to how a phone would be used, for example).
Further, if the relationship started online and became intimate online,
IMC will ultimately become too present-at-hand for the relationship to
successfully mature and the relationship will tend to lead to a face-to-
face encounter or eventually fade out. As Wellman & Gulia (1999)
posit, solely IMC-based multiplex relations that mostly express
themselves online prove to be “intimate but secondary relationships
[that is, weaker we-relations]: informal, frequent, and supportive
community ties that, nevertheless, operate only in one specialized
domain” (p. 347).

Rethinking anonymity, cyberselves, and fantasy in IMC via

Schutz
Schutz’s theories not only dimensionalize the gradations of
immediacy between interactants (as just discussed and as in Meadian
social analysis) but also dimensionalize the individual’s personal
orientations towards particular types of social acts and, with it, the
levels of self-disclosure and the appropriateness of the particular
technology to use.
Schutz dimensionalized each interactant’s “province of reality”
(Schutz & Luckmann, 1973, p. 22) by thinking of the life-world as
positioned in a spectrum he called the “accent of reality” (p. 22).
According to Schutz, “…there should be several, indeed probably
infinitely many, different orders of reality that at any given time have
a special style of being that is characteristic of them alone” (p. 22).5

5
The accent of reality was, according to Schutz, his version of what William James

11
This accent of reality is “meaning-compatible experience” that is
embodied in a “style of lived experience” or circumstantial preferences
(p. 23), recalling Mead’s social acts as performative spaces. To
Schutz, we can have infinite styles in “multitudes of provinces of
meaning,” each with their own “finite province of meaning” working to
make real the present experience being attended to with the capability
of moving back and forth between each province, seamlessly and
subconsciously (p. 23). “For in the course of a day, indeed of an hour,”
Schutz explained, “we can, through the modification of the tension of
consciousness traverse a whole series of such provinces” (p. 24).
Further – and of particular interest in rethinking postmodernism’s and
the popular press’s fascination with online role-playing – these
multitudinous provinces of meaning can also be made up of fantasy (p.
28). While in fantasy, however, our ability to influence the “social
reality” of the external world is suspended; according to Schutz,
fantasy worlds “bracket determinate strata of the everyday life-world”
(p. 28) that prevents meaningful intersubjective action:
We speak of ‘fantasy worlds,’ since it is a question not of a single but rather
of several finite provinces of meaning…. When my attention becomes
absorbed in one of the several fantasy worlds, I no longer need to master the
external world…. But also, as long as I live in fantasy worlds, I cannot
‘produce,’ in the sense of an act which gears into the external world and
alters it. As long as I tarry in the world of fantasy, I cannot accomplish
anything, save just to engage in fantasy. (pp. 28-29)

Practically, online fantasy and role-play, therefore, looked at

with a Schutzian eye, could be viewed as an instrumental and
temporary decision by the interactant to suspend the “external world”
while still remaining part of the actor’s dimensionalized life-world,
albeit a region of the life-world dominated by intra-subjective, and
thus “non-producing,” fantasy. This reading would contest the
postmodern insistence that IMC leads to radically new forms of
sociability and hidden or altered identities and multiple personae.
Further, anonymous and fantasy-based online interactions could be
said to fall into Schutz’s part of the dimensionalized life-world he
termed “zones of anonymity” (pp. 79-80), an area of one’s life-world
where full disclosure of oneself is optional and the relationship is
merely narrowly specialist or only about temporary play and fantasy.
Examples of these types of interactions online would include an email
to an online FAQ expert; an anonymous online chess partner engaged
with for a few hours; becoming a character in EverQuest; etc. In
these interactions, there is no need, as in similar situations offline, to
disclose too deeply the nature of one’s situated self-identity.

called “subuniverses” (Schutz & Luckmann, 1973, p. 22).

12
Inversely, and again as in offline sociability, online interactants
desiring deeper gradations of immediacy and some sort of “mastery of
their external world” demand full disclosure from each other. Does
one need to know the name of any of the opposing players on the
soccer pitch in order to play a game? At the same time, does one stop
being a “soccer player” and perhaps also a father, sister, farmer,
teacher, etc., when on the pitch if one does not disclose these other
life-roles to the opposing players? Alternatively, one should have a
good idea of the social biography, the likes, and dislikes of a spouse or
a best friend in order to maintain a mutually beneficial and intimate
“we” relationship.
It appears, then, that the growing corpus of IMC social
interaction research, looked at from the perspective of a Schutzian-
informed interactional self, is drawing a clearer picture of self-
disclosure, role-playing, and sociability in IMC.6 As Hine (2000)
asserts: “Whatever the potential of identity play, many users of the
Internet probably do not deliberately construct new identities” (p.
119). Further, the empirical evidence is showing that where new
online identities are toyed with, the average online intreractant tends
not to sustain these alternative identities for long and, on average,
certainly not at the expense of deeper Schutzian “we” relationships
offline.
A Schutzian analysis filtered through social network theory, then,
leads us to our sixth and last postulate illustrating the interactional
self:

• Postulate 6: The Interactional self uses instrumental anonymity

and strategic self-disclosure as part of the normal course of
encountering its life-world, online or offline.

In conclusion: A conceptual portrait of the interactional self

In this paper, I have argued that the emerging concept called
the interactional self can effectively illustrate how the self online and
offline is usually located in the same, socially situated, multi-
dimensional life-world. After introducing the well-known postmodern
theories of the self and cyberspace posited by authors such as Turkle,
Stone, Poster, and Rheingold, I began to paint an alternative
conceptual picture of an interactional self situated on a social world
canvass. I first used the ontological theories of Heidegger’s Dasein
and “Being-in-the-world” as my brushes and palette. The sketch of
the interactional self that began to emerge with Heidegger shows that

6
For an excellent analysis of Schutzian phenomenology and the dimensions of
Internet sociability as situated in everyday life, see Bakardjieva-Rizova (2000).

13
online, as in offline settings, we encounter the world fully embodied
and deeply engaged in daily acts of interpretive understanding of our
place in our world through textures such as equipmentality and the
ready-to- and present-at-hand of the objects of the world. From
Heidegger’s sketch as an outline for the subjectivity of the
interactional self, I then dipped my conceptual brushes into the colours
and textures offered by the sociological theories of Mead and Schutz,
exploring some alternatives to the postmodern explanations of online
sociability from a few of their key theories. I used Mead’s theory of
the “generalized other” to highlight the interactional self as a self that
does not concretely distinguish between offline and online social
settings but instead uses IMC instrumentally and holistically in
performative practices that maintain group cohesion online as in offline
settings. I then dipped my Heideggerian brushes into Schutz’s rich
theory of the sociological phenomenology of the life-world to show how
the interactional self and online sociability are fashioned via the
intersection of “intersubjective” and dimensionalized social biographies
positioned within overlapping life-worlds. I finally relied on Schutz to
provide an alternative explanation to online role-playing and fantasy,
adding yet more socially situated shading to the technologically
mediated life-world of the interactional self in IMC.
By complementing a few key theories of the self of Heidegger,
Mead, and Schutz with recent IMC-focused social interaction research,
therefore, six postulates emerged in the portrait of the interactional
self:

1) The interactional self’s offline affinities, on the whole, dictate its

online activities.
2) The interactional self is in a constant state of interpretation with
itself and its world, practically using the world, online and offline, as
a conduit to communicate with others and for self-understanding.
3) The interactional self is fully embodied; the body being the juncture
where the self is both incited by and incites the world both online
and offline.
4) The interactional self emerges within a social context by projecting
itself onto others and being projected upon through symbolic
interaction.
5) The interactional self is intersubjectively dimensional within degrees
of intimacy.
6) The interactional self uses instrumental anonymity and strategic
self-disclosure as part of the normal course of encountering its life-
world, online or offline.

14
 When filtered through the philosophies of Heidegger, Mead, and
Schutz, then, these six emerging postulates of the lived experiences of
the interactional self can subsequently be conflated into three
interlocking hypotheses for the self online:

1) The interactional self encounters online social acts as part of its

greater life-world, practicing performative and group-enforcing self-
management through…
2) varying and interlinked dimensions of online and offline sociability
in…
3) contextually relevant degrees of self-disclosure.

Coda
In closing, I return to the main question posed early on: Is IMC a
new way of doing new things or a new way of doing old things? I have
argued in this paper that the answer might be found in the concept of
the interactional self. Through the filter of the socially situated
interactional self, IMC seems to be, on the whole, a new way to do
things we’ve always done. First, I would suggest that this interactional
self, made known through the philosophies of experience and
supported by mounting empirical social interactionist research, reveals
a socially emergent self rather than a postmodern, fragmented, and
decentred self, offering a more sober, more fruitful place to begin to
look at online sociability for Internet studies. Second, what this self is
beginning to suggest to me is that, when engaging with the world
through the screen of my computer, I am still a situated self, not a
virtually fragmented cyberself. Finally, it seems that, when
encountering others via IMC, we are still primarily embedded in the
world of flesh-and-blood, not bits-and-bytes.

15
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