In my last entry I briefly wrote about an article in M/C Journal, titled "Transmitting the Body in Online Interaction." As the week progressed I felt the need to expand these thoughts a bit because it seems that Beusch, the writer, is approaching online interaction from an out-dated perspective. We need to move beyond analyses of individual-to-individual interactions toward analyses of projected identities, and swarms.

In his essay Beusch writes:

"...to conceptualise cyberspace as disembodied actually involves a ‘very narrow construction of how we should conceive of this space and the activity that occurs within it’ (Whitty 344). In fact, a central tenet of online interaction rituals is the transmission of the body. The popularity of chat programmes (such as Microsoft Messenger), chat rooms and online dating sites necessitates individuals to construct and transmit the self to others through text. However, drawing on the work of Goffman, this article notes that such transmissions are frequently problematic. In particular, the content of transmission is often subject to ‘framing troubles’, can be purposefully falsified and, as such, may be regarded with suspicion."

Here Beusch, while correct in pointing out the limited conceptualization that "cyberspace" provides for online interaction, does not provide an analysis specific to online interaction. Instead, by focusing on individual interactions via dating sites and instant messaging etc, he is ignoring what makes online interaction unique: its multiplicity and its archival capacity. In fact, it does not matter that there can be "framing troubles" or that transmission can be falsified.

We have to view interaction and identity construction on the Web as an inherently multiple process. Beusch, however, focuses the essay toward isolated and individual interactions. The type of online interaction most under scrutiny in the text is "chatting" in chat rooms and instant messaging. This type of interaction is from one user to another and Beusch is entirely correct in saying that a body is transmitted in these interactions through textual signifiers. But to imply that this can somehow be extended to online interaction as a whole is misleading. Beusch relies on out-dated theories of online interaction to make the point; we have moved beyond the fascination with the chat room. The type of interaction described and analyzed in the essay is now more applicable to a telephone call than it is to online interaction.

Our interactions on the Web do not begin or end in chat rooms. We must include everything from social networking sites to e-mail, from tagging to blogging. We interact not only with other individuals on the web but with the swarm and systems. While e-mail and chat rooms may typify individual-to-individual interaction, social tagging and folksonomies are interactions with a swarm, and an attention tracker is an example of a macro-level interaction with a system. The many different types of interaction all play a role in constructing identities, in constructing bodies online. We are not able to see the entirety of each other's projected identities-as-body at any time, just as we cannot ever be aware of the entirety Foucauldian archive at once. This parallel is not merely circumstantial, because just as the archive is constructed, in a from a series of links between individuals, institutions, and systems, online identity, online bodies, are constructed in a similar series of links between individuals, swarms, and systems.

This is why is does not matter that bodies or identities can be falsified in individual-to-individual interactions. This interaction is merely one of many that makes up the aggregate projected identity. The act of transmitting a differently sexed body to another, must be seen as just that, an act. What is received by the other individual is of little importance to the construction of the transmitter's aggregate body, projected identity. The process of transmitting a false body lends just as much to the overall identity as any other interaction, even if does not line up with physical reality.

Online interaction provides new opportunities for representation certainly, but in analyses of these representations we have to acknowledge their multiplicity and the multiplicity of interaction. Beusch's essay, even in its attempt to explore interaction beyond an idyllic 'cyberspace,' seems to be from a time when we still saw interaction as a singular event. In critical studies of these new media we have to see the plural, the multiple, the aggregate, the swarm, and the macro, and move away from the isolated, the singular, the narrow, and the self-contained individual.