How the internet can change lives

Ponder this: what would you look like if all of your digital information, your likes and your dislikes, your wall posts and your Tweets, your Google searches and your online purchases were put together and turned into a cartoon character? What would your digital self be? Would you be a superhero or a villain? A temptress or a Casanova? Would you drive a gas-guzzling 4x4 or an environmentally friendly hybrid? What colour would you be? The olive-toned hues of Middle Easterners or the whites and pinks of Caucasians? Would you be wearing a jellabiya or jeans and T-shirt? And most importantly: would you look like yourself? For most of us, these are as difficult questions to answer as they are intriguing. To conceive of a digital self is to step out of ourselves and into a reconstructed version. In The Matrix, Morpheus called it "the mental projection of your digital self". But in that fantasy world, the mental projection was more or less the same as the real thing. In real life, it's quite different. Digital self-imaging has become as much an art as it is a science. We often do it unconsciously, making our online choices in a world ruled by the imagination, limited only by the extent of our ability to dream and guided by hopes and desires birthed in what psychologists would call our latent mind, the part of us that once expressed itself only in our sleep. But in the 21st century, we dream while we are wide awake. Our dream world, in the age of cyberspace, now bleeds into the real. As we sit in front of computer monitors, that dream unfolds in byte-sized fragments of places and lifestyles stitched together in chat rooms and social media sites, on blogs and web pages where digital representations of the real have taken on the tangibility of fact. What was once only fantasy has now become real. Places that in the past were impossibly distant and fantastical to us have plopped - digitally speaking - into our living rooms. Our relationship with cyberspace is changing us in ways we are only beginning to understand. At first glance, the transformations appear utopian: as digital beings, the world is our oyster. We can be who we want to be, create what we want to create and re-imagine our futures in a universe of endless possibilities. But at least one expert is not convinced that the internet and the opportunities it offers always produce positive results. Dr Samuli Schielke is a research fellow in anthropology at the Zentrum Moderner Orient in Berlin. He has tracked and documented the digital dreamscapes of Egyptian youth since 2009, mapping worlds dominated by visions of escape, and alter egos built in the image of their online representations. His project, Imaginary Cosmopolitans: Engaging the World between Egypt and Europe, examines how the internet has made dreaming - of a better life, of a different reality - more "real" than at any time in human history and how that constructed "reality" operates in the minds of young people. His findings are startling. "One of the most powerful dreams in Egypt in the past years has been migration," Schielke says, "preferably to Europe or North America, otherwise to the Arab Gulf states. It is a very frustrating dream because not being able to migrate is often experienced as a failure, while actually migrating creates new kinds of disappointments and estrangement." I've witnessed the same phenomenon in Pakistan and Afghanistan, where young people, plugged into cyberspace, voraciously consume images of the West, adopt a simulated western lifestyle - in their tastes in music and film, for example, or in how they communicate, the language they use. Using internet models, they construct an identity in the image of a projected self, one that will eventually move West. Some of them actually do make it, arriving in western countries where, in today's environment of diminishing economic opportunities and rising racism, they find themselves in a warped and frightening parody of their dream.