Home and the Art of Self Invention

Home has many connotations. Traditionally, of course, it is where the heart is. For some of us, it is also where the art is.  Increasingly, it is someplace between the real and the virtual, as tech writer Aleks Krotoski of The Guardian recently noted in her column Home: how the internet has changed our concept of what home is.

Her insights were brought about through a graduate course in Environmental Psychology. It is a broad field, as Krotoski suggests, and covers much in the way of how humans relate to nature. The research investigates ways in which our surroundings influence who we (think we) are and the places that we love. This is the conceptual territory of place-identity and place-attachment, respectively. These are affective things, that is to say, fluid and ever changing, these identities and attachments. They exist as moving targets, flows, and, in the main, exist in the psyche. As such they exemplify a degree of plasticity in our brains that is constantly folding over on itself and reestablishing a sense of self in place, as the communications scholar James Cantrill (at Northern Michigan U) might suggest.

For Krotoski, these notions became evident in a course that "sought to understand how spaces become places because of how they are laid out."  In this way, as a sub-field of what is also sometimes called ecopsychology, social science researchers spend a lot of time investigating, as Krotoski says, "how houses become homes because of the amount of ourselves we put into them."

We often define ourselves by what we see around us. We live in a certain neighborhood, a particular type of house, we decorate in a specific style (well, not all of us). But the labels that are used to define these surroundings often then are used to define the people who adopt them.  We use such labels to simplify the multiplicitous world: I'm a west-sider. He lives in an Arts & Craft bungalow. She uses a Victorian theme with a dash of Americana. This becomes how we label ourselves and our sense of self often dictates how we arrange the spaces and places around us. It is a pinwheel of sensation and evaluation, action and reaction.

As it is with our physical surroundings, so it has become for our online environments.

The web has inspired a postmodern understanding of what "home" is, suggests Krotoski. Though she writes of the UK, I believe this can be generalized to the US as well, among a growing demographic from Boomers through Millenials. This postmodern sensibility is "a de-physicalised, conceptual and psychological phenomenon that externalises its invisible meanings," Krotoski writes.  Well put.  We design homepages. We create online identities. These often reflect our corporeal selves but don't necessarily always match up. The virtual is a sculpted version of our true self, and maybe closer to the self we want to be. Maybe an indication of future intent.

We can be more or less of who we've been or who we want to be by just changing an image or telling a tall-tale online. It is a flux, a flow, of identity creation.  We are both hyper connected and more free than ever to self-evolve and perpetually recreate.The impacts of this are speculative and will be fascinating to watch evolve through the lens of social science research.