From the vault, March 30, 1998 (revised):
Are you ready for the coming of the Dichotomous Man, dear reader? He is among us, hiding in plain sight; but we have not recognized him as such, because he looks just like us.
But he doesn’t think like us, and that is what makes him different.
If this sounds similar to something out of a novel by Stephen King or Clive Barker, be assured that it isn’t. It may, however, be a lot more disturbing.
In a conversation years ago with my former editor at TONIT (that other newspaper in town), he made the observation that, while the Internet allowed humankind to communicate with virtually everyone on planet Earth, it had isolated each of us in our own little cyberspace. I was instantly reminded of a novel by the late, great science-fiction writer, Dr. Isaac Asimov, entitled The Naked Sun. Dr. Asimov, who could discuss any scientific subject with authority, created a future society in which people communicated with each other through wall-sized video phones, almost like being in the same room with one another, but had an abiding horror toward actually encountering another human being in the flesh. My editor said that we were likewise being personal thanks to an impersonal technology.
It then occurred to me that, just as the human brain was divided into two parts, each part controlling specific functions of the body, the human personality could be split into two parts, thus leading to a dichotomy. To be sure, as psychologists frequently point out, humans wear two faces: A public face and a private one. This “Janus Syndrome” acts as a posture in order to be accepted by civil society or as a defense mechanism to protect against a shattered ego, respectively. Yet, the individual remains consistent in his behavior throughout his/her lifetime.
The Dichotomous Man, on the other hand, displays no such consistency. He is, in fact, multiple persons in one body. In Robert Louis Stevenson’s masterwork, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the main character ingests a chemical compound which actualizes two distinct facets of his personality, using the same body alternately. The chemical compound had acted as a dichotomizing agent, but it had only a temporary effect.
The Dichotomous Man of the future will be a permanently inconsistent individual, behaving differently in different situations, and he will be as addicted to his inconsistency as if he had been under the influence of some drug or another.
The addictive agent in his case is the Internet, and more specifically social media platforms. Social media platforms were sporadic initially, but now they are springing up like mushrooms. One may pick and choose among them, absorbing a wealth of useful, trivial, or pseudo information, meeting other fellow travelers on the cyber-highway, and having intercourse with them – or not (figuratively speaking!). One may express his hopes and fears, his world views, or his solutions to humankind’s woes and analyze those of others. One may do these things because the Internet confers total anonymity upon the user; one does not have to identify oneself, or one may use an alias if one so desires.
How often have you said or done something, dear reader, when you’ve had a snootful, which you would ordinarily never ever say or do had you been in your right mind?
The Dichotomous Man has no such regrets. He has no right mind and therefore can act and react and not suffer the psychological horror of revealing his true self to anyone. He can create new personas to fit whatever situation he finds himself in and interact with whomever he meets in cyberspace according to the persona of the contactee. With practice, he can slip in and out of personas as easily as changing his clothes. The transitions will be so subtle, because the instrumentation is so addictive, that he will be quite unconscious of the changes and thus the dichotomy becomes second nature.
The next time someone tells you that he cruises the cyber-highway endlessly and visits a large number of social media platforms, ask yourself: is (s)he one of…them? Then ask yourself: do I want have anything to do with this person? You can be sure that the Dichotomous Man won’t give a hoot what you think. Cyberspace is his oyster.
Just a thought.