Oh, you virtual you!
What defines you as you? Where does your identity reside?
Or do we really have identities at all?
In the 20th century, and probably still even today, many people felt their true identity as an inner self that no one else can fully see or fully know. But some thinkers have instead focused on the self as a social thing. Our personalities are things we perform for other people, create in response to or in communion with them, things that only have meaning in relationship to other people, ideas that are essentially constructed in interaction with other people, and with our culture and society. (This is known as the social construction of identity.)
I often find it helpful to use self to refer to the supposed inner identity and personality to the outer one. You may recall the distinction Marshall McLuhan made between the adolescent (searching for an inner identity for themselves) and the teenager (trying to make themselves "with it" through an outward appearance for others). But are either of those identities really you? Do such ways of thinking about identity still work in the 21st century with our technologies of interactive and mediated personhood?
In an important sense, maybe, there is no me except as I am experienced by someone else. Many philosophers and psychologists have argued for this interpersonal construction of identity. The Russian theorist Mikhail Bakhtin even suggested that no one really has a complete identity until they die. Only then can the story of who they were and the shape of their life be fully known and made comprehensible (by other people; we ourselves will never really know who we were). We are alive and changing all the time. This is true of identities as well. Do you think (feel) like you have a unique and enduring identity, some part of which doesn't change? I often think I do. Sort of. But then - I grew up reading books. And most of them were by people who believed in an authentic inner identity, separate from the social realm. Maybe this is just an illusion I developed because I was McLuhan's "book man." Books are often all about inner experience.
In this lesson, I am wondering how the nature of human identity changes in a world of virtual socializing and self-performing media "publicity" as described in the lesson on surveillance. My own earlier idea of "publicity" (as opposed to privacy) in the lesson on surveillance may usefully be merged with a new concept that I'll introduce you to shortly: profilicity. Does what it means to speak of our "identities" change in a world where personalities are heavily mediated by technology? Are our identities perhaps becoming more hyperreal along with the rest of our reality? Are many of us becoming "brands," ads for ourselves, media representations? Do we even feel like we exist now if we are not seen in the media? Do we think we "are" who we portray ourselves as in our media?
A line by the novelist Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. always comes to mind when I think about the performance of an identity: "We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be."
"Found" identies and "made" identities
Some people certainly believe that virtual socializing is changing what it means to think of one's "identity." As we have seen, "More and more people regard the virtual world as a place where they can establish and maintain safer, less demanding relationships on their own time" (Arnold Brown 2011,p. 31). If embodied, physically present relationships come to seem increasingly unsafe and demanding, how will our still embodied selves be changed by the new focus on our disembodied virtual selves?
Brown draws attention to how family relationships and familial identity roles have been changing. Before the Industrial Revolution, most people lived in extended families, with grandparents and possibly siblings or even cousins sharing living space with two parents and their children. The family was the most important context for one's identity until recently, and still in many parts of the world or for many people. But Brown reminds us that while friending hundreds of people on social media may be leading to an increase in the shallowness of most relationships, in fact the Internet helps people find people with whom they have stronger affinities than they may have with the members of their real famililes or with most of the embodied people they actually see on a day to day basis. We saw some examples of this in the documentary Second Skin. The strength of these affinity bonds could well lead to new forms of "familial" relationship not based on blood and physical space-sharing, and these could become legal in the future - variations on the ideas of adoption, marrying into a family, or common law partnerships. Meet Muhammad; he's my virtual husband.
According to Brown, this new opt-in "digital form of tribalism is an unexpectedly strong trend" and may lead to a greater investment in one's online identity, or identities, than one has in the persona one puts out there "offline." "Blood is thicker than water," perhaps, but is it thicker than spiritual bonding across a network? As someone says in a much-quoted moment in Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, "You can choose your friends but you sho' can't choose your family." In the future, though, more even than now, we may indeed come more and more to to choose our "families." As the K-HOLE report Youth Mode quoted in Jessica Baldanza's article from Lesson 8 put it: "Once upon a time people were born into communities and had to find their individuality. Today people are born individuals and have to find their communities" (qtd in Baldanza 2016).S
Brown calls attention to the distinction some sociologists make between a found identity and a made identity:
The found identity is one created by your circumstances - who your parents were, your ethnic background, your religion, your sex, where you went to school, your profession, and all the other external factors that people use to categorize and describe you. The made identity, on the other hand, is the one you create for yourself. It is how you wish to see yourself and how you want others to see you. (Brown 2011, 34)
You're dealt a hand in life: you are black or white etc; male, female, or something else; you're raised poor or rich or middle class; you're raised in a religion or you aren't - this is your found identity. But you also create yourself in various ways within the limitations of that found identity. This is your made identity.
It used to be quite difficult to change your identity, but with our new virtual identities this becomes a somewhat quicker and also a somewhat more accepted, maybe even expected, thing: "technology will let you make and re-make your identity at will - virtually. This extraordinary, even revolutionary, development will profoundly affect fundamental societal values such as trust and reliability" (34).
Split personalities
Brown points to a future in which one's "identity" may become much more multiple than the identities of most (sane) people have been up till now. One may have a variety of online profiles that promote and enact different aspects or even full variant versions of "oneself." (Perhaps some of you are already there.) Indeed, Brown seems to think that multiple personalities will ultimately become the norm:
We will go from "Who am I?" to "Who, when, and where am I?" What in the twentieth century was seen as a problem that needed treatment - multiple personalities - will increasingly be seen in the twenty-first century as a coping mechanism, greatly affecting the evolving economy, as multiple personas split their expenditures in multiple ways. (34)
Depending on the type of person you are, this might sound like an amazing opportunity to be more than you ever could have been in the past. Or it might seem like a management nightmare, leaving your sense of self (you) even more painfully fragmentary and unclear than it already is.