One true self ? Performing our selves on the digital stage
An exploration of what collective digital spaces mean for individual identities.
This is the start of a small series exploring traditional ways of being our selves in the world and how they translated into the digital age. Take this as me trying to dump the surface I scratched while working in the digital identity field.
This part talks about how we build our own identity, how we relate to it, the violence it is subjected to by the public discourse and how things change in virtual spaces.
A rough idea of what's next:
how technical layers of digital identity influence the way we can and must relate to our own identity,
an exploration of how tricky it is to preserve enough privacy for the whole range of our identities to flourish online.
One true self
Looking inwards, I am hoping to find myself. Something, anything that we define me. Something that could explain the whole thing that is my life. Who am I ? Why is it so hard to answer ?
Either oblivious to context or with uncommon confidence, some people navigate the world projecting a strong sense of identity. Some have it so strong they registered their Ashley Madison account with their government work email. Now that's confidence in one’s own identity and actions that I aspire to. This scandal is a good way to highlight the seriousness of online identities. Why their compartmentalization, federation or even unification bring a host of consequences to the social scene both in the digital and physical worlds.
In fact, our identity is fluid enough that it is more relevant to address the topic of our identities as well as our selves.
One true self ?
Not in a movie-schizophrenic way; in a very sane way. How else to reconcile the vastly different aspects of our lives and their respective demands ? To be so inflexible would be to break like the oak instead of bending gracefully like the reed.
It is a good exercise to think about oneself in various circumstances, how we talk, how we act. The personality we project with colleagues, friends and family. I see that my meat vessel is acting and speaking in different ways depending on what and who's around. What is the pilot doing ? Why is it trying to sound so smart ? Why didn't it shut up ? Why did it hold the door for someone who was like so far ! Did it not pass the meat vessel driving exam ? The careful navigation of varied demands and contexts can be confusing.
Our most stable traits have deep roots, stemming from core emotions and needs. Yet, in general, we navigate contexts with variations of our selves anchored in us vs. them relationships. Neither us nor them needs to take a negative connotation here. We define as spouses within our marriage, as employees with respect to our employers, as humans beings, distinct from other animals. There are as many categories as are useful for our self-definitions. That is where things get interesting. Our perception of categories is heavily influenced by social context. The resulting identities we adopt are usually the encoding of social and cultural stereotypes. We act as we think we are expected to act in the present context. For a more thorough exploration of these concepts, I encourage you to watch the following recording, presentation by the Organization for Identity+Cultural Development
The work they present focuses on the analysis of the relationships between us and them. Their work maps identities ecosystems and identify unhealthy ones by finding clusters of identities that relate to others through unhealthy and negative links. Their aim is to foster as many healthy pathways between identities as possible.
Our us and them being a product of our environment, it is necessarily a product of our media consumption. Whether books, articles, TV news, or even ads, we model some of our understanding of the world through the understanding of others. These consumable understandings have sometimes been carefully crafted. They are meant to influence the relationship between us and them in specific ways. Amartya Sen’s Identity and Violence is an excellent read. Not only on these concepts of multiple identities, handling them in the world and the hardship of compromising between each of them. But also on how and why these identities can be manipulated, as well as the dramatic endings this leads to.
Given our inescapably plural identities, we have to decide on the relative importance of our different associations and affiliations in any particular context.
Amartya Sen - Identity and Violence
One true self !
In essence, the many-faceted individual is hard to address and manipulate. Identity shifting is the super-power allowing us to look at and interact with the world from different standpoints that are all part of our self. Limiting these shifts and giving in to the demands of one top-ranked identity is opening the door to manipulation and herding of identity groups as an homogeneous mass. Politics and religion are prime examples of this building of identity on a single axis. Less dramatically but to no less extent, marketing is also quite fond of this. If you’ve been into any hobby, there is no doubt you encountered a lot of “10 signs you’re a [insert hobby practitioner name]”. They are sometimes fun and iconoclasts, but they also aim at making a specific part of you feel more like it is you. And of course, that you must buy some gear to be more you. Any fellow photographers or guitar players around ?
An important part of a single-identity propaganda is the insistence that the advertised identity is the only one that matters, all others needing to yield to its needs.
It is important to note that an individual’s choice in identity is only possible if the individual is in possession of means to affirm this identity. That is, the individual has the actual freedom to affirm an identity of their choice.
One true “them”
Let's continue with Amartya Sen's analysis on identity groups relationships
Within-group affinity can help to feed between group discord
He talks about Rwandans being informed that they are Hutus, and that they hate Tutsis. About Yougoslavians being informed that they are, in fact, Serbs, and that they hate Muslims. His analysis then goes deeply into the Hindu-Muslim riots and how group identity was a major factor in fueling that conflict.
Suppressing people’s multi-layered identities is only half the play-book. We discussed defining identities by contrasting them with others. Building them against other, similarly simplified, identities is the other half. It is usually characterized by gross misrepresentation, diminution, strawman-ization. This is what Sen calls “charged attribution": The act of misdescribing people belonging to a target category, and being insistent that the misdescribed attributes are the only ones relevant to this identity. This drives a disconnect between us and them while culling healthy connections between these groups.
The singular sense of identity is a pre-requisite for that second half to be effective. If it is not strong enough and if people mix, discuss, debate, concede and compromise, that cozy knitting-club in your town might become the next breeding ground for an unacceptably constructive and tolerant view of others. Thankfully, internet brought the technical means for a mixing so intense it resulted in a bland paste of human traits - saving us from the unsavory variety of the human spectrum.
The public self in digital spaces
Compartmentalized selves
Internet transformed what was a one-way flow into a space where anybody could grab a megaphone and reach the whole planet. Ideas went from being distributed via writings, TV, radio, to a space where anybody can talk back and contribute with their own ideas. For good or bad, people can now shape their own microcosm in the digital sphere.
Mailing lists, BBS, forums, the first agora of the internet, were relatively small and disconnected from each others. As such, they formed groups within which we could build and perform personas that suited the circumstances as we do in physical interactions. We could healthily exchange with varied groups of people and strangers without straining our own sense of identity. These different spaces were very loosely, if at all, inter-connected, allowing for an effective use of pseudonyms. Pseudonyms are wonderful things, even more so than their physical counter-part as the body is never in harms way. They allow for the exploration of opinions, the creation of wonderful art without fear of retribution.
For a very nice personal account on this I recommend:
This way of living in the digital spaces is still available today, albeit discouraged by the current context as we'll discuss in the next section. It is still possible on a lot of website to create a fresh account with a pseudonym and build an identity there. One of the key difference from the early internet is that most of these venues now connect to common data brokers that have little difficulty correlating pseudonyms across places, leaving the pseudonym as a decorum for other decorum-pseudonym identities.
Living pseudonymously also comes with friction. Technical friction, keeping tabs on multiple website, IRC servers, mailing lists, their respective usernames and passwords. Deciding on what and how to segregate aspects of our selves, as well as managing the blurry boundary some relationships have with different spheres of our lives.
Social media later brought to these internet communities the same kind of shift that mass media distribution had brought to other industries. The widening of the agora from well-defined communities to trans-national, trans-cultural scales.
One nice self - performing our own lives
This ushered us into the era of social networks as they are now. General-purpose platforms such as Facebook gave the illusion of shattering the walls around the comparatively closed communities that existed before them by regrouping people on a single platform based on the characteristic of being a person. Suddenly the megaphone was cumbersome because, in addition to reaching people far from ourselves, it also shouted directly into the ear of a lot of other people close to us.
I ramble about other aspects of platforms in this other piece:
Most importantly, these platform also force a unified identity across all contexts for its users. These insanely large regroupments of people introduced a lot of friction in pseudonym-based communication and sometimes even encouraged, if not coerced, people to show up with their legal identity as a basis.
Millions of sub-identities died or were stifled on this altar. Everything can be read by family, friends, and strangers alike. There is no room for modulation and compartmentalization of the selves on such platforms. Worse yet, the tendency towards short content kills the many nuances of even a single identity. Our various identities are not made for universal scrutiny. The filtering layers for identities are dense and intricate, and the more small interactions are recorded and displayed, the denser they become. What face do we show the world when, beyond the inherent openness of text, image or video posting, our every “likes” are for the world to see, when connecting with someone will affect the content they see in noticeable manners. Every act becomes a crumb in a disorganized trail for others to interpret and pin onto us as who we are.
The alternatives offered to us are, to remain silent, please everyone, or chose an audience to the detriment of others. Audience is the key word, as we build performative identities. Our TV-show-host smile and catchphrases, meant to be appealing to all or some, but devoid of the depth and authenticity of a real person identity. Thus the social platform sheds its primary skin of people-connector to adopt one of a theater of marketable-identites.
Marketable in the sense that displayed identities need to please across sectors and environments. LinkedIn and Facebook both encourage legal names, effectively creating a single identity that needs to satisfy very different criteria of each platforms.
Marketable in the sense that platforms usher users into sellable buckets of data. Sellable bubbles of similar identities in which the people who want to be heard need to crank up the discourse dial to eleven, to radicalize even the most trivial of subjects in pursuit of status within a performative community.
Digital spaces pressure users to perform a sanitized, marketable self. As we talked, the building of us as singular identities paves an easy way to build and misrepresent a them that fits a group's discourse or agenda. This makes these trans-national digital spaces an ideal ground for herding and polarization of opinions both on us and them, all in the hands of private companies that can erase any unwanted outliers in a few keystrokes.
The less nice selves
A key difference that these relationships have from physical world interaction is the distance to the other. Human beings are abstracted behind the text they write, the pictures they post. With that comes with derives that the physicality of our world usually deters and are hard to manage at scale.
I'm talking about moderation. Once the agora holds more than a few dozen seats, making sure discourse stay civil, and even legal, is a challenge, both in term of human organization and in technical terms.
This aspect of things also holds in anonymous and pseudonymous communities, maybe even more so. Trolls, flamewars, radicalized and hateful discourses are not exclusive to the internet-era but are plagues that adapted to digital spaces as well as bacteria to lukewarm water.
A take-away box for supper - conclusion
By having a look at the fact that many constituents go into the building of a healthy sense of self, we saw that our modern digital spaces can provide both opportunities and deadly traps for the variety of our individual identities. The range goes from the almost-too-liberating world of fully pseudonymous relationships to the stifling sanitized spaces of mass social media that require us to perform our own lives in exchange for the reach they offer.
The next step in this exploration of identity in the digital age will be a look under the hood to see how the management of identities - in technical terms - has evolved and continues evolving, hereby influencing the ways we can represent ourselves online.
Some nice readings
Identity and Violence, the illusion of destiny - Amartya Sen