Technology has started to play an integral role in the formation of one’s identity. Having an electronic information trail says as much about a person as not having an electronic information trail. This can be in large part due to what McLuhan and Fiore observed as a period of “great technological and cultural transition” which is forcing societies to review the concept of identity and identity formation. McLuhan and Fiore imply that current views of identity may be outdated or at the very least are in need of review because the current view of identity is similar to “trying to do today’s job with yesterday’s tool – with yesterday’s concept”.
Discourse when using a different tool has the potential of altering the identity of the communicators. The method that one chooses to communicate in has a significant effect on the discourse because inherent in each tool are different characteristics with different influences on the development of an identity. When one is able to see a person physically and communicates with that person face to face, the belief is that you are able to know the other person’s true character because of being in the same physical space. You can read facial expressions and other body language and be able to get a more accurate depiction of the person’s character which is integral to their identity. This is not necessarily the case with using the web to communicate especially when it is asynchronous. In an online environment, individuals have the opportunity to provide others with as much or as little information about themselves as they choose. It also enables them to create a profile based on how they may want others to view them by changing information about their appearance, interests, and even their name.
Gee describes how we all use “language plus ‘other stuff”” (ways of acting, interacting, talking) to establish identities (1999, 20-21). These change from one situation to another. For example, in one situation you are a father, in another you are a student. Camplese and McDonald mentioned the increased fractionalization of identity as we find ourselves in more and more communities online (2010, 2). Each of these communities constitute a different situation in which we are adopting a different identity. We act and interact differently as part of these different communities, and in doing so assume different identities. At the same time, is the general lack of borders in the online world in some way breaking down the barriers between these different identities? I may craft an identity on facebook, but both professional colleagues and old classmates are interacting with my identity through the same digital representation of myself. To quote the character of George Costanza, ‘the worlds have collided.”
In “The Medium is the Massage”, McLuhan talks about how each medium carries it with a message that is more powerful than the actual content the medium is conveying. New media de-emphasize hierarchies by focusing on shared authorship, collaboration, and equal ability of anyone to participate. There is no longer an inherent authority that comes from being able to disseminate content to a mass audience. As we all are receiving this message as we use the medium, we feel strange when this message is not being transmitted in the classroom. Something feels out-of-sync between the classroom and the world. Re-inventing the classroom experience to mirror the these new media, changes the rules of the Discourse. ” that the power of the medium exceeds the power of the content itself. This leads to another question: Does new technology really change the way we look at ourselves and other people?
LI-HUAI CHANG says
Due to internet spreading out the whole world, everyone can choose their effective and efficient learning approaches. Also they can decide the way they try to express themselves or how they make friends. Nowadays making Net-pal is popular and of course a little dangerous. From here we notice that Internet provide a space for creating and imagining. We can change our photo, job, weight, height or even sex, just depends on what we hope/ want others to view us. Many people feel satisfied or more confident within this imaginative space. It is not only a place for learning; it is also a place for relaxing. However it triggers out something we need to notice, that is TRUST and RESPONSIBILITY. Since there is no inherent authority, no one will tell us what to do or give us a ruler to measure a good or bad guy. Therefore it is a chance to test trust among strangers. Certainly everyone should be responsible for their talking. It is a self-monitor, self-control and self-awareness platform. It is quite interesting that we use something concrete (like high-tech device) to exam something abstract/ deeper inside our mind (like personality, relationship, trust etc.). It indeed changes ourselves and whole society in different degree.
Mark Brian Baker says
One interesting idea integral to the concept of identity that you’ve alluded to is the synthesis of our various “different identities” into an online identity, essentially “breaking down the barriers between” those identities. In real life, some people know me as a brother, others as a teacher, others as an old acquaintance from high school. Yet on the social platform Facebook, for example, all of these people are brought together through me, and thus each is forced to see my other identities. When my mother comments on a photo of my daughter, I know that my old co-workers from a janitorial service are seeing that and getting a glimpse into my fuller Me. This is something completely new, brought about through the development of Disruptive Technologies, and is an exposure I’m not sure I’m quite ready to embrace completely. I for one rather like my identities compartmentalized; knowing who I am based on whom I am with is a way for me to know how to act and talk. How can I speak familiarly with family knowing that professors are hearing every word I say? Perhaps the solution is to develop that TRUST Li-Huai talked about.
Christopher P. Long says
There are a number of important issues in this post and comment that I look forward to hearing more about as the semester progresses. My experience last semester with blogging in my PHIL200 class opened up many questions for me concerning the sort of trust and responsibility Li-Huai discusses, particularly when one allows anonymous commenting in a course blog, but that is a longer discussion.
The point I would like to make here concerns Mark’s remarks about FB. I don’t think we can underestimate the importance of FB’s relatively recent improvements to their privacy controls. For me as an Associate Dean, it was a huge step forward to be able to put all my friends into different lists so I can control exactly who sees what.
Before I started as Associate Dean in the College of Liberal Arts, a number of us discussed the issue of Fractured Identity on my Typepad blog. There was also a followup post to which I will link here:
http://cplong.typepad.com/blog/2009/11/fractured-identity.html
and
http://cplong.typepad.com/blog/2010/01/fractured-online-identity-targuman.html
The point I would make is that although I am the same person across my various professional and personal roles in life, still, I need to be different in different contexts for various important reasons. What I find so compelling about the FB privacy controls is that now I can feel free to accept friend requests from undergraduate students and professional staff and others and then decide on a case by case basis how much personal information I would like them to have about me and my family.
This allows me to enter more fully into worlds I would have been hesitant to enter without certain protections for my family. I don’t mean to imply that these worlds are dangerous, only that they involve relationships that ought not include access to all the intimate information I have accessible to close friends on FB. FB was smart to do this because now I have a platform where I can be a Dad and a Dean to different people even as I am one and the same person.
It seems to me that students will use this to ensure that potential employers and in some cases actual parents don’t see certain pictures and activities in which they are engaged. Giving us the power to control our identities at that level is very powerful; thinking about how to use these privacy settings requires being intentional about who one is and how one relates to others differently in different contexts.
Michelle Pasterick says
I think that the option of being able to determine who sees what on FB has truly added a new dimension to my thinking about who I am and how different people know me. To my various FB friends I am wife, daughter, friend, former high school teacher, college instructor, coworker, etc. I am a relatively open person and if you know me in a particular context it may not be all that different from how someone else knows me in another context, but that doesn’t mean that I necessarily want those roles and contexts to always overlap. This discussion of multiple identities and “breaking down the barrier” between those identities makes me wonder why it is that we are so often anxious to keep the barriers standing strong. Is it for our “protection”? For our “privacy”? What do those things really mean in a world where we have instant access to other people and they have instant access to us? Can we truly keep our identities separate from each other in a world where much of what we do in different contexts is “out there” on display?
AARON D BILBY says
When I first opened up my now inactive MySpace account and my currently active FB account, I was a bit appalled at the amount of personal information each social network wanted from me. Never in my life have I been asked to share that much personal information with people I hardly knew. I have the same feelings for Twitter. Many people use Twitter to tell other people what they’re doing constantly. To me I’m a little uncomfortable with that and that was the main reason why I didn’t want to use Twitter and to this day will refuse to post anything on Twitter. I don’t want people to know what I’m doing 24/7/365. That’s my business, that’s my identity. With all the current and newly developing social applications open for us to use, I believe that it is going to be a struggle to keep my identity personal. On my FB people know me as a son, friend, coworker, supervisor, teaching assistant, etc, and that is how I want people to know me. I believe that social applications such as FB and Twitter combine the identities listed above with the actions we provide in our status updates on both applications to develop a new identity about us and that’s something I’m not sure if I like.
Chris Millet says
We all talk a lot about the differences between our online identities and our “meatspace” identities (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meatspace). I personally feel that the there are as many similarities as there are differences in how I conduct myself in the physical world vs. the online. For example, I recently had a long (face-to-face) conversation with some colleagues about our behavior on Twitter, particularly how we make decisions about who to follow and who not to follow. The impetus for the discussion was that twice in one month I had been confronted, in meatspace, by people I had un-followed. In each case I think they were a little offended that I had chosen to remove myself from their Discourse. The conversation with my colleagues centered on the idea of whether or not who I follow on Twitter (or other social networking sites) should be governed by the same social rules as in the real world. My contention was that they absolutely should be. I agree that our identities are very fractionalized, but I believe that the greater fractionalization online is more a function of the limitations of current technology than of any inherent quality of Internet-based communication. It can be hard for even the most technical person to form a complete picture of someone’s online identity, not necessarily because that person hides away facets of themselves in secret networks, but because there’s simply not always an easy way to say “I find Scott McDonald interesting, I want to follow everything that he says online”. He has a Facebook identity, a blog, and a Twitter account, but he might use different authentication schemes, “handles”, screen names, etc. for each. There’s ways he can pull these identities together, but it’s far from perfect. If we were able to express ourselves in these environments in a much more organic fashion, saying what we want to say, how we want to say it, to the people we want to say it to, without the technological barriers I’ve mentioned, then I think we’d find that the social rules we obey online would be very similar to those we obey in the physical world. To go back to the example of our Twitter conversation, I largely used Twitter as a professional network. I un-followed those people in much the same way as I would remove myself from meetings at work that were completely unproductive.
My guess is that many of our students have multiple identities that each move fluidly from physical to online – in fact they may not even differentiate between the two. A teacher friending them on Facebook is very much equivalent to the teacher running into them at Burger King and plopping down at the table and asking them what parties they are going to that weekend. I thin it’s important to understand that as we engage students in the classroom with these tools.
TRACY THOMPSON says
I, too, have thought a bit about the fragmentation and consolidation of my identity as a result of online tools. My initial reason for setting up a Facebook account was that I was volunteering with High School students, and the only way I could get them to communicate was via FB. Then, work colleagues, old acquaintances from high school, current friends, and others all became “friends.” I found myself having to be very clear about what was “acceptable” to post on my wall, or that I didn’t want photos of myself tagged. It’s not that I’m embarrassed by the different parts of my identity, but I do think there’s a line defining what’s appropriate for what audience.
I had an interesting experience this summer when explaining Facebook to my mother. She is not what I would call technically savvy, but my brother posts pictures of his kids on FB, so I wanted her to have access to those pictures. What I learned from her is that she has a very certain definition of “friend” and of social protocol. It would be rude in the “real world” to say no, or ignore someone who asked her to be their friend. And thus, she was terrified that someone outside of our family would ask her to be their friend. To her, a friendship is something that requires time and effort, and she had no intention of being on FB more than once a week to check up on her own family. So, to accept a friend request and then not be in touch with people would be rude, but to ignore a request to be someone’s friend would also be rude. So, to her way of thinking, she had no way to join FB without offending people. It makes me think that she doesn’t perceive a difference between her identity in person and online. She maintains the behavioral standards she has set for herself regardless of medium. Which is, I think, why she has limited her online community to only family. And yet, I would argue that I do see a difference for myself. Not a bad or a good difference, but a difference.
Regarding students’ identity fluidity, I see Chris’ point that they may not differentiate. At the same time, I have to admit that if one of my undergrad professors had asked me what parties I went to that weekend, that conversation would’ve seemed weird to me. So, I suppose that’s something I need to keep in mind… what is uncomfortable to me may not be to others.
LI-CHUN WANG says
Reading the post and the comments here, I recalled my own use of FB or other social networking technology. I am a very passive FB user and one of the reasons is due to being uncomfortable pulling out my multiple identities to all my FB friends. That’s the same feeling as Mark describes. But at the same time, I also enjoy knowing more multiple identities from my friends from these social networking sites. I think any identity they reveal adds more my understanding of them. Probably trust is the answer. The post mentions breaking down the barriers of different identities but this may rely on whether that person trusts other people in that Discourse. When I firstly use plurk (similar to Twitter), I told few friends but I accept strangers to be my plurk friends. It is because I do not want my average friends know what I reveal myself there. They already know some part of me but I do not feel comfortable that they know of my other identities. But for strangers, since they know nothing of me and I do not plan to have physical contact with them, I feel secure of my identities they interpret.
Yet many people discuss about online identities and may regard them as not true and could be dangerous. I am not arguing about this statement but I doubt whether identities revealed in physical world are more secure. Online identity may offer an opportunity for people to have an identity that they think could represent themselves. Though this also causes other problems, such as struggling among identities could be a serious one.
Tracy’s mom’s story is really interesting and a good example illustrating generation difference on online environment. My parents act very similar that they think people should act exactly the same as they appear in social world. Chris said something similar. I agree that we should follow social norms online that we should not lie to others, be polite, be respect, etc. However, I am curious if we give definitions of one word different, what consequences we have to encounter? For example, online friends and friends in physical world could be quite different, such as frequency to contact, ways of interaction, ways to build trust, and so on. But is it only negative consequences for that? I don’t know but I am curious.
YUNJEONG CHUNG says
The matter of identity in an online environment is one of my major interests.
The Internet became the ideal place for individuals to try on possible selves (Markus and Nurius, 1986). Possible selves are the “ideal selves we would very much like to become…. the selves we are afraid of becoming”. The possible selves for an individual are regulated through the social and historical context in which the person exists. Individuals rely on feedback to confirm the presentation of identity as well as their self-conception of identity (Walker, 2000). Thus, individuals use their online identities as identity experiments, where they can try on possible selves.
In this sense, users can choose what identity to present in virtual environment. It might have no difference with their real life identity, but the individuals has much more freedom in which identity he/she will present than they do in real life in that certain physical attributes can be hidden or changed. For instance, when a person logs onto the Internet, she may choose a new name, one that can be either realistic or fantastic — a name that can reflect her identity in the real world or stray from it.
The sorts of identities that are performed in online communication are likely to vary considerably with the environment (email, discussion board, blog or online game) and the nature of the relationship (familiarity or affinity) to the other or others.
Viewed this way, people have a variety of resources to ‘interactively create identifiable personalities for themselves’.
Seunghee Sydney Jin says
Recently, I made an FB account and started using this social networking technology. As Li-Chuan mentions, I feel really uncomfortable about “breaking down the barrier” between my multiple identities. It embarrased me that some people from other community found out that I interact with people who they don’t want me to. Each of communities which I belong to expects me to do certain act and interaction. Accordingly, I adopted different identities. Then, what should I do if those multiidentities conflict each other and cannot be compatible at the same place? As we are living in a society which forces us to have a multiidentity, “the synthesis of our various “different identities” into an online identity” makes me uncomfortable and gives me a confusion of choosing which identity is the best represtative of me.
DOLORES M BODER says
I think the use, or lack there of, of technology can absolutely change the way we look at one another. It can either make us more connected, or further disconnect people from one another. Even on social networking sites, like Facebook, some people feel as though they can’t really be themselves for fear that their family members or perspective employers may develop the wrong impression of them. Unless they develop a completely anonymous identity they are still confined by feeling as though they need to maintain a “normal” identity. I have also seen that those people who refuse to give in to technology as a means to socialize and maintain relationships become allientated and “out of the loop”. In our fast paced society it is so much more convenient to update a status and to read through all of your friends updates than to meet with everyone individually. I don’t ever see technology as replacing face to face communication. Humans by nature need that physical and personal contact. I don’t see a diference between using email/Facebook to keep in touch and sending a letter. It’s just another form of script.