All the world’s a stage…

This one is for all my nihon-homies out there

So I feel the need to continue on a theme that I discussed in a slightly tangential way in my first post, and really a steady theme for most of my writing right now – identity in digital spaces.

In the first post I mentioned how the self can be split into different identities. In that scenario the identities could exist independently of one another without drawing connections back to the singular self from which they originated. This was often achieved by replacing your physical self by some altered representation (or an avatar).

But all of this changes in large scale social networks, where your identities might be multiple, but your physical representation is constant.

Let’s use the rapidly ubiqifying presence we know as Facebook for our example. On Facebook you build a digital representation of the ‘real’ you and project it out into the Internet for all to consume. You then fill your community with a variety of ‘friends’ (for a great discussion of digital ‘friends’ check out Danah Boyd’s article) with whom you have some sort of social connection. Now many of these people will know you from different areas in your life, and it is quite possible that you present yourself in in a variety of ways to each.

The ‘presentations of self,’ as articulated by Erving Goffman, are all the different roles you assume in the different situations in your life – for those who haven’t read the earlier post these could take the form of you-at-work, you-with-friends, you-with-your-parents, you-with-your-partner. One thing in all of these cases remains the same however: you project to your audience the representation of yourself that you perceive to be most advantageous.

Now granted much of this may be sub-conscious, but decisions to withhold the drinking and drug habits of the you-with-friends from your 10 year old sibling, and your bedroom hi-jinks from you boss, are all part of your careful articulations of who you are to the audience you’re presenting to.

Now what happens when all of these element collide in a digital landscape where you are constantly on stage, even when you are not there? You now have the responsibility of juggling multiple identities in a single space that lacks materiality; furthermore, you are constantly being evaluated by the scores of ‘friends’ who can scan your every key-stroke, posting, and reply.

Granted some of this is under your control… you choose the characteristics that you expose to the world, and thus knowingly construct you. But what do you do about the information that is beyond your control? The information placed within the sphere of public spectacle by others about you?

Even if you are ever vigilant – constantly scanning over your page, and those of your friends’ for the casual comment (or worse a picture) about you doing something stupid while on holiday, or making an off-colour joke amongst friends, or even smoking the occasional joint – there is no guarantee that you will catch everything.  Nor does it prevent some one from accidentally stumbling across one of these identity shattering vignettes at some point in the distant future.

So what do we do then? Do we simply remove ourselves from the digital landscape and bury our collective heads in the virtual sandbox? Do we simply give up (and in essence in) to the ubiquity of the digital panopticon? And with all the checks and balances, in the form of the eyes of the community, how does one negotiate the presentations of them self that came so effortlessly before?

Thoughts?

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