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?

And to be honest my immediate impression was:

“I don’t really care…”

Now those of you who know me know that I’m as small business, granola crunching, cruelty free wearing, left-winging voting (when I get around to doing it) and nag champa stinking as it gets, but I’ve feel like its a little bit of overkill.

But let me explain myself before someone comes to take my ‘critical mass’ iron-on patch away from me… Basically I question what new things this documentary is going to show me that I haven’t seen in the last four docs, or heard on an NPR radio program, or read on a blog/news feed/journal article? I mean most people get it by now… the war is a sham… it is about the oil… America has cluster fucked the entire Middle East (and I do preface this by admitting there are a lot of very intelligent Americans out there who are deeply upset by what is happening in their name)… and they need to get out before more people die to line another company’s pockets with blood money…

But I guess what I’m getting at is just who are they making these documentaries for?

Is it just to take pot shots at an easy target so you can say you’ve made a ‘critical’ documentary?

I just feel that the market is saturated at this point in time… those who are interested in what is going on are already informed, and have been for a long time… I just don’t see someone standing up at the end of this documentary and going “Oh my God, I didn’t know that was going on in Iraq!!!”

Furthermore, I just don’t see some hyper right-wing conservative turning to his friend and saying “Let’s go see that small screen showing of ‘Blood for Oil’ at the Bloor cinema!” In all fairness I don’t see myself going to a young conservatives screening of… we’ll I’m not sure…

And that’s part of the problem…

We tend to stick to what we know and what makes us secure in our beliefs… granted when I do read the news on something like Google.news, I try to pick three very different view points on the issue (like Al Jezeera, The Christian Science Monitor, and Voice of America) but I definitely don’t do this always, and lately I’ve stuck to left-wing web broadcasts.

All of this convoluted story brings me to the point at hand… Google

Now I love Google… really… for a super monolithic conglomerate I tend to like what they do… they stand tough when they have to and they just recently announced that they will be anonymising all user data 18-24 months after its collected (read here)… but I worry about the effects of their personalized searching… which learns from your searching habits and choices you make and then alters your search to fit your browsing habits.

If this is the future of searching as we know it we’re potentially in for a lot of trouble…

Think of it this way… if you happen to lean towards the left in your choices of pages, then the longer you search the more Google’s going to notice this, and the more its going to bring up search results that cater to your ideal…

“That’s great” you exclaim…

Well… no… not really…

Overtime you will basically be spoon fed exactly what you expect to get, and the results will be polarizing: from the left wing to the right; from Christian fundamentalists to Muslim extremists – individuals will only get information that supports their point of view.

In essence a rapidly expanding self affirming narrowcasting of the Internet… a polarizing and factioning of ideologies… the total disillusion of the middle ground… the slow eventual collapse of openness that is the hallmark of the Internet

The Digital Platonian cave… where only the shadows you see on the screen are real…

Most people who know me would probably reject the notion that my ego is having any sort of crisis short of delusions of grandeur… but I assure you this crisis is quite real… but perhaps not in the way first imagined.

Let me start by discussing the very notion of the ego and its importance in relation to ourselves and the world around us.

The ego, in terms of Freudian thought, is directly connected to the notions of our consciousness projected out to the world around us… it is also what gives each individual their own sense of meaningfulness and importance in the world – although we all might not want to believe it, the reality is that we are all very very small and fleeting moments in time – and our egos help us feel relevant despite this.

“If life is going to exist in a Universe of this size, then the one thing it cannot afford to have is a sense of proportion”

Douglas Adams

One thing to keep in mind with this notion of the ego is that as as Fliess puts it the ego is “in the first place a body ego,” connected quite directly to our corporeal selves… that is to say more directly that the Freudian notion of the ego connects our importance of self to the mental connection we have with our bodies.

This has been fine and good for quite some time now as we’ve had nothing else to draw upon, but over the last decade or so (perhaps even longer if you were one of the early Internet denizens), we’ve been interacting and sending our mental ‘selves’ out beyond the limits of our bodies through the use of the internet.

At first this may not seem to have any real effect on the body, or my little buddy the ego, but the Internet actually has had a very profound effect on him… let me show you how by examining the notion of roles (or as Erving Goffman called them ‘presentations of self’).

Depending on where I am and what I’m doing I take on certain roles: when I’m at school I take on the role of ‘Student Mike’; when I’m with my family I take on the role of ‘son Mike’, or ‘brother Mike’; when I’m out with my friends I become ‘social Mike’ (and after too many drinks perhaps I become ‘belligerent Mike’ too) – but one thing that is important is that they are all connected to the physicality of my own body.

To put this in perspective I like to use the idea of a party where everyone I know is in attendance… at this party everyone knows me, but one person may know me in a very different role than someone else, but they all connect their understanding of me to my physical body standing in the room with them. I could not be ‘Student Mike’ and ‘belligerent Mike’ at the same time without causing some major shifts in people’s perceptions of me.

Now in the digital world drastic changes are taking place in the creation and meaning of the roles that I take on. I can take part in online discussions, write to blogs, create a listing of my favourite links on del.icio.us, join a MMORPG and become an elf that slays dragons – all outside of my physical body.

This may not seem particularly remarkable on its own, but by delving a little deeper some interesting things are taking place… and I have a feeling it is this that’s starting to worry my little friend.

Many of the activities I mentioned above can be (can and often are) performed either anonymously, or with a pseudonym… it is  very rare that I get to register on a website with the name Mike, and for many obvious reasons I often choose not to attach my last name to many of them as well. We often create interesting and diverse names for our digital personas, and these will often vary from website to website.

Unlike the roles that I play in the physical world, the roles I play in the digital world have little or no connection to the physical me, and little or no connection to each other. In essence the narratives that I begin to create with these roles only connect back to my physical self, how and when, I choose.

Now let’s go back to the party again and let’s invite all of my digital personas to the party as well. Unlike the roles that are trapped to the corporeal body ‘me,’ my digital selves are free to do what they want. The ‘deli.icio.us Mike’ could be talking to some people in one corner about the great movie review he read last week; while, the ‘Blogger Mike’ could be getting in an argument with “Student Mike’s” friends; and “MMORPG Mike” has gotten drunk and has decided to relieve himself in a potted plant. None of these roles however are connected to my own physical body, and hence are free from the potential upheaval of others’ perceptions of ‘me.’

This may seem like an ideal situation, but as I spend more time interacting within these digital entities, my ego’s feelings of importance suffer. It is no longer the single conduit of interaction for me, and everything does not have to refer back to it… my body is no longer the single avatar by which I am defined.

I’m not sure how my besieged ego will react as more of my time becomes enmeshed in the digital… but I do have some theories… until then though stay strong little buddy – you have not gone the way of the Betamax yet, nor do I expect you to anytime soon.

You may not agree with everything I have to say on this blog

and

Not all of it will be good

I’m perfectly ok with both of these things, and if you are too… let’s eat…