internet and self identity

7/28/2019 Internet and Self Identity

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THE INTERNETAND SELF-IDENTITY

Dr. Dennis M. Weiss

York College of Pennsylvania

In the age of the Internet, the World Wide Web, and cyberspace, more

and more of our contact with one another is not of the traditional face-to-face

variety. Rather, our communications with one another are increasingly

mediated by machines, especially computers. We have voice-mail and e-

mail, participate in discussions on computer discussion lists, meet people in

computer chat rooms, role play in virtual realities such as MUDs, and satisfy

our sexual desires with anonymous, virtual others. These forms of computer-

mediated conversation (CMC) are decidedly different from the traditionalface-to-face contact that was the norm for most of the history of civilization.

When communicating through the intermediary of the computer we can, if

we choose, remain anonymous or even create false or alternative identities.

As Howard Rheingold has noted in The Virtual Community, The grammar

of CMC media involves a syntax of identity play: new identities, false

identities, multiple identities, exploratory identities, are available in different

manifestations of the medium (147-48). Recently, a number of

commentators on the computer culture have argued that this aspect of

computer-mediated communication, this identity play, will lead to a newsense of self-identity in our culture. The notion that the self is a stable, fixed,

unitary, and centered object will ultimately give way in the computer culture

to the idea of a self that is multiple, decentered, fluid, and fragmented. Sherry

Turkle, for instance, inLife on the Screen, argues that our contact with

computers and virtual identities is leading to a new image of the self in terms

of multiplicity, heterogeneity, flexibility, and fragmentation. In traditional

communities where face-to-face contact dominates, people developed a

strong, unitary sense of self. On the Internet, though, we learn to experimentwith different selves, different identities. We learn to fashion for our virtual

lives new selves. As Turkle puts it, today, many more people experience

identity as a set of roles that can be mixed and matched, whose diverse

demands need to be negotiated (180). Social psychologist Kenneth Gergen

has termed this phenomenon the saturated self. According to Gergen,

communications technologies saturate us with the various voices of

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humankind and lead to a self that is without foundations, an incoherent,

fragmentary self in which the notion of authentic self-identity is lost. Gergen

writes, There is a populating of the self, reflecting the infusion of partial

identities through social saturation. And there is the onset of a multiphrenic

condition, in which one begins to experience the vertigo of unlimitedmultiplicity (The Saturated Self, 49). Allucquere Rosanne Stone agrees. In

her The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age ,

Stone argues that we are witnessing a radical rewriting of our conception of

the self. In the age of the computer, our belief that to each body there

corresponds a single self or identity is undermined. Older, stabler structures

of identity are giving way to a new form of multiple identity. Stone draws

parallels between this new form of identity and multiple personality disorder,

suggesting that in the age of the Internet, multiple personalities may becomethe norm, not the disorder. Similar claims are made by Mark Poster in his

analysis of what he terms the mode of information. Poster argues that the

shift from an oral to a print to an electronically based culture reconfigures the

subjects relation to the word and the world. In electronically mediated

exchanges the self is decentered, dispersed, and multiplied. As he writes, In

electronically mediated communications, subjects now float, suspended

between points of objectivity, being constituted and reconstituted in different

configurations in relation to the discursive arrangements of the occasion

(11). Similar points are made by Jay David Bolter, in his analysis ofhypertext and the coming network culture, by Elizabeth Reid in her

discussions of MUDs (multi-user domains) and IRC (Internet Relay Chat),

and by Amy Bruckman in her analysis of MUDs as identity workshops.

Ignoring the differences among these various accounts, we can

identify at least four common claims in this body of work:

1. There has been a paradigm shift in our sense of self-identity, from acoherent, stable, centered sense of self to a fragmented, decentered,

multiple sense of self.

2. The role of technology is deeply implicated in this shift, perhaps

constitutive of it.

3. The emphasis is on a social constructionist account of the self.

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4. There is a repudiation of the traditional Western Cartesian view of

the self.

For the purposes of this discussion, I focus on the central claim that

communications technology, especially the computer and the Internet, isleading to a shift from a stable, centered sense of self to a multiple,

fragmentary, decentered self. Despite the growing proliferation and increased

acceptance of this claim, there are three general reasons for rejecting it. First,

it is not clear that we can understand the basic claim being made. Second, as

a descriptive claim purporting to account for changes apparent in our culture,

this claim rings false. Third, as a normative claim recommending a particular

view of the self as multiple and fragmented, it undermines many of our

important moral ideals. Let me address each of these points in turn.

First, this claim is, simply put, both vague and ambiguous. The

authors, for instance, fail to distinguish between different varieties of unity

and fragmentation. It is never clear whether the issue is unity of

consciousness at any given time or unity of consciousness over time. There

are a variety of terms used, even within one particular analysis, such as

self, person, subject, and subjectivity that are not adequately defined

or distinguished. Furthermore, the central terms of the claim, multiple,

fragmented, decentered, are never made clear and so the view of the selfthat is being defended is left ambiguous. The authors, for instance, treat

fragmented and fluid as synonymous and, yet, there may be significant

differences between a fragmented self and a fluid self. Indeed, a fragmented

self might be neither fluid nor flexible. Additionally, multiple models of this

new, multiple self are proposed with little recognition of the significant

differences among these models. Turkle, for instance, at various points in

Life on the Screen, mentions Gergens saturated self, Emily Martins flexible

self, Robert Jay Liftons protean self, Daniel Dennetts multiple drafts modelof the self, and her own metaphor of the self as a distributed system,

analogous to the multiple windows on a computer screen. No attempt is

made to distinguish between these competing models. Finally, and I think

most significantly, the relationship between this multiple, fragmented self

and technology is never clearly explicated. Is the technology fashioning a

new sense of subjectivity or is the new sense of subjectivity a product of

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broader cultural forces? Is the fragmented, multiple self an outcome of

interacting with computers or simply a function of a postmodern, fragmented

culture? The relationships between the broader culture milieu, technology,

and subjectivity are obscured in these accounts. And yet, the focus in these

accounts is clearly on computers, virtual systems, and cyberspace. Thisstrongly implies that the technology is causally implicated in the paradigm

shift. This claim, though, is never substantiated.

A larger difficulty concerns the status of the central claim that we are

witnessing a paradigm shift from a stable, fixed self to a multiple,

fragmented self. Is this merely a descriptive claim or should it be read

normatively, as prescribing norms of subjectivity? There is support in the

work of Turkle, Gergen, and Stone to read this claim either way. Gergen, forinstance, suggests I am not trying to document the societal norm. Rather,

my hope is to isolate an emerging shift in perspective and related life

patterns. The case is drawn from specially affected segments of the

populationyet there is good reason to believe that what is taking place in

these groups can be taken as a weathervane of future cultural life in general

(200). The style of writing in both Turkle and Stone suggest a descriptive

account of a particular culture or subculture, consistent with their

ethnographic approaches. Stone, for instance, writes, Among the

phenomena at the close of the mechanical age that it is useful to note is thepervasive burgeoning of the ontic and epistemic qualities of multiplicity in

all their forms (53). Turkle, too, suggests that these are broad changes

influencing every sector of culture. And yet, beyond merely reporting on

these changes, these writers also speak approvingly of the changes they are

documenting. They are not simply neutral observers. Both Turkle and Stone

speak approvingly of individuals playing with multiplicity. Stone refers to

members of the virtual age living happily with multiplicity (43). Gergen

refers to the self taking pleasure in the expanded possibilities of socialsaturation and being liberated from the demands for coherence. So the

central claim regarding the multiple, fragmented self can be read either

descriptively or normatively. Unfortunately, there are problems with either

reading.

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As descriptive, this claim rings false. This claim to a new sense of

identity, it is suggested, captures a widespread shift in our culture.

Unfortunately, very little is offered as evidence in support of this claim. And

what evidence is offered is largely biased and based on non-representative

samples. Turkles sample, it appears, is drawn exclusively fromundergraduates and so-called twenty-somethings, precisely the group one

would expect to find engaged in identity-play, as their self-identies have not

yet fully formed. In her central chapter on identity fromLife on the Screen ,

Turkle profiles eleven individuals. Of these eleven, her four extended

analyses are all of young male college students. The average age of the

eleven is 25. Her Note on Method suggests that many of her informants are

kids from the MIT and Boston area. Outside of individuals with multiple

personality disorder, the only group Stone mentions accepting the multipleself are hackers and young engineers. But premising claims about social

trends on the backs of twenty-something hackers is probably not a good idea.

In studies by Steven Levy, Bruce Sterling, Katie Hafner, and even Turkle

herself, hackers are often portrayed as loners, maladjusted, uncomfortable

with themselves. It is doubtful that broad conclusions about identity in the

wider culture can be soundly based on such a non-representative group of

individuals. Furthermore, in Turkles ethnographic study, many of her

subjects use the very same modernist vocabulary of the self (authenticity,

self-fulfillment, self-development) that she argues is pass in thepostmodern, computer culture. The case of Stewart, for instance, presents a

young man in search of his ideal self and working towards the goal of an

integrated self. These are ideas much at odds with the postmodern

vocabulary championed by Turkle.

Importantly, Stewarts concern for realizing an ideal and fully

integrated self still finds parallels in many sectors of our society. While I

think Stone, Turkle, Gergen, and Poster are right that there are signs ofmultiplicity and fragmentation in contemporary society, there are just as

many signs of unity, integration, and authenticity. Certainly the self-help and

new age sections of most major book stores trade on the search for

authenticity and integrity. As just one brief example, Time magazine recently

profiled Sarah Ban Breathnach, who has been called the Martha Stewart of

the Spirit. Ban Breathnachs Simple Abundance: A Daybook of Comfort and

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Joy has been on the best-seller lists for 70 weeks and sold 2.2 million copies

(far more, I imagine, than all the texts I am considering combined).

Significantly, Ban Breathnach emphasizes, as she puts it, excavating the

authentic self. Additionally, just a glance at the best seller lists also suggests

that memoirs are currently a growth industry in the publishing world. Italmost seems as if a new memoir is published daily. A thorough and more

complete account of the self in contemporary culture has to account for these

phenomena as well as the potentially multiple self found in the computer

culture. Even in the computer culture, it is not clear that technology leads

inevitably and completely to a fragmentation of self-identity. The

phenomenon of personal home pages seems to attest to a certain desire to

represent and fix the self in cyberspace. The growing field of biometrics, the

use of retinal identification, voice recognition devices, iris scanners suggestfurther ways in which technology operates to fix and preserve a stable and

nonchanging personal identity. The now ubiquitous camcorders act to

preserve every moment of our lives so that they can be re-experienced over

and over again. While all of these phenomena require a deeper analysis than

they can be given here, they do suggest that it is too simplistic to claim first

that the self in contemporary society is multiple and fragmented and, second,

that technology acts solely to fragment the self.

As descriptive, these claims are simplistic in two further ways. First,they overplay the role of technology in constituting subjectivity while

simultaneously underplaying other factors that play a role in the formation of

identity, such as early childhood experiences, human embodiment, and

human sexuality. In attending to the formation of identity in relation to

interaction with technology and especially computers, these analyses

simplistically suggest an almost direct connection between technology and

identity. The self, though, is more than a product of its interactions with

machines. Too often, accounts of the power of the media and technology toshape human lives presuppose that human beings live in a vacuum and that

there are not other influences on our lives. Long before children experience a

computer they have been formed and shaped by parental influences and

interactions. Or briefly consider the role of the body in the formation of self-

identity. There is a long tradition in philosophy that focuses on bodily criteria

in personal identity and there is growing support in fields such as cogntive

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science and linguistics for the claim that the body plays an important role in

our sense of self. In these analyses we are considering, though, human

embodiment receives very little attention. Often, as in the rest of the

computer culture, the body is portrayed as mere passive stuff, the meat that

somehow or other supports the self.

Secondly, these claims simplify the modernist view of the self against

which they are reacting, a view which often amounts to little more than a

caricature. The sharp shift these analyses see from a modernist, centered self

to a postmodern decentered, fragmented, multiple self is simply falsely

drawn. Alternative theories of the self have been around at least as long as

Buddhas theory of the no-self and David Humes account of the self as a

bundle of perceptions. Nietzsche clearly articulated a notion of the multipleself, as did the American Pragmatists James, Mead, and Pierce. The

phenomena of akrasia, self-deception, and other forms of self-conflict were

commented on by both Plato and Aristotle. Additionally, it is not clear that

our sense of self hasnt always embodied at least some degree of flexibility

and multiplicity. As Jennifer Radden points out in her studyDivided Minds

and Successive Selves, our lives and selves are marked by a want of oneness,

wholeness, and homogeneity. She writes, Ordinary selves are at best only

relatively continuous through time, and at any particular time their unity or

oneness is not simple (20). Feminist analyses of the self and subjectivityhave been especially noteworthy for revealing the orindariness of the divided

self.

As descriptive, then, the claim that technology has led to a shift in the

sense of self from a stable, centered, unified self to a fragmented, fluid,

multiple, decentered self is unacceptable. Beyond merely describing this new

self-identity in the age of the Internet, this claim can also be read

normatively as recommending that we actively take up a multiple,fragmented, decentered identity. This claim too faces serious problems and I

wish now to consider several reasons for regarding it as dangerous.

First, as a number of practicing therapists have argued, the judgment

that we should embrace a fragmented subjectivity and play with multiplicity

is overly naive and fails to recognize the terror most patients suffering from

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borderline syndrome experience. As Jane Flax observes, Those who

celebrate or call for a decentered self seem self-deceptively naive and

unaware of the basic cohesion within themselves that makes the

fragmentation of experiences something other than a terrifying slide into

psychosis (Thinking Fragments, 218). A strongly similar point is made byJames Glass in his analysis of multiple personality disorder and

postmodernism. Oliver Sacks argues that one cannot live normally, humanly

in the world without the integrative power implied by a stable self.

Anthropologists such as Sheri Ortner and Jose Limon, in their study of

minority populations, write with great eloquence about the striving for unity

and a coherent life among minorities in this country. Jose Limon argues that

while life for working-class Mexican Americans is indeed full of

discontinuity, disruption, and fragmentation, the forms and patterns of theirdancing in south Texas dance halls represents a struggle against these things,

an effort, however momentary and inadequate, to construct a world of

meaning and coherence (Limon, Representation, Ethnicity, and the

Precursory Ethnography). The weakness in these celebrations of

multiplicity is that they fail to connect to a sense of lived reality, the practical

sphere in which selves must live out their lives and construct a sense of

coherence and meaning.

Additionally, these claims celebrating the fragmented self ignore thepotential dangers of accepting multiplicity as a normative standard. Norms

are often appropriated for disciplinary ends and the norm of multiplicity can

itself become disciplining when connected, for instance, to the demand that

one ignore integrity or coherence of the self or that one continuously reshape

oneself according to flexible and changing social standards. Stone herself

recognizes the connection between self-identity and regimes of discipline

and control. She argues that the unitary monistic identity characteristic of the

modern period, what she terms the fiduciary subject, is the product of tacticsof discipline, control, and violence directed at the body and institutionally

maintained by what she refers to as location technologies: psychological

tests, phone numbers, census taking, etc. As an account of the formation of

self-identity, Stones is very simplistic, reducing what surely must be an

exceedingly complex story to a one-dimensional account of the violence of

the law reigning in the multiplicitous psyche. Equally simplistic, though, is

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Stones corrollary suggestion that the multiple self, created in the

cybersystems of the virtual age, escapes that disciplining process. The

technosocial space of virtual systems, Stone argues, has an iruptive ludic

quality, a potential for experimentation and play that undermines the

disciplining forces of real space. How exactly this technosocial realm is ableto escape the discipline and control of real space is never precisely made

clear in Stones analysis. It is as if the mere presence of play in cyberspace is

powerful enough to guarantee a degree of freedom not normally encountered

in real life.

Relatedly, when it becomes normal to reinvent oneself and when

social standards are missing or themselves fragmented and multiplied, the

self risks losing itself in slavish devotion to social trends and fads. Robert

Jay Lifton, who has developed a notion of the protean self, points to onepotential danger of the fragmented self, what he terms doubling, evident in

the ability of German doctors during world war two to move easily between

their practices as healers and their Auschwitz self. Lifton writes,

Use of the term doubling calls attention to the creation of two

relatively autonomous selves: the prior ordinary self, which for

doctors includes important elements of the healer, and the Auschwitz

self, which includes all of the psychological manoeuvres that help

one avoid a conscious sense of oneself as a killer. The existence of anoverall Auschwitz self more or less integrated all of these mechanisms

into a functioning whole, and permitted one to adopt oneself to that

bizarre environemnt. The prior self enabled one to retain a sense of

decency and loving connection. (qtd. in Glover, 23)

InHabits of the Heart, Robert Bellah and his colleagues speak

eloquently of the danger of what they term the unencumbered self, the self

completely unencumbered by ties to others, communities, or traditions.Bellah describes this self as a fluid self, moving easily from one social

situation and role to another without trying to fit life into any one set of

values and norms, even ones own. In fact, ones values are not really a

single system, since they vary from one social situation and relationship to

the next (77). This is the view of selfhood championed by Turkle, Stone,

Gergen, and others. As Bellah warns, though, such a self defined by this kind

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of absolute autonomy is not really self-defining and self-constituting, but

simply becomes a slave to the social situation and socially defined values.

The only basis for choosing becomes ones own idiosyncratic preferences,

which come to define the true self (74).

Finally, this multiple self also presupposes a socially isolated andindividualistic view of the self that is antithetical to our social existence and

leaves no room for the development of character, virtue, care, integrity, and

future concern. In this respect, the multiple, fragmented self is not far afield

from the highly individualistic, Cartesian self that it is defined against. Both

stress the self as ultimately an atomistic individual, making its way through

the real world or the chat rooms of cyberspace, defining and redefining itself

as it moves from situation to situation, adopting first this role, then that

persona. Such a self seems incapable of including the ties that bind a familytogether or constitute friendships that progress beyond mere acquaintances or

role-playing others. The view of the self as described in works by Turkle,

Stone, Gergen, Poster and others is often portrayed as a self at play, a free

spirit, positively recommended for life in the virtual age. But it is also a self

without attachments, with little coherence, perhaps lacking integrity,

completely unencumbered by ties to others or to a stable community of

family and friends. Before adopting this playful approach to multiplicity, we

ought to ask ourselves whether we really want to play such a part in life.

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