IDENTITY AND ONLINE WRITING
YOUR FACEBOOK IDENTITY: YOUR ONLY IDENTITY?
“You have one identity. The days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly … Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity.”
–Mark Zuckerberg (Pariser 109)
The ripped-apart remains of this infamous quotation from Mark Zuckerberg can be found all over the internet, as well as in Eli Pariser’s book The Filter Bubble: How the New Personalized Web Is Changing What We Read and How We Think. In a move that restored some of my faith in humanity, many angry people have risen to the occasion of dissecting and correcting Zuckerberg’s naive sentiments. And while many have constructed eloquent, well-reasoned arguments, a Psych101 student could give you the rundown of reasons why Zuckerberg’s statement is a laughable assessment of human nature, context in general, and rhetorical situations.
Looking at Zuckerberg’s words from an idealistic point of view, one can see how the idea of unified, definable Facebook identities for every person is attractive, particularly to the creator of the company that might make it possible. Zuckerberg may want to believe that the days are near upon us where you’ll be okay with your boss, grandmother, or professor seeing everything that you post for your friends. But is it really disingenuous, as Zuckerberg claims, to have multiple online identities? The answer is: disingenuous or not, multiple online identities are unavoidable.
Here are all the features of the online representation of your identity that prevent it from being an accurate representation of you.
According to Engadget writer Nicole Lee, having multiple online identities is more normal than one might think. “This multiple online identity phenomenon is indicative of how multifaceted human beings are. To have us each be confined to just a single account, or a single all-in-one persona, is confining.” Principal Researcher for Microsoft danah boyd (name preferred lowercase) agrees. "I interviewed a young person last week who was very clear about the need for multiple profiles,” she said on her blog. “She used Tumblr to share all sorts of political feminist images with people who cared about that, Instagram to share photos with her classmates, Facebook to interact with everyone she's ever met, and texting to talk with her closest friends and family."
“Different sites, different audiences, different purposes. Very simple."
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Shouldn't you explain why identities are based on context in the first place?
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Oh, yeah. That.
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The History of Split Identity
Zuckerberg’s quote seems a direct shot at a Charles Dickens character from Great Expectations: John Wemmick. Wemmick is known in literature studies as a turning point character, signifying the end of a society built on skilled craftsmen and the beginning of the industrial revolution. As opposed to previous generations, Wemmick’s personal identity was tied not to both home and work, but was divided between the two. He exhibited his warm, cheerful, “real” personality at home with his family and friends, while he was incredibly cold and insufferably callous at work in the law office. British literature professor Maxwell Uphaus states that the development of our industrial world has ensured that work and home identities have remained separate, especially into the 21st century. One could argue that while we may identify ourselves with our job, the average person doesn’t see their workplace as a significant stake in their personal identity. While there are always exceptions, the workplace generally now symbolizes another mask. Who I am at work is not who I am at home. I don’t know many people who are.
Zuckerberg’s statement is mistaken because social responsibilities, events, and possible identity options have multiplied our possible identities, instead of settling into one easily definable and displayable mask. Rather than returning us to the notion of a person with one consolidated identity who is essentially “the same” in every context, the internet gives users the opportunity to present themselves in slightly different lights to each of their slightly different audiences. The different social media platforms are tailor-made for this kind of identity fragmentation.
How Social Media Scatters Identity
Digital Media theorist Douglas Rushkoff has observed the tendencies of simultaneous activity on multiple social media platforms to cause what he calls digiphrenia. I’ll discuss digiphrenia in more depth here, but it’s a form of identity fragmentation caused by the simultaneous use of multiple social media accounts. As Rushkoff says in this brief interview, digiphrenia is “more than one instance of you living simultaneously.”
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(Not, and Here's Why)
These videos are a frightening testament to how humans will respond when an “expert” sanctions and encourages a certain type of behavior. The lesson here about our identities is twofold: context can greatly manipulate how we might react if placed within a particular situation, and humans are not capable of anticipating what we would actually do in every possible situation. Contrary to what we may think, we do not know everything about ourselves. And sometimes, discovering those things can be frightening.
Any self-designed representation of an identity may be a partial picture of the self, but it can never be a completely accurate representation. We are not capable of creating internet profiles that are 100% true to ourselves because we don’t always know ourselves…and ultimately won’t, until we’re faced with situations that ask us to make choices we would never have imagined we might make. Our reactions prove a better measure of ourselves than our perception of ourselves.
We also have notions of our imagined best self, the self we’d like to be, which can be very different from the self we actually are. For example: I’d like to think that I balance my life well and don’t stress out over grades too much and blah blah blah. Reality: I stress WAY too much over stuff that doesn’t matter. And THAT’S one that I can actually SEE. Think about all the ones that I can’t.
The complex notions of identity are made more complicated by social media and the question of audience. Who is viewing our posts, emails, and comments? Audience awareness is a problem to varying degrees (be it hyperawareness or lack thereof), but social media settings can inflate it to the point of paranoia. Acute audience awareness is the anxiety-inducing aspect of social media.
In an article about digiphrenia in teens, social media researcher Katie Davis emphasizes the influence of audience: "If they're on Facebook, their identities are available for many different audiences to see. So that restricts how they can express themselves because they have to make sure it's OK for a wide audience.” (Growing Up Digital) That doesn’t just go for teens—that goes for all of us.
Personal identity becomes tied to everything you post—photos, personal thoughts posted to your wall, and even the articles you link to. In most cases, hyperawareness of self-representation leads to an awareness of what you’re posting and who will see it. It’s no secret that we generally post different things based on context, according to who we believe will see them. On her blog apophenia, danah boyd describes a conversation she had with a social media-savvy teen:
“A while back, I was talking with a teenage girl about her privacy settings and noticed that she had made lots of content available to friends-of-friends. I asked her if she made her content available to her mother. She responded with, “of course not!” I had noticed that she had listed her aunt as a friend of hers and so I surfed with her to her aunt’s page and pointed out that her mother was a friend of her aunt, thus a friend-of-a-friend. She was horrified. It had never dawned on her that her mother might be included in that grouping.”
http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2010/05/14/facebook-and-radical-transparency-a-rant.html
Context, in our wonderful filter-bubble world of Facebook, is something that doesn’t exist. Your “friends” aren’t just your close friends. Facebook is the rare environment where most of the people you know all see you at the same time. In my case, that means: family (immediate, aunts, uncles, cousins), friends (BFFs down to that person I hung out with a couple times in high school), People I Respect (mentors, people who’ve made me a better person) acquaintances (anywhere from we attend the same church but have only talked once or twice to that one person from that one group project in that one class sophomore year), classmates (self-explanatory), bosses (from all my jobs since high school), and professors (who, obviously, have power over my college career).
An online self is inherently disingenuous. An online profile may present a “true” picture of the user to varying degrees, but there is no online platform free from the tyranny of the audience. No matter how hard the user tries, they will never create a profile that fully represents their incredibly complex, intertwined identities.
The myriad social media platforms have caused not a consolidation of individual identity, but a vast terrain over which to spread various aspects of it.
No one social media account can completely capture the identity of any individual, as each platform’s genre predetermines what sort of things the person will be sharing and who they will share it with. The representation of one’s identity shifts with genre and context…to say nothing of the fact that these accounts depend on information that is voluntarily shared.
Pariser takes on another flawed aspect of Zuckerberg’s argument: the idea that one’s social behavior comes entirely from their internal personality, and not external factors like context. It’s one of the flawed ideas of human psychology, Pariser says. “Fundamental attribution error. We tend to attribute peoples’ behavior to their inner traits and personality rather than to the situations they’re placed in” (116). People’s actions are indeed a reflection of their worldview, but those actions always depend on the context of the situation.
The Milgram Experiment is a famous example. By using actors and a seemingly realistic shock machine, Stanley Milgram was able to create a social experiment that demonstrated the power of human authority and situational context. The experiment has been recreated several times, as depicted in these videos: