The Psychological Implications of Moving from Print to Digital Writing

Writing digitally has many psychological implications, a whole host of which have not yet even been researched, nor their effects understood. What’s clear, however, is that our writing technologies are not simply shaping the way we write….they’re changing the way we think. 

While we often speak in terms of alternate identities and people being “completely different in person than they are online,” that’s something of a misconception. Your offline self creates the identity for your online self…and vice versa. 

​

The notion of blended identity (as it pertains to the digital self) comes from the 2009 study "Mick or Keith: The Blended Identity of Online Rock Fans," in which Dr. Andrea J. Baker sought to look at how the online representation of self affected the users’ offline personal lives. What Baker discovered is that “the standard dichotomy between anonymous and real life personas is an inadequate description of self-presentation in online communities” (Baker 7). Instead, the evidence strongly favored a view of internet personalities that accounts both for the individual’s influence on the persona and the persona’s gradual influence on the person. Baker uses the term “blended identity” to describe this phenomenon: 

​

Following Walther and Park’s (2002) notion of “mixed mode relationships” to denote connections that span the online and offline worlds, here the concept of “blended identity” refers to online self-presentations that include both online and offline aspects of individuals. To understand the process of the creation of blended identity is to know how people (a) derive identities online related to their offline experiences and the online community they have joined, and then (b) migrate from online to offline bringing with them the online identities that they then introduce to others whom they have met first online. (Baker 15)

​

Active members of the Rolling Stones fan forum Shattered formed the basis for Baker’s study. After observing several of the forum members and their fan gatherings for an extended period, Baker noticed that the forum members gradually identified themselves more and more as Stones fans, becoming more willing to wear Stones fan gear regularly and, when fellow forum members met in person, referring to each other not by their real names, but by their usernames. The off-line self created the internet persona, which in turn influenced the choices of the offline-self as each person continued to further interact with the people they met online. 

​

In short, the idea that your online and offline identities are separate is a myth. Your online activities affect your offline, real-world personal identity. Your contributions may be anonymous, but they will directly impact your personality. 

​

The split becomes even more complex with the multiplicity of online identity. The plethora of social media and communication platforms offer different genres to suit the individual’s momentary communication needs. Email and text messages offer a quick solution to the need to communicate with predetermined individuals in private conversations. In an effort to keep users on the site, Facebook created Messenger toward the same end. Twitter is a means of communicating your thoughts publicly in short bursts of 140 characters. Facebook allows you to communicate with all your “friends” and “friends of friends” in elaborate posts that you design to be as simple as a public text message, or as multimodal as text combined with pictures, videos, and hyperlinks. Blogs offer a much longer format to voice thoughts and opinions, but must be sought out by readers (unless, of course, you link to your blog from your Facebook page, which then exposes your friends to it without having to consciously seek you out). Chat rooms and forums create chains of conversation. Instagram focuses on photos and captions, in its own unique form of visual rhetoric. And that’s just barely scratching the surface of the current most popular social media platforms, to say nothing of the broad scope of what’s available to users. Each service, intended as a different genre to meet very specific communication needs (or, let’s face it, desires), forms another online identity. Prolonged curation of these different identities leads to the onset of digiphrenia: simultaneously existing in multiple different personas and identities through various online accounts. Digital theorist Douglas Rushkoff, who coined the term digiphrenia, explains it this way: 

​

'Digiphrenia' is really the experience of trying to exist in more than one incarnation of     yourself at the same time. There's your Twitter profile, there's your Facebook profile, there's     your email inbox. And all of these sort of multiple instances of you are  operating simultaneously and in parallel. And that's not a really comfortable position for most human  beings. (Rushkoff)

​

Rushkoff’s theories stem from the observed effect he calls “present shock,” (which, as it happens, is also the title of his book). While humans have always lived in a universe where many, many things happen simultaneously, we’ve never experienced a point in time at which simultaneous activity is so present and knowable. The temptation to reach for omniscience is incredible. And that, Rushkoff believes, is what causes digiphrenia. 

​

In an interview with NPR, Rushkoff discussed his own personal experience with present shock and digiphrenia: 

​

In my life, it's the experience of being on Facebook and seeing everyone from my past suddenly back in my present. And the inability to distinguish between who may have been friends of mine in second grade, and people who I've met just yesterday, and people who are actually significant relationships. That collapse of my whole life into one moment, where every ping, every vibration of my phone might just pull me out of whatever it is I'm doing, into something else that seems somehow more pressing on the moment.

The increasing number of social media platforms do nothing to help these pressures. Good Morning America conducted a study in October 2017 to determine how the proliferation of platforms affects teens. They discovered that social media is not a fun way of alleviating stress: social media is causing stress. 

​

GMA video: What Parents Should Know About the 'Constant Pressure' of Social Media for Teens

And while social media pressures tend to affect teens more acutely than adults, the effect is the same. As social media writer Nicole Lee attests, when you invest time and energy in your social media accounts, it becomes a full-time PR job that’s tied to their own personal identity. 

According to social media researcher Katie Davis, multiple online identities cause users to carefully curate themselves, as if building and curating a brand. “There's this interesting dichotomy online where there's an emphasis toward identity consolidation and having this crystallized identity that is well-formed for many different audiences versus an increased opportunity to present different identities," she said in "Growing Up Digital," an article for Deseret News. The focus becomes the outward representation of the person's external image, and not the considered creation of a true internal identity. Davis believes the external focus actually damages the opportunity for becoming grounded in a settled internal self-perception. "They're tailoring and promoting almost a branded 'self.' If you're all of your time projecting an identity externally, it crowds out the time you have for internal reflection."

​

​

#Digiphrenia

​

Believe it or not, digiphrenia has its own hashtag. It hasn’t been trending since, like…ever, but the fact remains: people are using the very platforms that perpetuate digiphrenia to talk about it.