The Changing Nature of Identity

In my last post, I introduced the idea that our identity is changing, that our understanding of identity is undergoind a paradigm shift. I want to discuss this in more detail, as this underlies much of the discussions that will occur later, and also because it may be one of the changes that is the most transformative for the individual.

I indicated three ways in which our understanding of identity is changing
- from a focus on past history to present actions;
- from a focus on centrality to peripherality; and
- from a focus on a single, self-consistent sense of identity to a multiple, inconsistent sense of identity.

Before pursuing this line of argument, however, it behooves us to examine more closely the notion itself of "identity". In the 1980's, identity was defined as "a system of representations, feelings and strategies, organized in defense of its primary object...identity is a structured and differentiated model simultaneously rooted in the past..., in the coordination of current behavior and in the legitimized future (projects, ideals, values and styles)". Hence we see that both one's historical past and one's actualized present form part of one's identity, along with one's future oriented ideals, one's representations and one's strategies.

Wikipedia gives a more straightforward definition, as "an individual's comprehension of him or herself as a discrete, separate entity". In its section on "Identity Formation", Wikipedia also states "Pieces of the entity's actual identity include a sense of continuity, a sense of uniqueness from others, and a sense of affiliation." This underlines what I said in the previous post, that identity is not only about differentiating ourselves from others, but also a set of affiliations with others, of commonalities.

Our personal history usually echoes both these properties. Often a history is given as "I was born on such and such a date, at such a place, and my early life was spending doing such and such". This constitutes a differentiation - most of the time, the time, date and place of birth constitute a near unique marker of who we are, and our early history further emphasizes our distinctness. On the other hand, our biography may also state "I was born of parents with such an ethnic background in such a country, and when we left this locale we joined this new community". This part of our history consists of our membership in various groups. Not only individuals but also groups and communities are defined and described in these terms - it is the movement between what differentiates us from others and what brings us together with others that constitutes our particular identity.

In today's online environment, however, we often leave this information behind us. For example, within the environment of Second Life, the online virtual world, many people refuse to provide any information about who they are "in Real Life" and it is considered impolite to insist. Not all blogs are "authored" by real life identities either - usually, the only validation requested is an email, and with the ability to create emails with very little identification, blogs may be authored by individuals whose "true identity" remains completely obscure. Within these environments, it is not your history that defines who you are, it is how you act towards people, what you say and how you say it, that determines how you are to be treated and whether you shall have any popularity.

These changes are not restricted to our online behavior, however. Rather, they are illustrated by what happens online. In today's world, people often have more than one job. They may act very differently in each work environment, indeed, the perception their co-workers have of them may be suggestive of entirely different people. People are often quite different in their family lives than their work lives. Increasingly, relationships, even intimate ones, are transient - by moving on to a new relationship, we can set our "behavior history" back to zero. The same is true of creating a new family following the fragmentation of an older one. We typically move from one job to another, and if we are stable within an employment situation, we find other ways to change our "reflecting environment" so that we may take on different roles and modes of being.

Of course, many people lament these changes. They are treated as symptomatic of a "breakdown" of social mores and values, or of a generation that has "gone mad". This is perhaps a natural response to the loss of a way of life, of a sense of stability. However, there are no indications that the change is temporary, that the new generations will switch back to the older way of functioning. Instead, the change is accelerating. Therefore, instead of seeing this as a temporary phenomenon, a kind of transient breakdown "until people figure things out", it is time to switch our understanding and see this for what it is... the emergence of a new kind of personal identity, a new social fabric, a dynamically stable system state that is likely to persist for the foreseeable future, indeed, to become even more esconced.

The second dimension of the change is the switch from viewing ourselves and our communities and institutions as being "central", of "central importance". This is less obvious, but of critical importance. We have functioned within societies that were globally organized as a set of centers. Each community (family, city, nation, people) viewed itself as having concentric circles within its interior and a boundary that separated it from the outside. Hence a family's core might be the parents or even grandparents, the larger circle would include chidren, then grandchildren, and so forth. Cities are viewed as having cores, and nations have capitals that constitute a kind of core. As individuals, we also see ourselves as having a "core" (our heart, perhaps, our mind, or for some people our soul) and a boundary around the self, that may or may not include other people (our children, our life partner). Actions we undertake have more important consequences when they occur in relation to the core region than near or outside the boundary. In addition, one can expect the consequences of actions to dissipate over time, a transference of the notion of centrality to the temporal domain. This mode of thinking about the self and about our communities has dominated history.

Within a peripheral or networked view, there is no clear notion of a "core". All neighborhoods are equally important. There are no gradations of membership, with some being "more representative" than others. There is also no boundary, not in the traditional sense. There is no "outside" - alternatively, everything may be viewed as "outside", including the self. Any actions I take remain active and present, they do not dissipate. They lose influence only when other actions occur to compete with them. Furthermore, they propagate throughout the periphery, and become present everywhere. This startlingly different idea of identity is the one that is beginning to take hold of our society.

Within the internet, as stated earlier, my status in life has little bearing on my importance. My actions, and the image of my actions, is what determines how much other people listen. However, my actions do not dissipate either. If I publish a blog, the blog is as present ten years later as it was the day I published it. Not only that, what I say will inform other people's blogs. And lest one believe that this behavior is limited to the net, notice that within our work environments, something similar is taking place. Even in our home environment, what our parents say does not have the same status of authority as it did in another epoch. Instead, what we say as parents is accepted by our children when these affirmations have the "ring of truth". If they are poorly motivated, our children may well reject them, and fail to respond as expected. People are less and less willing to accept the "word of experts" - they question their doctor's advice, their lawyer's instructions, based on information they have researched themselves. Like the shift from a focus on history to our actions in the present, the shift away from centrality and authority is here to stay. It represents a profound change in how we function within our social environments.

The third change is towards a multiple, sometimes inconsistent identity rather than a single, coherent identity. Again, there are many signs of this occuring in our everyday lives. This is more than simply a question of point of view. It is not the case that we are simply placing greater emphasis on the multiple facets of who we are, but that we remain organized around a single, coherent identity. This shift follows from the movement away from orthodoxy towards paradoxy.

In Wikipedia's definitions of identity, the emphasis was placed on the idea that identity is a perception of how one is continuous, different and yet also part of other identities. The issue of continuity harkens back to the ideas put forward by John Locke in the 17th century, one of the first thinkers to struggle seriously with the issue of identity. From a modern perspective, one could suggest that our identity is a product of our relationship with the world around us, that is, it follows from ecological considerations.

In Middle Age Europe, the world was conceived of as a unity dedicated to the glory of God, an orthodoxy from which all forms of identity were derived. When social functioning is viewed within an orthodox framework, then personal identity is necessarily viewed in terms of this framework, both in terms of differentiation and affiliation. Within the Christian orthodoxy, the self is defined as belonging to a spectrum of behaviors that may be good or evil, and it is submission to authority (of God, of the word of God, or of the priests or ministers who represent God) that allows us to determine right behavior.

Within an orthodox framework, there is only one self. All forms of reflection of who one is are subsumed within this framework. Within orthodoxy, inconsistencies are expressly and intentionally supressed - that is the nature of an orthodoxy. This process of rejecting that which does not fit is also applied to the self. Identity, therefore, is defined as self-consistent within an orthodox environment, but this self-consistency is achieved only by a process of systematically eradicating inconsistencies from one's identity.

Hence the idea that one is self-consistent is an illusion that is carefully nourished within an orthodoxy.

In today's world, however, we are witnessing the breakdown of orthodoxy in its myriad forms. In particular, we are left with no "central" organizing orthodoxy, but with a multitude of ideas and arguments about the nature of being, of self and of community. The illusion of self-consistency is therefore stripped away. We may therefore embrace our inconsistencies, accept them as part of what it is to be human.

Likewise, in the absence of a single organizing orthodoxy, such as the Christian church provided for millenia, and more recently has been replaced for some by feminism, for others by political correctness, and still others by sociopolitical agendas such as neoliberalism or the New Right, in their absence we may proceed to affirm that the self is not a single unit, but rather a multitude of interacting elements. Modern cognitive theory confirms this view - our psychological makeup is very far from being unitary, in fact, even the notion of continuity is suspect as a feature of identity!

Hence the multiplication of contexts in which we make take on alternative personas of our being, whether these be online or in our daily lives, do not present simply different facets of ourselves - rather, they allow us to explore different investitures, different subsets of our ecoself, some of which may not appear to be parts of the same person. Indeed, the problem with the single identity/multiple facets perspective is that the multiple facets are generally understood as being windows into the same being. However, humans are characterized by an ability to construct many different beings from the same set of constituents - in the extreme, a Hitler can enjoy art and small children on the one hand, and promote the destruction of millions of people on the other. Most people consider Hitler to be either a monster or a highly deranged individual, and therefore assume these distinct personas to be atypical, but while we are not all Hitlers, we all have the ability to construct ourselves out of diametrically opposite subsets of our total being.

We are shifting, therefore, from an identity construction process that consists of pruning and trimming the inconsistencies from one's identity, to an alternative construction paradigm, that allows us to explore identity construction across a much broader canvas that we have tended to do in the past. I like to think of our being as a universe in itself, from whose materials we can construct several individual identities, and each of these forms its own identity ecosystem in relationship to other people.

If identity was just formed from our psyches, no such change would be possible. But of course our identities form from the collision between our genetic origins, our unfolding lives and our environment. Identity is the result of a system, and the system as a whole is evolving and changing. While we remain human, we are discovering that human identity is larger than we believed, than we were led to believe by the institutions that make our up societies.