The changing face of identity

In her fascinating and important study Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet (1995), Sherry Turkle — professor of the sociology of science at MIT (at the time) and cyber-psychoanalytical theorist — explores the social and psychological effects of the internet on its users.

One of her startling findings is that many denizens of cyberspace appear to value their cyber-identities more than their “normal”, embodied selves. And the use of the plural — “cyber-identities” — is appropriate here, because invariably the inhabitants of cyberspace construct several identities for themselves in the course of frequenting MUDS (multi-user domains), chat rooms and the like.

A decade earlier, in The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit, she examined such identity-transforming relations, but at the time it was still largely a matter of one-on-one, person and machine. The rapidly expanding system of networks collectively known as the internet has changed all that, in such a manner that its capacity, via computers, to connect millions of people in new kinds of spaces has altered the way in which people think, the form of communities, the character of their sexuality and the relative complexity of their very identities — Turkle reports some fascinating cases where the discrepancy between cyber-sexual persona and “real-time” sexual persona is disconcerting, to say the least.

One of the most interesting topics she discusses is the connection between specific kinds of cultural environments and certain kinds of psychological disorders. The advent of the internet and its concomitant opening-up of hitherto unheard-of spaces of encounter have gone hand in hand with many other manifestations of multiplicity and diversity in contemporary, postmodern culture.

With this in mind, it is striking that, simultaneously, the number of people who display symptoms of what is known as MPD (multi-personality disorder) has burgeoned. She stresses that she is not positing a causal relation between internet-usage and MPD; instead, she is arguing that all the different signs of difference and multiplicity, today, are contributing to modifications of prevailing conceptions of identity.

In clinical cases of MPD, she points out, there are usually various degrees of isolation among the various “alters” and the “host” personality — an indication that the barriers between these “personalities” block access to “secrets” that have been repressed — while, in contrast, MUD participants “play” with the various identities constructed by them in virtual spaces.

Hence, it seems likely that a culture that is more tolerant of multiplicity than earlier ones is also more likely to promote the emergence of multiple identities, in both the healthy sense of developing a more fluid, flexible sense of selfhood, and the sense of creating the cultural environment where pathological “symptoms” of MPD may manifest themselves more readily.

But — and here’s the rub — Turkle’s findings indicate an accompanying experience, on the part of many who create online personalities, of their “constructed” selves as somehow “real”, more real even than the person’s “basic”, everyday, “natural” host-self.

What Turkle has brought to light in her work should not surprise anyone. Didn’t Karl Marx already, in the 19th century, warn against the dehumanising, reifying (literally: thing-ifying) effects of factory labour, which robbed workers of their humanity through their use of industrial machines? In other words, technology — including computers and the internet — is never innocuous when it comes to the human beings that use it: invariably it leaves its imprint on people.

But, like computers, the internet is not a static thing in its various possibilities either. I haven’t read any recent comments (on the part of Turkle) on the appearance of virtual space phenomena such as Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn and the like, but I am willing to bet that she’d have plenty to say about its progressively diversifying implications regarding the issue of human identity.

If email provided a welcome alternative to those, like myself, who find snail mail just too cumbersome and slow to engage earnestly in the kind of correspondence sustained by Freud and his contemporaries, Facebook and its cyberspace relations have taken the possibilities created by email to new proportions. Email (or the frenetic use of cellphones) has its own identity- and psyche-transforming capacities, of course, as the recently deceased French thinker Jacques Derrida shows so convincingly in his Archive Fever. But Facebook and its ilk have paved the way to novel possibilities in the realm of especially the experience of one’s own identity.

On the one hand, as Joel Stein argues in a recent edition of Time magazine, these “friend-based” websites are less about socially “connecting and reconnecting”. They are, he points out, “a platform for self-branding”, and, one might add, doing so in a fairly exhibitionistic way. That this is informed by the (ironically) person-diminishing values of capitalism should be obvious.

Moreover, Stein remarks, if anyone should object, in the name of “privacy”, to the practice of placing so much information about oneself, one’s likes and dislikes (in textual as well as iconic form) on such a site, he or she clearly does not understand the word “privacy”. After all, what individuals post there is not what they regard as private (although it may seem like it to others); it is exactly what they want to show, and show off, to others.

The question arises, of course, whether the best, digitally “retouched” photos of oneself, or one’s list of favourite films, books, musical numbers and so on, really represent “you”, or whether this composite, mostly carefully constructed “identity” is located entirely at the level of the largely self-deluding register of what psycho-analytical theorist Jacques Lacan calls the “imaginary”.

If this is indeed the case, the upshot is that it is not one’s everyday, multifaceted “self” displayed there, but something entirely fictional, of the order of the “ego” in Lacanian terms, which is a far cry from the “self” that “speaks”. Unlike the “ego” of the imaginary register, the “self that speaks” cannot be objectified in this manner.

I’m not pointing out these implications because I want to be a spoilsport. It is also true that, on the other hand, Facebook and MySpace have, like all novel inventions, an up- and a downside. The upside includes the possibilities they create for genuinely interpersonal, “communicative” cyber-communities of friends, colleagues, scientists and other (shared) interest groups to engage in debates, exchange valuable information relevant to research in various disciplines and so on.

But people should not fool themselves into believing that Facebook will leave the face of humanity unchanged. If Turkle’s work on the internet’s social effects is anything to go by, one may anticipate that the very artificiality of the personal profiles on Facebook may well aggravate the kind of socially “artificial” behaviour already encountered among economically competitive yuppie types.