The Born E-dentity: Ludlum the Cultural Theorist?

I just finished re-reading Robert Ludlum's best-selling novel The Bourne Identity, the story of an amnesiac government agent who runs up against enemies from all sides in an attempt to regain his memory. It was pure escapist reading for me, a holiday treat to congratulate myself for getting through dry, literary behemoths like Thackeray’s Vanity Fair and Dickens’ Hard Times in my Victorian Literature class. But I should know better--I’m an English major. If my professors have drilled anything into my head, it’s that there’s no such thing as escapist reading anymore. Everything has meaning, if only you would look.

Turns out, looking has become almost second nature. While immersing myself into the tortured mind, dazzling intellect and completely improbable yet nonetheless scintillating adventures of the book’s protagonist Jason Bourne, what struck me most was that his search for his identity focused solely on finding identity from without rather than from within. He wanted to know his name, what he did for a living, the company he worked for, whether he had a family. In short, he wanted to know where he came from, what shaped him and influenced him and made him who he was. He didn't look inside himself for the answers--in fact, he ignored his instincts about who he was at every turn. He preferred to believe he was a notorious assassin rather than face the possibility of creating his own identity, valuing the testimony of others over what he knew to be true. He fell into the trap of assuming that identity is "born" rather than created.

This got me thinking about the Internet and its ability to strip away our real life identities and allow us to replace them with our own creations. We all do this, whether it is through social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook, through online games, chat rooms, even email. Everything we do online constitutes a part of our online identities. Sometimes we form these identities consciously, choosing representative characteristics that may or may not belong to us in real life. Sometimes, the process is unconscious, revealing details of our real-life identities that we never before considered. Regardless, online identities are a legitimate but often overlooked aspect of ourselves.

When Ludlum published this book in 1980, he couldn’t have dreamed of the amazing and wonderful opportunities for identity creation that we have today. He wrote in a time before the Internet, before most individuals even had regular access to a computer. While we can’t excuse him for ignoring the impact of technology on his characters’ identities (they did have telephones and cablegrams and computer systems after all) we can certainly see how he might have overlooked it. The implications of technology on our identities weren’t so clear when we didn’t consciously create (or re-create) ourselves online.

The same cannot be said of today’s theorists, which is why it is so surprising that more of them have not delved into the consequences of our new cyber world. Those who do, such as Rheingold, Turkle and Nakamura, tend to focus solely on online role playing games and the processes they provide for identity creation while ignoring the broader spectrum of opportunities the Internet has to offer. In a way, Ludlum was before his time, bringing up the issue of technology’s impact on identity without explicitly exploring it. After all, isn’t the novelist’s job to ask questions, leaving us readers to look within ourselves for the answers?