Me, Myself and My Screen: Multiplicity, Identity and Email

We live in a world of “more is better”. Let’s face it, we like collecting stuff. More food, more cars, more electronic gadgets—more…email addresses?

Be honest folks. You probably have at least two email addresses. A 2007 poll suggests that 94% of American email users have at least two email accounts, and many have significantly more. Look at me--I have four.

The interesting thing about this is not so much its ability to reflect our culture of conspicuous consumption (although I think it does that) but as a clear indication of the multiplicity of our identities.

Postmodern cultural theorists like Jean Baudrillard subscribe to the idea that our identities are multiple and changeable. This is to say that we don’t each have one fixed, stable identity, but rather many, fluid identities, which we don to relate to different people, places, things and even times. It’s difficult to conceptualize when it comes to our physical, real-life identities, but becomes clearer when we consider our online identities.

Think about your different email accounts. You probably have one account that you use just for family and friends. Your address is probably casual, clever, or silly, something like “luvmycocoa@hotmail.com”or “rockmysocks@yahoo.ca.” In addition, you might have another email address that you use for professional purposes, for example for business-related correspondence. This address is probably more sedate, consisting or your name or initials, such as “jane.doe15@gmail.com” or “johnpsmith@sympatico.ca.” If you’re a university student, you probably have an account for contacting your professors or fellow students. You might have even more if you work for a large corporation, have your own business, or communicate with different social groups.

You can see that each of these email addresses has a distinct purpose. They each represent a facet of your identity, or, according to Baudrillard one of multiple identities. Think about what each address says about you. Does one imply an identity as a student? As a businessperson? As a somewhat kooky yet lovable friend or family member? What do all of these things taken together say about you as a person?

It's a lot to think about, but it's helpful when it comes to determining how the choices we make online contribute to identity formation.

Pulled Over on the Information Superhighway: Pit Stop to Analyse our Surfing

Now that we’ve got a bit of theory under our belts, it’s time to take a pit stop on this tour of the information superhighway and think about how our online habits reflect and shape our identities.

There’s a running joke in my family that if a black helicopter is circling, it’s the government come to collect me. This concern for my inevitable apprehension is mostly due to my admittedly odd surfing habits. I’ve googled everything from hotwiring a car to the chemical composition of C-4. (Hey, I was curious.) Anyway, JTF-2 has yet to break down my front door, lay siege to my house and confiscate my laptop, but at this point, it’s only a matter of time.

But before you write me off as a psychopath, think about what you look for when you surf the web. Here’s an interesting exercise—go through your browsing history sometime. Look at where you started and compare it to where you ended up. Are they on the same topic or are they vastly different? What about the middle of your surfing session? Can you pinpoint a place where your interest veered into something else?

If you’re like me, chances are, your browsing history is pretty predictable. There are some sites that you go to every time you go online. Some sites may be new if you heard about them from a friend or followed a link from a regularly visited page or have a new research project you need to get started on, but by and large, the sites you visit—especially those you go to immediately upon opening your browser—are those you’ve looked at time and time again.

Let me give you an example. Every time I open my browser, the first thing I do is check my university webmail. After that, I usually check my hotmail. Then, with those things out of the way, I get down to doing whatever it is I need to do—usually involving Google and research for school papers.

“But what does this have to do with identity?” you cry. Plenty.

You might have gathered from the first paragraph that I’m interested in a wide variety of semi-criminal topics. Also, you might have gathered that I’m a pretty nutty person. Some of you may now fear me because of my dubious sanity. Really, it’s all a matter of opinion.

If you consider my habit of checking webmail and hotmail every time I open a browser, you might calm down a little. My compulsive need to check my webmail all the time (due largely in part to the insane volume of emails I get from group projects in practicum courses) shows that I’m a generally studious person terrified of missing a deadline or learning some important bit of information too late. My visiting hotmail, while not noteworthy, shows that I am generally a sociable person who likes to keep in touch with far-flung friends and family.

All this from a throwaway comment about googling and a list of my top two most visited web sites.

But these surfing habits shape me as much as they reflect my interests and values. I’ve noticed that my constant need to be connected and current when it comes to my studies and my friends has morphed into a mild paranoia about missing something important. Now, more than ever before, I feel the need to write things down so I don’t forget, making lists and lists of everything from homework, to chores, to when I’m meeting friends to see a movie.

If I looked at my browsing history every day for a month, I could give you a more comprehensive picture of who I am and what I’m like, and how my surfing has shaped my identity. Of course, I’m not sure I want anyone to know that much about me.

There are some things that just shouldn’t be shared.

Online Identity? I’ll Pass, Thank You…Part II: Race

Last time, we talked about the phenomenon of “passing” for a different gender online. Today, we’re going to talk about another form of “identity tourism”—racial passing.

If you’ve ever wondered how people of a different ethnicity are treated, it’s sometimes difficult to walk a mile in their shoes. After all, we can’t all be like Robert Downey Jr.’s character Kirk Lazarus in Tropic Thunder, nonchalantly donning an elaborate new racial identity as one would a new coat. The only viable resource we have as ordinary citizens is the Internet. Online, we can assume any identity we want, presenting ourselves as members of a different race through our habits, our words, and through the information we choose to distribute about ourselves.

I stumbled across a recent blog post concerned with whether racial identity is a product of ourselves or those around us. My first thought was that this idea misses the point. Our identities do not define how we act—our actions define our identities. This is an important point to consider, especially regarding online identities, because in order to “pass” for another race, we have to avoid falling into stereotypes that may or may not have any basis in truth.

In her book Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity on the Internet, Lisa Nakamura examines the impact that telecommunications technologies like the Internet can have on identity. She writes:

“While telecommunications and medical technologies can challenge some gender and racial stereotypes, they can produce and reflect them as well.” (Nakamura 4)

So not only does the Internet allow us to challenge stereotypes by providing a medium in which to express ourselves, it also reflects the stereotypes we already have by allowing us to perform the kind of actions we think those of another race would perform. But there is a downside to this kind of freedom. Nakamura notes that:

“Rather than ‘honouring diversity’…performances online used race and gender as amusing prostheses to be donned and shed without ‘real life’ consequences.” (Nakamura 13-14)

Racial passing online can be seen as a kind of social experiment that we can try on our own, when we feel like it, without affecting our day-to-day lives. The anonymity of the Internet ensures that any slip-ups or embarrassments cannot be attributed to us, making it easier and more appealing for ‘identity tourists’ to poke a toe into the swimming pool of another racial identity without having to jump right in. But Nakamura also points out that such glimpses into the lives of others may not be valuable as learning experiences since those who pass are unlikely to experience any quantifiable discrimination, leading to a potentially false impression that minority groups may not have it all that bad.

For these minority groups, passing may be an escape. Another aspect of racial passing has to do with a feeling of deep-seated inequity, a feeling that the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence.

“…passing is often driven by harsh structural cultural inequities, a sense that it really would be safer, more powerful, and better to be of another race and gender.” (Nakamura 31)

But is passing really necessary on the part of these minority groups? After all, when we think of the stereotypical computer-user, we usually think of the geeky, socially awkward computer nerd. The white boy with copious amounts of facial hair, glasses, and pasty skin. As Nakamura notes, our ability to choose our own online identities is often an illusion, because:

“…in the absence of racial description, all players are assumed to be white.” (Nakamura 38)

Maybe that blog post I mentioned earlier is right. Maybe racial identity is more of a product of those around us. It’s a rather bleak thought, isn’t it?

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?