Identity and the Internet.

[Friedrich]

All of us are actors. We play roles every day in our normal lives. I am a husband, father, son, writer and lots of other things too. You probably have just as many or more roles to play in your life. As Hamlet says, "we jig, we amble, we lisp." Yet none of these roles that we play exhausts our capacity for role-playing. For many of us, like all actors, no single role ever touches to the very bottom of the self. Whatever the self might be, assuming that there even is one, we may never come to know it fully. We are surely something more than the roles that we play in society.

Interestingly, the word "persona" originally meant the mask worn by tragedians in the theaters of ancient Greece. We all have "real" faces (presumably) behind the masks that we wear. Yet none of us can say for ourselves what these faces are really like, for we only know ourselves from the "inside" whereas others see us from the "outside."

In solitude, of course, we allow our masks to slip. We slide out of our social disguises, permitting our actions and natures to be seen dispassionately -- if only by ourselves, or by God, if He is "out there." Solitude offers a liberation from the pressure to make ourselves attractive to others. We all arrange our personas so as to beguile and charm others, to make others smile or feel happy, especially when we ourselves are sad or in despair. We try somehow to fit in to a context, to become whatever is deemed "normal" for as long as we interested in that particular context.

Perhaps there is a little bit of Leoncavallo's "Pagliacci" in all of us, forced to see ourselves in the mirror as we remove the grease paint and bright costume of the day.

In espionage novels, the "agent" is always "undercover," pretending to be something other than what he or she is, in a world where nothing is what it seems. Both John Le Carre and Graham Greene, and also Michael Frayn and Tom Stoppard, have exploited this setting to dramatize issues of identity and shifting metaphors of imaginative "self-creation" that now seem increasingly timely and relevant for ALL of us, spies and non-spies alike. We live in a time and place in which all of us are undercover, in a way.

Who are we really?

This is an old question. If we are merely the persons others claim to know, as Hume or Skinner might suggest, then we need to be clear about about exactly which group of others this might be. Very often, the people who know us privately do not know us publicly. Those who know us professionally do not know us socially. Those who know us intimately are not aware of us as economic or political agents. Each group of friends or "close strangers" knows a "character," a performance.

Perhaps this is just as well, for their protection and our own. If, as Sartre says, the self is "only in the world" and ceases to exist as soon as we withdraw from the world, then each of us must achieve that withdrawal occasionally in order to really know him- or herself. Traditionally, the knowledge of God was equally impossible in society -- and for similar reasons, because of the unreality of the world and of ourselves as actors in it.

Maybe even in private we are still reacting to social expectations. We examine our actions, yes, but only in order to improve the performances that we will eventually give. It may be true that in the absence of others, there would be no need for a performance at all, no need for a self; and therefore no identity to fashion and protect, but only a "pure" being. Such a thing is almost inconceivable. Wittgenstein insisted that "there can be no private languages," perhaps there can also be no identifiable "self" dwelling -- like the British during the Edwardian period -- in "splendid isolation."

We need others to confirm who and what we are, to confirm our choices, our identities, to serve as mirrors for the psyche. These others necessarily respond to an embodied self. The other sees a person who enters the room -- a person of a particular age, gender, economic class, well-groomed or not. To be emboddied, then, is to be limited. It is to be seen.

When I say "limited," I mean that these embodied characteristics serve as constraints on self-creation, so I resent them. The postmodern ambition is absolutist: we desire a total plasticity of identity. We want to be all things human; and, impossibly, to be limited to none. We do not wish to be pinned down to one identity as opposed to another. It is because I am male that I cannot be female; because I am a Westerner of European ancestry that I cannot be African or Asian; because I am middle class, casually dressed, say, that I cannot be in a blue suit from Brooks Brothers at the same time, or in traditional Arab or Japanese garb. To draw the Nietzschean conclusion, I can only act on the world or see it and express myself from my "perspective." And every perspective is incomplete, only partial and unsatisfactory. Yet this recognition of incompleteness alone tells us of a possible objectivity that transcends such perspectives.

The development of computer technology has done much to liberate us from these limitations. For the first time in human history millions have been emancipated from the condition of imprisonment within the corporeal, physical envelope of the body, thus allowing them to pursue meaningful interactions with others, who are similarly disembodied, in cyberspace.

Computers have allowed us to re-evaluate our identities in the age of the Internet.We no longer give commands to a machine, but we enter into dialogues -- sometimes "personal" ones -- with "friends" located (what does "located" mean in the computer age?) in different countries and cities. We navigate simulated worlds. We create virtual realities.

Computers allow us not only to communicate and exchange ideas, but also to assume personae of our own creation. Computers permit us to hide, while also revealing aspects of ourselves not seen in our daily lives; but they permit us besides this to become something different, to become the other. Computers invite us to reverse Nietzsche's dictum and become "the persons we are not" -- that is, to become disembodied and perspectiveless perceivers, finally achieving what Thomas Nagel might describe as: "the view from nowhere."

In cyberspace, everyone is a dualist, both a body and mind. Neither body nor mind is to be found, by the way, when the other is around.

Sherry Turkle has examined this phenomenon in several books: "The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit" (1991) and "Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet" (1995). In these works, she traces a set of "boundary negotiations" telling the story of the growing impact of the computer on our psychological lives and our evolving ideas about minds, bodies, and machines.

Professor Turkle asserts that the new sense of identity is "decentered and multiple." She describes trends in computer design, in artificial intelligence, and in people's experiences of virtual environments that confirm a dramatic shift in our notions of self, other, machine and world.

"The computer emerges," according to Ms. Turkle, "as an object that brings postmodernism down to earth." The Internet serves to mediate between role-playing public self and the more honest and free private self. My screen self is both an entity that exists "out there" in cyberspace, and "in here" within the confines of my personal space -- because both belong to or are connected with, the strange person sitting at his terminal on a lovely Autum afternoon in New York.

At what point do these selves meet? Or do they meet at all? Where is the boundary today between human and technology? Will our technological extensions of human capacities change the human essence? Or have they already done so?

[orgaelin]

In a much less organised fashion, I had been wondering along similar lines myself.

It is somewhat ironic that a medium which allows me such freedom of identity nevertheless leaves me with a feelnig that something of my identity is lost in it.

Whoever I am at this keyboard is what determines what I will write, but whoever you are at your screen determines how I will be perceived. If I write that Jesus was just a man and you are a Christian then you might consider me to be a mean-spirited person, or simply someone who is lost from the lord. An athiest, on the other hand, might view a perceptive and clever fellow who's done his homework well.

Of course the same is true of direct, person-to-person communication. Is there any real difference, save that the medium is in writing instead of sight and speech?

Obviously there are limitations as to what can come across in the written word, but anyone who expresses themself well, and is a good communicator, should be able to transcend these difficulties.

I suspect there are also benefits. I write the things I write in a manner which suggests authority, that I know what I'm talking about. I also write in style that suggests, I hope, intelligence, and generally I come across as being a good deal older than I am.

And that's when this medium becomes beneficial. People expect to hear certain things from certain classes of people, and don't like to recognise them when they come from someone who seemingly should not hold such views.

That's why people don't like to hear love songs by 17 year old boys, no matter how good their voice. That's why we don't want to hear a convicted rapist tell us about forgiveness, or a white-boy tell us about life in the ghetto!

On the whole, I feel this is a very wonderful medium that has added a whole new dimension to human existence. Everyone wants to express themselves, and now we can express ourselves to anyone, anywhere, anytime, and in any way we please, largely without consequence.

~ Org

[TheColdTruth]

When our different personas merge, we become enlightened, so to say. Humans are unlike animals in one distcint way: Instead of instinct, we have abstract reasoning to help us deal with reality. The less we are multi-faceted and the more true to ourselves we are, the less masks we use, until, eventually, we can use only one. This is almost so rare it's unheard of, but it has happened. I myself still have quite a bit of work to do. Our perspective is only as limited as we let it become due to the postulates we continue believe in that were indoctrinated in us since birth. Overcome common lies and deceit, and you no longer have a narrow "cultural" view of things, but a worldview.

[TheColdTruth]

Yes, this medium lets even bigoted, "cultured" people look at your words free of prejudiced stereotypes. It lets you be heard for what you have to say, rather than what you look like. Appearances can be decieving, especially to the stupid.

[Friedrich]

Thank you both for the thoughtful responses.

[TheColdTruth]

No problem, feel free to contact me on any of the mediums I use like AIM, yahoo, msn, irq, etc.

[Technosoul]

Originally posted by Friedrich, All of us are actors. We play roles every day in our normal lives. I am a husband, father, son, writer and lots of other things too. You probably have just as many or more roles to play in your life. As Hamlet says, "we jig, we amble, we lisp." Yet none of these roles that we play exhausts our capacity for role-playing. For many of us, like all actors, no single role ever touches to the very bottom of the self. Whatever the self might be, assuming that there even is one, we may never come to know it fully. We are surely something more than the roles that we play in society. Interestingly, the word "persona" originally meant the mask worn by tragedians in the theaters of ancient Greece. We all have "real" faces (presumably) behind the masks that we wear. Yet none of us can say for ourselves what these faces are really like, for we only know ourselves from the "inside" whereas others see us from the "outside." In solitude, of course, we allow our masks to slip. We slide out of our social disguises, permitting our actions and natures to be seen dispassionately -- if only by ourselves, or by God, if He is "out there." Solitude offers a liberation from the pressure to make ourselves attractive to others. We all arrange our personas so as to beguile and charm others, to make others smile or feel happy, especially when we ourselves are sad or in despair. We try somehow to fit in to a context, to become whatever is deemed "normal" for as long as we interested in that particular context. Perhaps there is a little bit of Leoncavallo's "Pagliacci" in all of us, forced to see ourselves in the mirror as we remove the grease paint and bright costume of the day. In espionage novels, the "agent" is always "undercover," pretending to be something other than what he or she is, in a world where nothing is what it seems. Both John Le Carre and Graham Greene, and also Michael Frayn and Tom Stoppard, have exploited this setting to dramatize issues of identity and shifting metaphors of imaginative "self-creation" that now seem increasingly timely and relevant for ALL of us, spies and non-spies alike. We live in a time and place in which all of us are undercover, in a way. Who are we really? This is an old question. If we are merely the persons others claim to know, as Hume or Skinner might suggest, then we need to be clear about about exactly which group of others this might be. Very often, the people who know us privately do not know us publicly. Those who know us professionally do not know us socially. Those who know us intimately are not aware of us as economic or political agents. Each group of friends or "close strangers" knows a "character," a performance. Perhaps this is just as well, for their protection and our own. If, as Sartre says, the self is "only in the world" and ceases to exist as soon as we withdraw from the world, then each of us must achieve that withdrawal occasionally in order to really know him- or herself. Traditionally, the knowledge of God was equally impossible in society -- and for similar reasons, because of the unreality of the world and of ourselves as actors in it. Maybe even in private we are still reacting to social expectations. We examine our actions, yes, but only in order to improve the performances that we will eventually give. It may be true that in the absence of others, there would be no need for a performance at all, no need for a self; and therefore no identity to fashion and protect, but only a "pure" being. Such a thing is almost inconceivable. Wittgenstein insisted that "there can be no private languages," perhaps there can also be no identifiable "self" dwelling -- like the British during the Edwardian period -- in "splendid isolation." We need others to confirm who and what we are, to confirm our choices, our identities, to serve as mirrors for the psyche. These others necessarily respond to an embodied self. The other sees a person who enters the room -- a person of a particular age, gender, economic class, well-groomed or not. To be emboddied, then, is to be limited. It is to be seen. When I say "limited," I mean that these embodied characteristics serve as constraints on self-creation, so I resent them. The postmodern ambition is absolutist: we desire a total plasticity of identity. We want to be all things human; and, impossibly, to be limited to none. We do not wish to be pinned down to one identity as opposed to another. It is because I am male that I cannot be female; because I am a Westerner of European ancestry that I cannot be African or Asian; because I am middle class, casually dressed, say, that I cannot be in a blue suit from Brooks Brothers at the same time, or in traditional Arab or Japanese garb. To draw the Nietzschean conclusion, I can only act on the world or see it and express myself from my "perspective." And every perspective is incomplete, only partial and unsatisfactory. Yet this recognition of incompleteness alone tells us of a possible objectivity that transcends such perspectives. The development of computer technology has done much to liberate us from these limitations. For the first time in human history millions have been emancipated from the condition of imprisonment within the corporeal, physical envelope of the body, thus allowing them to pursue meaningful interactions with others, who are similarly disembodied, in cyberspace. Computers have allowed us to re-evaluate our identities in the age of the Internet.We no longer give commands to a machine, but we enter into dialogues -- sometimes "personal" ones -- with "friends" located (what does "located" mean in the computer age?) in different countries and cities. We navigate simulated worlds. We create virtual realities. Computers allow us not only to communicate and exchange ideas, but also to assume personae of our own creation. Computers permit us to hide, while also revealing aspects of ourselves not seen in our daily lives; but they permit us besides this to become something different, to become the other. Computers invite us to reverse Nietzsche's dictum and become "the persons we are not" -- that is, to become disembodied and perspectiveless perceivers, finally achieving what Thomas Nagel might describe as: "the view from nowhere." In cyberspace, everyone is a dualist, both a body and mind. Neither body nor mind is to be found, by the way, when the other is around. Sherry Turkle has examined this phenomenon in several books: "The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit" (1991) and "Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet" (1995). In these works, she traces a set of "boundary negotiations" telling the story of the growing impact of the computer on our psychological lives and our evolving ideas about minds, bodies, and machines. Professor Turkle asserts that the new sense of identity is "decentered and multiple." She describes trends in computer design, in artificial intelligence, and in people's experiences of virtual environments that confirm a dramatic shift in our notions of self, other, machine and world. "The computer emerges," according to Ms. Turkle, "as an object that brings postmodernism down to earth." The Internet serves to mediate between role-playing public self and the more honest and free private self. My screen self is both an entity that exists "out there" in cyberspace, and "in here" within the confines of my personal space -- because both belong to or are connected with, the strange person sitting at his terminal on a lovely Autum afternoon in New York. At what point do these selves meet? Or do they meet at all? Where is the boundary today between human and technology? Will our technological extensions of human capacities change the human essence? Or have they already done so?

Thanks for clearly outlining the philosophy about self and self-image.

Somewhat based on your perspective which I did not read until now, but had a simular idea about, I put forth in the political section a idea that "Government shall not make any law telling us what we can or cannot wear" which I posted with the title "My Admendment".

Uniforms and clothing greatly enforce those "roles" we act out in our social order, they denote authority, personality, economic status, as well as our occupational idenity.

If one went to a nudest camp he could not tell who was what relative to everyday life and the roles people have, without the cloths you cannot tell a rich man from a poor man, a policeman from a doctor, etc. Unless they flat out told you they were rich, or that they were employed as a doctor, etc.
Basically it was be quicker to get to know the real person because that would be one less mask to get past (the mask of the uniform).

My admendment idea bombed as a political objective.

However as a philosophy or even for use in phychology, I think the idea has value for self realilazation purposes.

The internet is somewhat the same, in the cyber culture we can sit here in anything we want to wear and no one knows what we look like, or who we are in the ranking systems of our culture. Even age matters not and we can use nicknames or handles that can be non-discriptive.

All anyone can see (in audio only forums or chat rooms) is our thoughts and the words that we express. With our words we can assume the role as an authority, or assume the role of someone seeking answers. As well as many other pretenses we wish to act out in fantasy or in order to be ourself in an anonymous manner. Some like to play the role of bully in chat rooms because no one can really knock their lights out. And of course, the whole dating ritual takes on a new environment outside of person to person contact.

Some webpages have a section where you can discribe your self in a profile because people get confused if they cannot have a mask to hide behind.

The fig leaf of the Garden of Eden was symbolic of acting innocent.

However, back to the question of the topic, I do not think we should have any mandatory law that we must identify our self on the Net withsome kind of degree or other self-attained mask. Better to follow the philosophy "you shall know them by thier words", I kinda like it that way.

Technosoul.

[orgaelin]

Originally posted by Technosoul, Some webpages have a section where you can discribe your self in a profile because people get confused if they cannot have a mask to hide behind.

This one does.

You have a profile people can get to when they click on your name. Yours is here.

It says you're 76% a politition, and you post around 14 posts every single day, you busy boy!

I think it would be weird if we all came out as who we really are. I try to be honest and open, and be myself, but still that probably doesn't fit with how my situation in the world would seem, apart from the way I come across.

~ Org.

[Friedrich]

Great responses. Thank you all.

[orgaelin]

Originally posted by TheColdTruth, Humans are unlike animals in one distcint way: Instead of instinct, we have abstract reasoning to help us deal with reality.

This always interests me. I agree we have abstract reasoning, but also feel we are still subject to our instincts in a massive, and often problematic way.

Perhaps I'm straying off topic here? If anyone wants to take this elsewhere then we will, otherwise, I'll say what I was going to for now...

The most clear-cut example is in the widespread obessity problem experienced by the Western world. Our instincts developed to have us desire the fattiest and sweetest foods, so that we would gain weight to help us survive when food was scarce. But now society and technology/methodology have developed to such an extent that food is abundant. And our instincts still keep telling us to eat these foods, and thus make us fat.

I think our instincts, while potentially useful in some situation, are a problematic thing we could do without. Or could we?

[Friedrich]

They sure come in handy when we meet an attractive member of the opposite sex.

[Samildanach]

How do we know animals don't reason? Also how would you define reason other than a verbalised sharpened form of instinct. I would go so far as to say most people I know instinctively reason.

[Friedrich]

Samil:

Nice quote, by the way.