Digital Technology and Identity
Postmodern thought challenges traditional
concepts of identity. From the Enlightenment on, Western culture fought
to establish the individual as a unitary, volitional entity with powers
of perception and action. Its literature glorified the individuals metamorphosis
and acts of self-assertion and identity. Critical theory suggests a
less romantic, more complex view, in which an individuals identity is
fluid, shaped by circulating narratives of gender, class, nation, history,
media, and situation. Digital technology accelerates the process and
provides a laboratory for experiments in identity. The digitalization
of information provides great flexibility in representation, while telecommunications
and on-line environments sever the connection between physical persons
and their communications. Theorists have sought to elaborate on these
new views of identity and to analyze the impact of digital technologies.
Bill Nichols sees the self as a potentially outdated concept. The old
unitary self may have lost its relevance in a world dominated by digital
representation and interdependency: Liberation from any literal referent
beyond the simulation, like liberation from a cultural tradition bound
to aura and ritual, brings the actual process of constructing meaning,
and social reality, into sharper focus. This liberation also undercuts
the Renaissance concept of the individual. Clear and distinct people
may be a prerequisite for an industrial economy based on the sale of
labor power, but mutually dependent cyborgs may be a higher priority
for a postindustrial postmodern economy. There is an analogy between
modern physics and identity in the digital world. Personal identity
can be viewed as confluent densities of information, just as physical
reality can be viewed as the density of matter points. The virtual body
acting in virtual space transgresses traditional notions of physical-body
boundaries and location. In this fluidity it more radically challenges
the basic Western notions of dualistic demarcations, which underlie
some concepts of identity. Virtual on-line communities invite experimentation
with identity. These worlds are often constructed on the ?y by participants
and allow people to present themselves in any way they want. They are
freed from the physical body cues of gender, age, and appearance to
enact various personas. Anonymity allows for people to try out idealized
or negative identities, to cross genders, or to manifest as multiple
identities. Commentators draw parallels between on-line and physical
life. Sandy Stone, well-known for her writing and creative work related
to identity experimentation, describes the experimental possibilities
of on-line representation: They learn how to manipulate those personalitiestake
them out of the box, dust them, run them, put them back in the box,
put them away, take out another one. On-line communities functioning
as places to experiment with identity, much like psychotherapy. There
is a connection between the on-line experiments with multiplicity and
contemporary notions of the fluid, postmodern self: Virtual personas
are objects-to-think-with. When people adopt an on-line persona, they
cross a boundary into highly charged territory. Some feel an uncomfortable
sense of fragmentation, some a sense of relief. Some sense the possibilities
for self-discovery, even self-transformation. Many manifestations of
multiplicity in our culture, including the adoption of on-line personae,
are contributing to a general reconsideration of traditional, unitary
notions of identity. Contemporary psychology is being challenged to
conceptualize healthy selves which are not unitary but which have flexible
aspects to their many aspects.