Identity in Social Media
Identity in Social Media
With one person having accounts all over the internet, all with little bits of information which define who we are to the people there, is identity thus distributed? Identity IRL is about memory and perception, but online memory is archived and perceptions are in bits and pieces. Even lifestreams only show us tiny bits of mostly disconnected ideas.
How about it? Do you feel like your identity is distributed or singular?
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Evan 12:38 pm on May 21, 2009 Permalink | Log in to Reply
What is Identity? Is it the thing you think you are? or the thing other people think you are? or is it an aggregation of actions that you have done or others have witnessed?
If identity is made up of the perceivable part of us, the part others (and one can argue, our conscious minds) can see or interact with, than we have always been made up of those individual and speratic events.
But what about the Myspace me, and the facebook me, and the SMPP me? I suppose just as we regulate our actions based on the situation, I find myself adjusting my online actions according to the type of audience I expect to be there.
I wonder, how far the online community as a whole has allowed their online identity to become their primary externally facing identity
thePuck 2:17 pm on May 21, 2009 Permalink | Log in to Reply
Looked at logically, identity is defined as:
Let there be sets A and B. These sets are defined by their elements such that if A={n} and B={n} then A=B
In life, this is cashed out as:
Concrete particulars have properties and any concrete particular can be seen as a set of properties. Since a set is defined by the elements it contains, a given concrete particular is the sum of its properties.
The problem to me seems to be an equivocation about the meaning of identity when we switch from concrete particulars to abstracts. My notion of identity is informed by my thoughts, memories, and experiences, and the experience of my identity is shaped by qualia…the actual sensations as perceived “from the inside”. Since these properties can never be discretely defined, unlike my physical properties, I am left with a notion of identity which can never be fully cashed out…never fully defined. This problem is not so bad IRL, and various philosophical and religious systems account for this indefiniteness of identity in various ways. Some say they are “folk psychology” and just a problem of language, others say they point to mind-body dualism…that there is something about us that is distinct and separate from our physical properties.
What I find interesting, however, is that these entries on posts and profiles online are discrete properties, but they are non-localized in space and time. All our normal notions of identity involve localization; I have hazel eyes, but some pair of hazel eyes somewhere else don’t share identity with my hazel eyes. Our properties, both the physical and perhaps non-physical I spoke of before, are equivalent to our identity because they are copresent in time and space. But these accounts, profiles, connections, they are non-local, yet they still represent us and act as us when we are using them. Thus the question is not one of the respective notions of mind-body dualism identity vs. eleminative materialism identity, it is one of copresence…do all of my properties, the parts of me, need to be local to be considered “me”, or are they distributable to online accounts, avatars, game characters, etc?