Our Digital Selves
Posted on 12. Mar, 2010 by Peter Katz in Debate
Who is Madison Johnson?
Now you’re with me, Dear Reader (it was a cruel narrative device, yes, but I regret it not one bit). But who, indeed, is Madison Johnson? Is she, in fact, less real than the rest of us on Facebook?
I am being a bit philosophical, here, but the Madison question is the essence of an article that was in the making even before the whole incident. It is, in part, a question of the theoretical, a question of self-construction and culture, but unlike most of the philosophy that I do, it has direct, pragmatic effects on all of us.
Take “me,” for example. I friend you on Facebook. You may have seen me doing something for C2, or you at least know my name, so you accept. What, now, do you know about “me”? You know I am in Angwin, I’m from Redding, I’m 21 (after some math), engaged to Ariane Gregory, a socialist, and think that I’m amusing as far as religious views go. I obviously have an obsession with poetry, and some sort of issue that compels me to declare an excessive amount of majors. My stati tend to be snarky witticisms. That’s me.
But is it? There’s no law that says what I put on Facebook has to be empirically “true.” My sister and one of my friends arbitrarily changed their stati to say that they were engaged to one another; both of them set off chain reactions of excited—and then rather irritated—friends and relatives. People declare siblings at random. I got incredibly excited that one of my friends was into Hitchhiker’s Guide, only to find out that it was in fact a different friend who had stolen her laptop and commented on one of my comments.
Moreover, we are defined by the medium. The way we construct our digital selves depends entirely on the programming decisions of sun-starved computer techies who are far wealthier than any of us. You know I’m a socialist because Facebook decided to include political views, and make them customizable. We hold a “conversation” on Facebook via stati-and-comments, and every exchange is mediated by the medium of stati-and-comments.
The “Like” button is the epitome of this phenomenon. Do any of us really know what it means to “Like” something? Several of my friends immediately “Like” any of their own comments; others use it sarcastically; others seem to “Like” just about anything they read. And yet, because of programming decisions, to “Like” something is an integral part of our interactions with one another.
Medium as controller goes beyond Facebook (yes, there are things beyond Facebook, I hear). Twitter, for example: because of arbitrary decisions, one has one-hundred forty characters to construct a self. A program called “DigitalLife” allows one to create an entire digital persona, down to physical appearance; many corporations use this program for meetings, to the point that there are corporate task-forces composed of people who have worked together for years, but never seen one another in person. All the interactions that those people have, have been and will continue to be defined by programming decisions at DigitalLife. Don’t even get me started on WoW.
We use digital selves to interact in other-constructed mediums, and thereby, our digital selves are not really “our” selves at all. Our internet selves, though they do embody in part an extension of ourselves, are not our own constructions—but they are, to the fullest extent, constructions.
Forums, or gaming personae, demonstrate the façade of digital self. For a year or so, I was a member of a martial arts forum, until internal forum politics got me banned; I created a new login, new persona, new self, and rejoined. Very few people are terribly friendly when gaming online, particularly since, from what I can gather, the point seems to be killing one another, repeatedly. The person who just put a hole through your character’s head, then messaged you, “u sux n00b,” may in fact be one of your closest “friends” in a forum, or on Facebook. Identity is inconsistent, to say the least. These interactions are essentially anonymous, even with names attached.
This relative anonymity is, in my opinion, the ugliest worm in the apple of internet interaction. Youtube is a cesspit of inhumanity; a cursory look on the comments of any Youtube video will not only teach one new expletives and racial slurs, but also demonstrate the horrendous cruelty of anonymity. Without a person attached to a name, people feel free to fling whatever they would like at whomever. We would direct your attention to the debate on the “Student Suspended over Crude Video” article, with the additional information that we had to delete at least ten comments for content consisting almost entirely of baseless mud-slinging. Juxtapose the ninety-something anonymous-but-hostile comments with the fifteen or so named, but very constructive comments on the “Madison Johnson” article. A name, it seems, adds a least a bit more identity.
Herein lays the tension of the digital self. In the nineties, the internet was an opportunity to reinvent the self, to “be anyone you want to be.” Somewhere in the ’00s, with the rise of Myspace, Facebook, and other social networking sites, it became “be the real you”—which, as we’ve already discussed above, is highly problematic in itself. Now, however, as we enter the teens, are we to be “our real selves, as we would want them to be”? Do we still hold the illusion of our ability to construct, or do we hold the illusion of individuality, or both, or neither?
As far as I can tell from student reaction, most of us feel that Madison Johnson is an outrage. But, why? Is it an invasion of privacy? Anyone who thinks that our digital selves are at all private has simply missed the entire notion of the internet. Is it a violation of internet etiquette? Internet custom is an etiquette in formation, a culture in transition, shaped by the medium that allows “friends” to browse one another’s photographs. Is it a violation of ethics?
This last question is the crux of the entire issue. The ethics of the internet are in their infancy. Before, arguably, we had “public” and “private” selves. Now, we have a “digital” self, a sort of grey area between. We want our privacy, but our medium is public. We want our public voice, but we want that voice to be respected as though it is spoken by an individual with private conceptions of self.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I do not intend to preach gloom-and-doom, nor fire-and-brimstone. Our “selves” are not falling apart, nor is internet culture evil. It simply is. But its existence is perhaps one of the most important lessons we can learn, one of the most important aspects of our society of which we need to be aware. To simply assume that the digital self is, and operate within the constraints and constructions of the internet, is truly to give up any ability to define ourselves. We must explore, we must be aware of the constructions, and we must constantly ask ourselves how, and why, we construct ourselves the way that we do.
I am more than an info box. You are more than an info box. But the existence of that box, in many ways, has come to define us. It is an extension of me, an extension of you. We live in a brave new world, and it is up to us, the academics of our generation, to explore to the fullest digital culture, and our digital selves.
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