Digital Identities

Creating and Communicating the Online Self

Rob Cover

• Publisher: Academic Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780128004272
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Social Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Online Identities: Creating and Communicating the Online Self presents a critical investigation of the ways in which representations of identities have shifted since the advent of digital communications technologies. Critical studies over the past century have pointed to the multifaceted nature of identity, with a number of different theories and approaches used to explain how everyday people have a sense of themselves, their behaviors, desires, and representations.

In the era of interactive, digital, and networked media and communication, identity can be understood as even more complex, with digital users arguably playing a more extensive role in fashioning their own self-representations online, as well as making use of the capacity to co-create common and group narratives of identity through interactivity and the proliferation of audio-visual user-generated content online.

• Makes accessible complex theories of identity from the perspective of today's contemporary, digital media environment
• Examines how digital media has added to the complexity of identity
• Takes readers through examples of online identity such as in interactive sites and social networking
• Explores implications of inter-cultural access that emerges from globalization and world-wide networking

Chapter 1

Understanding Identity Online: Social Networking

Abstract

This chapter explores some of the critical frameworks by which social networking can be contextualized and understood within the broader cultural practices of identity and selfhood. Utilizing Judith Butler’s theories of performative identity, it is argued that the use of social networking sites are performative acts themselves. Two facets of social networking are examined from theoretical and critical perspectives: (1) the use of social networking profiles (info pages, taste selections, and biographies) as a tool for performing, developing, and stabilizing identity as a narrative in line with cultural demands for coherence, intelligibility, and recognition; (2) identity performances that occur through relationality among online friends via list maintenance and communication (wall posts, tagging, and commentary), and how identity is reconfigured within a network morphology. Drawing on Castells elucidation of the constitute power of the network society, the chapter indicates ways in which social networks “fit” within a dominant identity practice that situates the performative self within the broader formation of a network morphology. Finally, the chapter aims to open a discussion around the broad the cultural practices and implications of social networking by developing some theoretical approaches to understanding the incompatibilities between these two facets which compete and risk ’undoing’ online identity coherence.

Keywords

social networking

networks

performativity

profiles

tagging

relationships

If we are to investigate the available ways of understanding identity in the context of online communication and digital media cultures, then there is enormous value in paying attention to how identity can be seen to be “performed” in one of the most popular, contemporary online platforms and practices – social networking. In an always connected and cloud driven communication environment, identities are performed, articulated, represented, and negotiated in relation with those who are not necessarily physically present in our everyday lives but also with those we engage with in the “networked social.” Founded in 2004 and available for use by anyone aged 13 years and above, Facebook has over 1.3 billion active users as of June 2014. The largest social network by virtue of active users, Facebook represents approximately 18% of the world’s population. Facebook is rivaled only by social networks that originate in China and, despite common predictions in early 2010 of its eventual downfall in favor of newer sites, its name is increasingly synonymous with online activity – more so even than Twitter. Facebook has come to stand for the notion of representation of identity and selfhood online as much as for communication among potentially distant friends. By its very name, Facebook points to the interface between the corporeal and the digital, a site through which identity is both expressed and acquired: the face (traditionally the site that betrays or hides facets of identity but that is the point of corporeality through which we routinely make relational contact with each other) is replaced by the more complex array of what we post, how we read posts, how we post about each other, and how we interact through varying, complex degrees of friendship and affiliation online.

Social networking sites have been investigated and discussed by researchers, journalists, and public commentators. Much of the time the range of uses, tools, functions, or gratifications of social networking sites are overlooked giving them the appearance of having a singular, unified activity or sole “purpose”. A site for sharing personal experiences among friends or sometimes strangers (Ellison, Steinfeld, & Lampe, 2007, p. 1143); as a site for the articulation of one’s identity-based interests through the construction of taste statements which act as identifications with objects and with other people (Liu, 2008, p. 253); as a site for relationship maintenance (Hoadley, Xu, Lee, & Rosson, 2010, p. 52) and connecting unfamiliar people with one another (Hoadley et al., 2010, p. 53); as a networked space for the expression or representation of preexisting and salient aspects of users’ identities for others to view, interpret, and engage with (boyd, 2008b); as a space for young people to engage with each other outside of the physical world’s constraints and parental surveillance (boyd, 2008b, p. 18); as a site for the expression and/or self-regulation of narcissistic personalities (Buffardi & Campbell, 2008); and prioritizing the idea that being friended and linking to friends whether close friends, acquaintances, or strangers as “one of the (if not the) main activities of Facebook” (Tong, Van Der Heide, Langwell, & Walther, 2008, p. 531). These are all ostensible reasons for the use of social networking – conscious, self-aware purposes articulated by different users in varied contexts.

However, an alternative approach to understanding social networking and identity is to take into account some of the ways in which social networking activities, as digital media use par excellence, are performative acts of identity which actively constitute the user. This requires us to make use of some of the most powerful, albeit complex, theories of identity performativity circulating in poststructuralist writing, particularly the work on gender performativity by Judith Butler. A Butlerian approach to identity as performative helps us to understand how identities and practices of using online communication in everyday life are interwoven and cocreative, rather than to take the more simple approach of assuming that we have a fixed identity which we express and represent (perhaps truthfully, perhaps fraudulently) through our activities online. We can therefore draw together poststructuralist, antiessentialist theories of subjectivity and identity with prior work on social networking to do two things: (1) expand the critical frameworks by which social networking can be contextualized within the broader cultural practices of identity and selfhood; (2) further destabilize the problematic dichotomy of a “real identity” in an offline capacity and a “virtual identity” represented in digital, networked communication. Additionally, by exploring social networking through Butler’s theories of identity performativity, it is possible to show that social networking activities and behaviors are both a means by which subjectivity can be performed and stabilized and, simultaneously, made more complex and conflicting. This comes from the fact that social networking is not a singular activity but a set of interrelated – sometimes incompatible – interactivities which include identity performances through profile management, friending, liking fan pages, tagging, being tagged, updating statuses, and having responses given by others to one’s own status updates. That is, an array of activities requiring the users to “work” to perform a coherent, intelligible selfhood extending across all these online activities in addition to offline behaviors.

Working from a poststructuralist, antifoundationalist perspective that draws on Foucault, Lacan, and Derrida, Butler’s theory of performativity is based on the idea that identity and subjectivity is an ongoing process of becoming, rather than an ontological state of being, whereby becoming is a sequence of acts, that retroactively constitutes identity (Salih, 2002, p. 46; Butler, 1990). That is, identity formation occurs “in accord” with culturally given discourses, structures, and practices which, once stabilized for the subject come to feel like common sense, and by which any actions, performances, or behaviors of the subject appear to emanate from that identity rather than constituting it. The self or “I” is made up of a matrix of pregiven identity categories, experiences, and labels (Butler, 1990, p. 40) that, through repetition, lend to the illusion of an inner identity core (Butler, 1993, p. 12). Where Butler’s theories provide an important perspective for the study of social networking and identity construction is in extending the very idea of performance from the bodily, the experiential, and the affective into the field of online acts; in other words, online social networking behavior is just as much a performance as any other “real life” act, and equally constitutes a sense of self and identity. That is, online behavior should not be understood as an activity separate from those more ostensibly embodied performances of identity categories.

Working Butler’s theory of identity performativity alongside existing discussions of social networking, I argue that the online performance of subjectivity is articulated in at least two, sometimes competing ways: (1) modifying your own profile (boyd, 2008a, p. 122) by: (a) developing the profile through choosing particular categories of common identity coordinates or demarcations as well as stating categories of taste and providing and deciding on particular information that, in the act of deciding, is in itself a performance of identity, that is, age, gender, relationship status, indicators of sexual orientation/identity, and making biographical statements; (b) ongoing activities such as status updates, uploading and captioning photos, sending messages, rewriting biographical statements, and other forms of updating, refining, and manipulating one’s profile; (2) identifying in a relational sense with various friends and networks through adding and accepting adds – and, of course, updating, changing, and making new additions or deletions to your friends list. Both of these are performances of self-identity which, in Butler’s formulation of subjectivity, retroactively constitute identity, just as offline performances of selfhood do. Separately, these two social networking activities are acts of identity performance; however, the extent to which these two areas of social networking operate together toward a coherent, unified self needs to be explored. Lewis and West (2009) have indicated that while social networking sites require “both the presentation of self and a process of “friending” … there is a degree of incompatibility between these imperatives” (p. 1224). Since identifications are, as Butler (1993) noted, “multiple and contestatory” (p. 99), and the subject is produced at the “cost of its own complexity” (Hall, 2004, p. 127), a stronger understanding of the use of social networking in the construction of intelligible and coherent identities can be explored by thinking through the ways in which the complexity and multiplicity of social networking friendship activities, comments, discussions, tagging, etc., work both to build and undo narratives of selfhood. Concentrating on Facebook as the most common example of social networking, this chapter will begin by giving a theoretical account as to how Butler’s performativity can be utilized to understand the contemporary cultural role of social networking in relation to how identities are constituted, played out, transformed, and stabilized online. The first section of this chapter will argue that profile management can be understood as an act of identity performance, while the second will explore some initial approaches to understanding how the relationality of friendship lists provide a somewhat different framework for the performance of identity. In the final section, I analyze some of the ways in which these two areas of identity performativity – profiles and friending – produce gaps and rifts in the coherence of an identity narrative, creating “extra work” for identity self-management. Ultimately, this chapter intends to provide a few directions for continued theorization and analysis of identity and subjectivity in an online context, and the ways of approaching, in greater complexity, the relationship between Web 2.0 interactive environments and contemporary shifts in how selfhood and identity are constructed and played out.

1. Approaching identity

Before we can investigate the usefulness of a Butlerian account of identity performativity for understanding how our selves are constituted and played out, in part through online activities, it is useful to think about other approaches to identity and whether or not they have value for understanding the complexity of selfhood in online frameworks and digital cultures. Modern identity emerged in Western Europe and Great Britain during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, culminating in the humanist figure of the free and autonomous individual in the eighteenth century Age of Enlightenment. Humanist notions of subjectivity, provide the conceptualization of the subject as having unquestioned certainty, truth, and presence. Central to the contemporary, everyday, and “common sense” understanding of identity and selfhood is René Descartes’ (1596–1650) fifteenth century notion of cogito ergo sum (“I think, therefore I am”), which operates as a first principle for the idea of an “I” as a conscious and reasoning individual in which thought or “mind” is given preference over corporeality and bodily sensations. Significant to western thinking on identity, this notion of the autonomous, coherent, unified self was extended and solidified by numerous writers and thinkers, including John Locke (1632–1704) who posited the liberal and free individual; Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) who argued for a human individuality grounded in nature; and Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) who equated selfhood and consciousness.

However, although the notion of the unitary, autonomous, coherent, and essentialist subject remains commonsensical, everyday understanding of identity, theories, and philosophies emerging throughout the twentieth century have questioned this notion of identity and rejected the idea of subjectivity as a self-contained being. Several competing theoretical positions led to the decentering or rejection of the humanist subject in poststructuralist theory. Marxism refuses recognition of the subject as a “conscious” subject, attributing it a “false consciousness” in a capitalist socioeconomic system. The structuralist–Marxist critique of subjectivity undertaken by Louis Althusser (1971) questions the integrity of the universal subject by showing it to be bound by its interpellation through institutions and ideology. In Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic critique, the discovery of the unconscious fragments the subject at the point of its consciousness, and suggests that one’s identity is bound by one’s desires. Jacques Lacan (1977), extending Freud’s theory through structuralist semiotics, makes clear that desire and subjectivity are inseparable: there cannot be a subject without a concept of desire – in coming in to language in the Symbolic, identity is separated from the unconscious. Other, thereby resulting in a subject that is always described as “split.” For Lacan, desire is constituted by lack, as a result of the inability to reacquire the preoedipal and premirror stage jouissance, hence the subject (always unsuccessfully) seeks fulfilment by trajecting desire toward the objet petit a (an object of desire), be it a sexual object, a “personal goal,” or otherwise – a desire that can never be satiated. Thus, the psychoanalytic approach posits a subject which is always “in process.”

From the 1960s and 1970s, the Enlightenment humanist notion of subjective identity was put further in question by theories of social, cultural, and discursive constructionism in which the subject is not born or the result of nature, but produced within the environment, language, and sociality. Both building upon and rejecting the dominant psychoanalytic critique of identity, this antisubjective structuralist and poststructuralist criticism has become the prevailing understanding of a critical and cultural theory of identity, although it has by no means resulted in a wholesale rejection of the Enlightenment figure of the subject in contemporary everyday and pedestrian thinking about identity. Significant among constructionist approaches to identity is the work of Michel Foucault (1926–1984) who posits identity not as an “effect” of power, disciplinarity, and biopolitics, which includes processes and techniques of surveillance and normalization. Foucault’s theory of subjectivity as a form constituted in and by discourse approaches a poststructuralist position – and contributes heavily to it. For Foucault, the subject is inculcated by, and through the deployment of power-relations, normalized variously in accord with regimentary, disciplinary, and biopolitical discourses. The humanist subject of Descartes as self-existent, coherent, and consciously active is rejected by the Foucauldian position in favor of the disciplining of bodies made “docile” (Foucault, 1977) and conforming. Three modes of objectification of identity in Foucault’s work can be identified: the first is dividing practices, such as the isolation of “the mad” in asylums. Second is the Foucauldian concept of “scientific classification” arising from modes of inquiry given the discursive status of science. In the context of Web 2.0 digital media environments, we might similarly refer to this as profile categorization or “naming”; a discursive practice which in Foucauldian analyses of identity plays a pivotal role in the inculcation of the subject as subject. Finally, there is “subjectification,” the processes “of self-formation in which the person is active” albeit with conformative regimes. Biopolitics is a technology of power that both analyzes and constructs not the individual subject but whole populations as subjective through a range of techniques from statistical measurement to health promotion to immigration controls; its governance mechanics are generally, but not always, located within the administration of the nation state. Emerging slightly later than discipline in the second-half of the eighteenth century as part of the further developments of governance for larger states, biopolitics can be a useful tool for understanding the relationship between online environments and identity in that the use of digital communication tools results in the capacity for large-scale data collection on the level of whole populations, thus, producing certain forms of identity which are normalized not along the disciplinary normal/abnormal distinction but in terms of distance from a norm along a distribution curve of normativities (Foucault, 2007).

Building on the work of Foucault (although at times deploying Lacanian psychoanalysis), Judith Butler projects one of the most useful, poststructuralist theorizations of identity by suggesting that the subject is constituted by repetitive performances in terms of the structu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Table of Contents
• Copyright
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Ubiquitous Digital Networks, Identity, and the Self
• Chapter 1: Understanding Identity Online: Social Networking
• Chapter 2: Performativity, Communication, and Selfhood
• Chapter 3: Interactivity, Digital Media, and the Text
• Chapter 4: Bodies, Identity, and Digital Corporeality
• Chapter 5: Identity, Internet, and Globalization
• Chapter 6: Mobile Telephony, Mobility, and Networked Subjectivity
• Chapter 7: Online Selves: Digital Addiction
• Chapter 8: Digital Surveillance, Archives, and Google Earth: Identities in/of the Digital World
• References
• Subject Index