Digital identities : creating and communicating the online self

308 Pages·2015·1.657 MB·English

by  Cover, Rob

DIGITAL IDENTITIES
Creating and Communicating
the Online Self
ROB COVER
School of Social Sciences
The University of Western Australia
Crawley, WA, Australia
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Parts of Chapter 1 were previously published in an earlier version in
“Performing and undoing identity online: social networking, identity
theories, and the incompatibility of online profiles and friendship regimes,
Convergence, 18(2), 177–193, 2012.” Parts of Chapter 3 were previously
published in an earlier version in “Audience inter/active: interactive media,
narrative control & reconceiving audience history, New Media & Society,
8(1), 213–232, 2006.”
The author would like to extend his appreciation to Emily Ekle at
Elsevier for suggesting this book and encouraging its development, to
Timothy Bennett and Chris Wortley for managing its production, and par-
ticularly to Dr. Kyra Clarke at The University of Western Australia for her
superb editorial support. Thank you also to Professor Anjali Gera Roy and
the staff and students of the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, for
providing a productive environment for work on this book.
Digital Identities is dedicated to my many undergraduate, honors, and
PhD students at The University of Western Australia with whom I have had
the great benefit of fruitful exchanges and shared ideas on how we live, who
we are and who we might be in terms of digital belonging.
vii
INTRODUCTION: UBIQUITOUS DIGITAL
NETWORKS, IDENTITY, AND THE SELF
1 UBIQUITOUS DIGITALITY: BEYOND THE REAL/VIRTUAL
DISTINCTION
In the everyday experience of the affluent West, the tools and technologies
of digital communication surround us to the extent that they are no longer
noticeable, remarkable, or distinct from other forms of communication, such
as face-to-face or traditional analog and print media. In some respects, the
tools of digital connectivity literally encircle us as we move through space
across day and night: from the desktop computer to the laptop, the tablet to
the smartphone, the connected fitness device or smartwatch to the radio fre-
quency identification device (RFID) trackable card, the networked car to the
online fridge, the wifi access points in the office to the use of high-quality
mobile and cellular data connectivity in the street, we are surrounded, con-
nected, always online, and making use of these connective devices as part of
all our many everyday interactions, engagements, desires, and routines. This
fact is what makes them banal and mundane (Baumann, 2003, p. 65), which
is not to say that they are uninteresting or unexciting, but that this digital
connectivity is as commonplace today as the likelihood of finding a televi-
sion in the family home, or running hot water in the everyday apartment.
They have slipped so much into everyday experiences that they are only
noticeable and remarkable on the rare occasions they fail, in much the same
way as we might become aware of our hot-water systems on the morning
in which a rare breakdown of the service results in us having to take a cold
shower. Indeed, today digital connectivity is so commonplace that we might
already have been alerted to a failure of hot water through an online alert or
a warning email long before we begin to try the taps in the bathroom.
This digital “Internet of everything” that, in its everyday familiarity and
sense of naturalness as a dominant form of communication, disappears into
the background of our everyday space has substantial implications for how
we create, conduct, articulate, and perform our identities in everyday life.
The fact that digital communication is no longer that which we do at one
moment or in one space or with one device that we then put aside to have
a conversation with another person in a face-to-face context has an enor-
mous impact on how we do our relationships, subjectivities, and produce
ourselves. We do not put those devices aside and, even when we do, our
ix
x Introduction: Ubiquitous Digital Networks, Identity, and the Self
conversations, relationships, and our everyday “being” are still strongly in-
fluenced by the communications and media access we experience.
We talk of identities being “online” and that very idea has shifted con-
siderably over the past few years. In the 1990s and 2000s, it was possible
to think about identity as something one did, performed, engaged with,
or represented differently online from offline, as if an online identity was
somewhat fake, virtual, unreal and then we had our real, embodied selves.
Today, however, identity is always online. We are, in some ways, always per-
forming ourselves online because even when we are nowhere near a digital
communication device (which is now extremely rare), we leave traces all
over the Internet, social-networking pages, blogs, Twitter, and other sites
that are actively contributing to elements of our identity. If I wish to get
to know you, I may look up your social-networking profiles, whether they
are professional or personal. And I am not necessarily getting a sense of
“who you are” surreptitiously, secretly, privately, but may well be sharing
that experience with you, in front of you, together. In that context, we are
always online, and our identities are “always on.” Identity and its online rep-
resentation is therefore not something we switch off, move away from, or
otherwise demarcate from the everyday practices of selfhood.
I would like to use this introduction to walk through some of the key
concepts related to identity in a digital era, particularly using the example
of the selfie image to help make sense of some of the implications for sub-
jectivity and selfhood an interactive, networked, technological environment
has for us and our futures. One very important fact about identity in a
digital environment that needs to be addressed is the move from a practice
in which subjects make use of online communication separate from other
aspects of their life to one in which digital media infiltrate and network
with all aspects of our everyday. While there are many on the planet who
do not have this kind of access to digital technology, I am interested here in
the implications for those in the affluent West, the urban worlds of constant
connectivity, and the environments in which mobility and technological
access to the Internet occurs while on the move. This shift to ubiquitous
digitality is the central idea discussed in this book, and I work through it
from a number of different angles.
2 IDENTITY AND PERFORMATIVITY
Identity or subjectivity are, in basic terms, ways of conceptualizing the self
in the context of representations, self-representation, demarcations of iden-
tity categories, linkages between self and behavioral attributes, and ways of
Introduction: Ubiquitous Digital Networks, Identity, and the Self xi
approaching and understanding “being” in our everyday lives. There are
many different ways of understanding and theorizing identity, and there
is a very rich, complex history of philosophies and approaches relating to
some of the key questions addressed in cultural and artistic expressions of
the past and present: Who am I? Who are we? I use the term identity in
this book to refer primarily to the self-perception of being, which also is
known as subjectivity and selfhood. Identity is comprised of identifications
with particular categories or demarcations that are given in language, me-
dia, and culture – I often refer to these as the “coordinates” of identity that,
along with memory and experience, come to make up the contemporary
subject. Such coordinates might include the common denotations of iden-
tity categories such as gender, race, ethnicity, class demarcations, and sexual-
ity, alongside nationality, citizenship, schooling background, socioeconomic
status, educational experience, and career, all of which to varying degrees in
varying contexts add to the personal and individual experience to make up
the figure of the I, the subject, the self. Subjects are invited to identify both
actively and passively with categories and frameworks of identity and self-
hood and, today, those categories are given in media and digital media, and
played out through our practices in relation to communication and digital
participation.
In very pedestrian ways, there is a tendency to speak of identity in what
is sometimes referred to as “essentialist” terms – the idea that our identities
(or major facets of them) emerge from the inside, and are fixed over time,
innate. Genetic theories of identity that attribute, say, criminal behavior to
the identity category “criminal” and see it as caused by one’s genetic heri-
tage (Pilnick, 2002, pp. 38, 39) is an example; likewise many contemporary
perceptions of nonheterosexual identity through very simplistic “born that
way” notions are examples of essentialism. Some psychological approach-
es to identity assume that our sense of self and our subjectivities emerge
through a “nurtured” way of being that is formed in early childhood by
relationships with parents that have had an impact on our psyches. Although
these approaches continue to be dominant in much public discourse, such
theories are, since the twentieth century, in contrast to what are sometimes
referred to as “constructionist” approaches which, broadly speaking, un-
derstand identity as formed through cultural and social forces that change
over time and are produced in the unfolding of history. For example, some
racial identities (and the very concepts of race) change over time, such that
in past eras, particular racialized groups were considered “more human”
than others. Likewise, the idea of an intersex identity that differs from cis-
gendered masculine/feminine norms is only possible in the current cultural
xii Introduction: Ubiquitous Digital Networks, Identity, and the Self
and historical frameworks that make possible a more nuanced approach to
gender. From a constructionist perspective, it is important therefore to think
about the role of media and digital communication as a contemporary, his-
torically derived, and culturally significant formation that governs how our
identities are constituted and formed, and the very meanings of identity,
subjectivity, and selfhood today. For example, in a constructionist frame-
work, we need to take account of the fact that our contemporary culture
of communication is increasingly dominated by visual representation and
the flow and exchange of high-quality visual images (Giroux, 2004, p. 789),
circulating not through text, which increasingly becomes a communication
form for the cultural elite, but through mass-mediated communication such
as television, film, music, online engagement, and music video (Lessig, 2008,
p. 68). In that sense, how we produce and figure our identities, the informa-
tion we encounter that helps construct and constitute our identities, and the
norms, categories, and elements of culture with which we identify are more
readily circulated to us through image than through written text. This, of
course, is broadly unproblematic and not a judgment or a denouncement
of the visual culture in which we live – merely an observation that some of
the frameworks that govern how we do identities in contemporary society
have changed and, in a constructionist perspective, how we as a culture
and as a people change along with them. Important here is that identity is
best conceived of as a project in which we are actively engaged, a process
of moving toward some sense of identity with no necessary arrival at some
fixed sense of selfhood (Barker, 1999, p. 3). In that context, the trajectory
of identity is one which is both helped along and disrupted by the ever-
changing presence of identity information in both traditional and digital
media and communication.
Historian, philosopher, and theorist of subjectivity, power, thought, idea,
and knowledge, Michel Foucault, noted that identity, subjectivity, or the
self is not a substance or thing, but a form (Foucault, 1988, p. 10), consti-
tuted in the discourses or languages that represent and make available the
ideas around selfhood. Foucault’s work powerfully overturned the idea of
the liberal subject as being free, self-contained, and rational. The early lib-
eral subject of modernity was presupposed in liberal discourses, then, as
that of a self-governing, natural person, able to make rational choices, act
upon them, and thereby “influence intentionally the way the world goes”
(Benn, 1982, pp. 4, 5). John Locke and Laslett (1988), the former being a lib-
eral philosopher, attributed natural rights to this subject as a free and equal
individual capable of consent to be governed (pp. 337–338, 428). For Locke
Introduction: Ubiquitous Digital Networks, Identity, and the Self xiii
and later liberals such as John Stuart Mill, the concept of the self-contained,
self-present individual subject was characterized as autonomous and self-
governing, constituted through nature, and with a natural right to liberty
because, at heart, the subject was able to make rational choices by virtue
of being a human subject. The free individual has thus come to be seen in
contemporary society as “the apogee of all modern desires and possibili-
ties” (Walker, 1999, p. x). Alongside the powerful work of psychoanalysis
emerging with Freud and Lacan, as well as Marx’s decentering of the liberal
subject in favor of identities that are, in part, produced through ideologies
and false consciousness, Foucault’s approach has opened the possibility for
thinking about identity and subjectivity as constituted in and through the
power/knowledge network of discourse as it speaks the subject into its sub-
jectivity. While such views are not necessarily how we ordinarily perceive
ourselves and others – and, of course, we do not necessarily engage in such
self-reflective thought in our everyday lives at all times – the decentered,
constructed, and sometimes fragmentary subject has come to be impor-
tant in theoretical accounts of contemporary life and contemporary culture.
Fredric Jameson (1985) was correct to point out that in a postliberal or
postmodern culture not only should we think of the individual bourgeois
subject as a thing of the past, but we ought to understand the constructed
nature of subjectivity so that we can see that the figure of self “never really
existed in the first place; there have never been autonomous subjects of that
type” (p. 115). For Jameson, the autonomous subject has been a “cultural
mystification that sought to persuade people that they “had” individual sub-
jectivity and possessed this unique personal identity” (p. 115). However, de-
spite such theoretical decentering of the subject, contemporary culture and
our everyday practices of identity regularly persist in relying on the notion
of a fixed, natural subjectivity or identity. The question this leaves is why is
the illusion of identity so convincing? What are the forces of contemporary
media and digital communication that build, produce, and maintain notions
of subjectivity that, on the one hand, are so readily decentered and, on the
other, allow the liberal notion of subjectivity to endure?
One of the very important and highly influential theoretical approaches
to identity that I rely on heavily in this book helps to answer that question.
Gender theorist and philosopher Judith Butler has written extensively on
the identity as “performative.” In her earlier works such as Gender Trouble
(1990) and Bodies That Matter (1993), Butler rejected some of the inherent
foundationalisms and residual normalizations that persist in liberal, essential-
ist approaches as well as some brands of constructionist modeling of identity.
xiv Introduction: Ubiquitous Digital Networks, Identity, and the Self
She found that the constructionist approach in which identity is overlain on
a foundation (the body) emphasized too greatly the linear power of culture
to exhaustively produce the subject. Likewise, essentialist approaches rely
on an idea of an inner foundational identity that is ultimately unknowable,
since there is no prediscursive “I” that drives our identities. Instead, she
turned in her work to show that the very structure of signification and how
language gives and produces meaning opens the possibility of understand-
ing identity as constituted in the reiterative performances of selfhood that
produce, retroactively, the illusion of an inner identity core (Butler, 1990,
p. 143). We perform our identities – never consciously or voluntaristically –
“in accord” with cultural demands for recognizable, unified, and coherent
norms of identity as a tendency that responds to the broad cultural demands
for intelligible selves necessary for social participation and belonging. Im-
portantly, then, Butler opens the way for thinking about how language and
discourse are encountered through media and digital media, and how per-
formances can be more than just how we comport our bodies, conform to
gender norms, speak in ways relevant to our cultural or class backgrounds,
hold attitudes intelligible and in relation to our affiliations and kinships to
confirm and continue the coherence of our identities. Rather, we also per-
form those identities in how we articulate ourselves online, whether that be
through designing and maintaining a social-networking profile, contribut-
ing to discussions on a blog, editing and distributing a self-image or selfie,
or selectively encountering information on Wikipedia, among many other
forms of “identity work” undertaken knowingly or surreptitiously online.
In light of the above points, there is no longer any real sense of offline and
online in a world of ubiquitous digital media and digitization. How we
perform our selfhood in the context of digital media is also no longer sepa-
rable from how we perform in other spaces where our digital devices may
be less readily at hand or less important in the communication we are pres-
ently undertaking. I take up and expand upon these queries related to how
identity can be understood as performative in the context of our digital-
dominated environment in the chapters that follow. Part of the task at hand
is to bring Butler’s theories of performativity into close articulation and
alignment with the new and emerging practices of digital media use, such
as interactive engagement with cocreativity of texts, the fast-paced social
networking of identity relationalities, the vastly new ease of access to infor-
mation including at times highly obscure discourses, and the frameworks
through which we record, surveil, and archive our sense of subjectivity in
online sites and situations.
Introduction: Ubiquitous Digital Networks, Identity, and the Self xv
3 SELFIES: INTERPELLATION AND SPECTACLE
IN A PRODUCTIVE WORLD
Before getting into greater detail regarding how we can understand our
performative selves as produced in the context of social networking and
other digital practices, I would like to spend a little time here thinking
about the very important and very recent digital practice of the shared
selfie, particularly as a way of introducing what will follow in this book. The
new custom of taking self-images by turning our cameras onto ourselves
along with the backgrounds against which we might be depicted and shar-
ing these online serve as technologies of selfhood that are built on high lev-
els of critical self-awareness (Tiidenberg, 2014). The selfie is, in many ways,
emblematic of the questions opened up about selfhood, identity, and digital
communication, and it is useful to ponder, albeit briefly, how what little we
know about selfies today provides a framework for some of the shifts in how
identity is being performed in digital contexts. Butler went to considerable
lengths in her book Bodies That Matter (1993) to demonstrate that identity
performativity is not an individual act but “is always a reiteration of a norm
or set of norms” (p. 12). That is, a subject does not express or articulate an
inner truth, but cites, repeats, and mimes the norms, attributes, and codes
of coherent behavior that fabricate the idea there is an inner essence (But-
ler, 1990, p. 136). In this context, the figure of the selfie is important in that
it may at one level be seen as an act of proclaiming a particular identity but,
at the level of performativity, is about shoring up the coherence and ongo-
ingness of the performance of that identity.
I will use here a relatively mundane example: a male selfie taker who has,
either deliberately or unthinkingly, taken a self-image that includes some
sporting equipment in the background in a way that expresses masculine
identity attributes in terms of cultural assumptions, norms, and stereotypes
of masculine behavior. The selfie that, here, might be distributed across the
user’s social networks is not a declaration of masculine identity, nor is it a
moment of becoming masculine. Rather, it is one element in the complex
chain of performances and articulations that are required of subjects to pro-
duce a coherent, ongoing, linear pattern of masculine identity over time.
It is the necessary “work” of doing identity in order to fulfill the cultural
demands for coherence, intelligibility, and recognizability (Cover, 2004a). In
that context, the selfie has drawn on a stereotype of masculinity that links
the identity (masculine) with a set of attributes (enjoys sport, proficient
at sport), because stereotypes are, while problematic and often demean-
ing, also a very efficient “byte” of quick and recognizable communication