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?
Just saw this post tweeted and thought that it raised some interesting questions.
Thoughts? Is social media and technology some sort of natural model of free human interactions?
“Social technologies allow humans to interact without respect to locality in time or space.
But so have emaillists and online forums–for going on 20 years now. What’s different about social media?
I think that usenet and BBSes and such were the beginning, but mostly geeks and business types would use them. Now they are easy to use and attractive, and people have gotten used to the computers themselves in a way they weren’t before.
This leads to vaster masses of people interacting at once than ever in human history.
Also, the viral ease of pulling people in to new services is new. It used to take a massive effort to introduce someone to a new technology, now it is simple and probably works with something they already use.
Hmm, on the shoulders of giants… maybe you ought to define social media somewhere.
Because other than the signal to noise ratio going down the drain over the past 20 years I can’t say the ‘new’ services offer that much I haven’t seen in some form or another before. I think the technology going mainstream has far more changed how we interact online than the changes in technology itself.
Which by itself is interesting, it’s the users changing the technology instead of the other way around.
@XIII
That’s kind of my point. While these technologies had been percolating for some time, them becoming available to mainstream users is nothing short of a revolution.
There was writing prior to the Gutenberg press, but it did not have the same impact because it was not in the hands of the people. Think about the impact the printing press had on human culture…this is several orders of magnitude bigger!
As to defining social media…that’s part of what we are doing here. I want it to be defined not as some top-down categorical, but instead to have a true definition evolve from the process of social media itself. To just declare a definition is to invite epistemological problems out the wazoo, because then we have issues of grounding the claim and figuring out the semantic, syntactic, and implicit meanings. There are some real problems with that (see Quine, “Two Dogmas of Empiricism”). Instead, I prefer to let things evolve organically.
Once, everyone lived in a village. Once, everyone knew what everyone else was doing. Secrets were hard to hold. The offset of that was the sense of community. To share the events of life, big and small, good and bad.
You shared because it was natural, but you also held back what you could, to reserve something for those closest to you. Levels of contact were formed, with close family groups, extended family groups, all linked to the community.
In Meditation 17, John Donne famously says “No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main”. A part of everything, of the village, of the community.
Donne was writing from a religious sense, but we can see the way that social networks are fulfilling that role from a technological sense.
There are multiple types of social networks now, and each type fulfills a need. There does not, as yet, seem to be a comprehensive solution.
There are microblogs, such as Twitter and Plurk and the ilk, with their immediacy and frequency of information of flow. Then there are the more detailed and comprehensive social sites such as Facebook and Myspace, giving people a presence, a home, online, to share updates and information on the events of their life, in a way previously reserved to bloggers. A permanent place to talk about their lives, connect on a more detailed level.
Most people seem to use a combination of at least one, if not many, microblog(s) and one or more comprehensive social tool(s).
As a result, communities are forming, of common interests. These transcend physical location, age, and social class. The usual limitations on society. These communities are rich, vibrant, and diverse. The disabled are no longer judged on the way their bodies are limited, those of wealth mix with those of lower socio economic circumstances. Ideas flow, information is shared.
Again, we are choosing to have our levels of sharing, with some people close, much more informed about our life, than others who may be acquaintances, or extended members of our circles.
News is flashed instantly, disasters and other major events are now being broken globally before news services have heard of anything.
The Internet was once a frontier town, way back ten years or more ago. When I first got online, you could feel the rough and ready nature, you were pioneers, pitching your grey-backgrounded, text based ‘tents’ (then came the white-backgrounded ‘tents’, images, including the much abused animated gif, and the dreaded ‘blink’ tag). social media
Now, our social networks are forming us into communities, and soon, towns. Later there will be cities. All the good and bad of that growth we bring with us, inherently, as humans. Yet this is a new way, a more egalitarian way. All you need is access to technology, and you can use these social networks to carve your place out.
Access itself is becoming much more available, as new mobile phones, ultraportables, and the rise of netbooks, are making our ability to link in to our networks immediate and frequent. The portal travels with us, now. We are no longer tied to our desk.
Truly, we are once more becoming ‘part of the main’. Where will that take us, what will our cities look like?
Your observation of how social media transends many of the normal limitations of society. Social media is more about what we have in common than how we differ.
The point I was trying to make is that social media facilitates us exploring and sharing our commonality, not our differences. Indeed, I agree that I was intending to indicate social media transcends the limitations of society – and thus allows us to explore our humanity.
I couldn’t agree more hence my site.. The Village Stream. We need each other to deal with the challenges we face today. You can not call mom or even grandma all the time anymore for advice they are working!!
The more we share the stronger we become.
@timelady It is now apparent to me that my comment comes across quite different to what I intended. I thought the article was great and was just agreeing with what you said.
Thank you both for the encouragment:) Thomas, it was a bit unclear, thank you for clarifying!
Thank you! YOu’ve said here exactly what I’ve been thinking recently, and said it so much better than I can.
Actually, I woke early this morning thinking about the “What is Plurk?” question a friend asked yesterday, and with the word “village” in my mind.
David Bridgers last blog post..Brainstorming a modern Novel of Letters
Nice post.
I totally agree that the internet gives us a place to be more human.
(Very Clue Train)
I curated a presentation for some ad folk called Humans, Marketing and the Web a while back . It’s visual and is a kind of a narrative….
and reflects some of my thoughts on this topic.
Have a peek if you like…
http://tinyurl.com/6lfuku
Jax
Jax Wechslers last blog post..Nokia’s N96 Face the Task Campaign
To make this more concrete, consider the relocalization projects for Food & Energy. Community Supported Agriculture is the more developed of the two, but Community Supported Energy is emerging. Distributed solutions are going to replace many of the old centralized ones. They are more resilient and more secure. — Jock
On the one hand, I certainly agree that the web allows for interactions that would never happen in the ‘real world’. On the other hand, I’d caution against taking that too far. “These [communities] transcend physical location, age, and social class” – really? I’ll give you physical location and age, but social class? I don’t think there is nearly enough recognition among those who are active in these online communities that there is a definite bias to the socioeconomic class of who is participating. Only those with a certain level of affluence in the first place are able to be online so much. I’m not saying everyone online is ‘affluent’, but the vast majority are at least lower-middle-class and somewhat educated. I just don’t think we should be patting ourselves on the back about how diverse our communities are without also recognizing which sections of society are missing.
@Jennifer
I think you make some good points. There is a strong divide in socio-economic classes with access to modern technologies in the US.
However, in Japan, India, and some parts of the EU, public cost internet in being instituted on large scales. Similar projects have been proposed here in the US, with them soon fading away to the interests of the ISPs.
But nonetheless, there is a strong enough cut across socio-economic class-lines that my contacts list runs the gamut from working class to rich. While there are no truly poor in that mix, I think it is just a matter of time before computers and online service is like TV and electricity…luxury items once, moving away from that now, and soon most people will have them, until eventually everyone has them (even the poorest household).
I miss the frontier town, and I love the post.
@XIII
The internet is an eternal frontier town.
The Social Aspect of the Internet certainly grows and the sense of community continues to develop. We have seen examples in the last few days of how the community will quickly gather around when a member of the community is threatened in anyway and when they feel down and lonely.
I remain concerned that the paradigms of life and the human evolutionary part of the spiritual being still remains aloof, unprotected and is being denied. I shall be interested if the sense of community will grow to a deeper and stronger place than before given perhaps the relative anonymity allowed by being behind the keyboard.
A great article and very thought provoking.
JimBob51s last blog post..Twitters, Diggs, Pliggs and Plurks???
Evan 12:38 pm on May 21, 2009 Permalink |
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 |
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?