A few thoughts about (online) identity

There is one dreadfully existential question I've asked myself a lot over the last couple years: "Who am I?"

When I feel particularly dramatic, I like to think that I am in a sort of perpetual identity crisis, but that's not entirely true. Most people I know wouldn't agree either. The reason is that it's mostly been a conflict inside my own head and hasn't reflected on how I present myself or interact with people. Still, I regularly have doubts regarding my place in the world and where I fit in, who I want to be, and even the almost-meta question of whether how I identify or think about identity is "good" for my mental health.

How did I get to this point? I think the main catalyst was the start of the pandemic in 2020 combined with my decision to move to a completely new city and subsequently becoming socially isolated. There certainly were incubating circumstances for it, too: I was a teenager at the time, and the last two years of high school had felt strange. Strange, not because I had a hard time in any sense (I was doing great!) but, paradoxically, because I was weirdly comfortable with everything, more than ever before. I was content with where I was, even though I clearly was not done with anything, if that makes sense. It was comfort, but fragile comfort – I knew things were going to change, I knew I still wanted to change. But I wasn't mentally prepared.

The masks we wear are part of our identity

Probably everyone has heard of the idea that we all wear figurative masks that change depending on social context. We behave differently in different social circles – you present yourself differently, you speak differently, you hide or highlight certain attributes if you speak to your friends vs. your close family. I don't think anyone would argue that this theory is false.

However, I would go further: Instead of proposing that our true identity is masked depending on social context, I would say that our identity is directly influenced by social contexts. To stick with the picture of masks, I think a significant part of our identity is "just" a big collection of masks. There is no such thing as a complete "true" identity behind the masks we wear.

Now, this doesn't necessarily mean that our behaviour determines, and thus changes our identity all the time. There is certainly more to it than that, as philosophers have been debating for millenia. But you could say I have a pretty anti-essentialist view on the connection between identity and social context. I.e.: I believe the core of our identity is what we make of it.

The false dichotomy of 'online' and 'offline'

While many people these days don't really give a shit about the information that is available about them online, some still try to maintain a more or less "clean" pseudonym on the internet – i.e., a pseudonym that has little identifiable real-life information attached to it. I consider myself one of those people, generally trying to be vigilant of the consequences of how I act under my pseudonym. I do believe making the connection between me, the physical person, and me, the person I present as online, is not trivial.

Online pseudonyms are rarely completely disconnected from offline persons, though. For example, most people can be "de-pseudonymised" by friends in real life because they connect to them online using the same identity they present to strangers. This can go further – I choose to share a selection of information about myself, like the city I live in, what and where I study, maybe even the events I'm attending. So, it already becomes obvious that the personal existences "online" and "offline" are never completely separate.

Circling back to the beginning, a particularly weird version of this realisation hit me when I started studying. Given the time, my first study acquaintances were online, mostly on Discord. Instead of creating a new Discord account specifically for connecting with other students, I just used the pseudonymous account I had been actively using for the previous 4 years. Why wouldn't I? This resulted in a subconscious "proximity" of my interactions to my pseudonym and so I ended up treating the relationships with my new peers the same as any other "online" relationship. When I met most of them about half a year later, I felt whiplash. It hit me that I'd basically put on the wrong mask for the last months – these people were always going to be something other than "Discord friends".

But was it really wrong? I hadn't pretended to be someone I wasn't; I am my online self the same way I am my offline self. Why, then, does it still feel like these two things coflict?

I think the answer lies in the fact that my brain is not wired to really grasp the interplay of online and offline existence yet. I say this as someone born in the 2000s – even though I'm part of a generation that grew up with the internet, I didn't grow up on the internet. In my mind, they're still separated by a simple observation: the offline world has the unique notion of direct social interaction, while the internet imposes an additional, unavoidable layer of techno-social indirection. This indirection, in turn, enables us to shape our identity more easily than offline – if we choose to keep the layer opaque, our identity is almost entirely determined by our behaviour. On the internet, we can be all mask.

And yet paradoxically, the online and offline world become more and more intertwined, to a point where it's not entirely unreasonable to question the notion that there is a meaningful distinction in our day and age. Information philosopher Luciano Floridi proposes we live in a kind of muddy in-between, a place he calls the infosphere. He provides an analogy for it:

Imagine someone asks whether the water is sweet or salty in the estuary where the river meets the sea. Clearly, that someone has not understood the special nature of the place. Our mature information societies are growing in such a new, liminal place, like mangroves flourishing in brackish water.

Identity as a spectrum

So, given that a) social context plays a role in determining identity and b) the line between online and offline is blurred, our current understanding of identity online doesn't really make sense to me. In too many instances, we seem to cling to the pre-internet idea of a monolithic identity that, I think, is not a suitable way to model our flexible self in the infosphere.

It would make more sense in my eyes, to view identity not as something rigid ("you are this thing") and not even as something discretely variable ("you are one of these things"), but as a context-sensitive, continuous, multi-dimensional spectrum. Now it's not so straight-forward anymore: "in a given context, you are a weighted combination of everything that's associated with you".

Ok, I realise this sounds like I'm trying to turn the human experience into a mathematical equation, which I swear I'm not. Let me illustrate: I'm publishing this and other articles on this blog under a certain pseudonymous identity. The pseudonym is connected to other places online that represent other social contexts. Those, effectively, constitute different identities with a lot of overlap. But as discussed earlier, this online pseudonym and my online presence aren't really that "online" – for example, they overlaps heavily with my identity as a student among peers. Some aspects are shared (I'm as much of an enthusiastic homecook on my socials as I am among peers), some are not (my legal name is not part of this identity), and some are weighted differently (my vision for the web certainly plays a bigger role for my blogging identity than my peer group identity).

"Identity as a spectrum" is incompatible with practically all administrative procedures, forms, social norms and software that exist today. Admittedly, the idea that everyone should be able to separate, blend and switch between identities left and right is pretty radical and would also be difficult to put in practice. What would a world beyond discrete names and rigid personal information even look like? I don't know. What I know is that I am not satisfied with the way we currently dance around the issue. Many people try to consolidate their identities, going back to being a monolith: they "settle" on their legal name, their face and they keep all their presences fully consistent with each other.

I don't feel comfortable with "workarounds" like this, both for obvious reasons of control over my privacy and because it simply doesn't match my idea of identity. Perhaps I find an adequate approximation for the "identity spectrum" in the future – until then, I'll just have to keep it the way it has been for the last years.