Anne Truitt Zelenka

Joshua Porter of Bokardo argues against considering online life and life-in-the-flesh as separate:

I think the dichotomy of a “digital life” being somehow different from our “real life” is becoming more false every day. Not only do people understand how web technologies work, but they’re leveraging them to improve all parts of their lives. And the evils that Carr is so quick to point out (gang mentality, self-commoditization, and my personal favorite: blogospheric lynch mob!) are simply online representations of people’s behavior…behavior that hasn’t changed for millenia. When Carr gets excited about the latest emotional upswell online and compares it to selling our souls to the Devil, it is more interesting to watch him construct an argument for discussion from it than to actually go watch the event. Sure, there are issues with identity, but for the most part people are honest and are who they say they are.

I agree with Josh, but want to take the discussion someplace a bit radical. I think our conception of a person’s self as permanent, unchanging, and independent limits us. Conventional notions of what a person is say that a person has the same unchanging identity through time and across different contexts. The basic idea is that a person’s life–their acting out of self–underlies their activities, and in fact, determines them.

Modern life, especially when acted out online, calls for more sophisticated, more fluid understandings of what a self is, socially and psychologically. Consider this, from a blogging scare piece:

As some people are discovering, their musings are no longer drawing just pals and confidants, and postings are not as anonymous as they had imagined. Potential employers, romantic partners, and even law enforcement have cottoned on to the fact that they can get tremendous insight into a person’s character — and keep up with every misdeed — simply by clicking throughout these online diaries. [emphasis added]

While you can definitely learn something about a person by checking out their blog or MySpace page, can you really know their character this way? That is, do you know something about their unchanging self? Or have you merely caught them acting in ways sanctioned and rewarded by their peer group, something that many people would do in the same situation regardless of their personal traits?

Psychologists know that most people will excuse their own transgressions with reference to the situation in which they occurred while overestimating the effect of disposition or temperament on other people’s behavior. This is known as the fundamental attribution error. If I’m thinking of hiring a babysitter for my children and I find that she’s posted a drunken picture of herself online, in a place where many people have done the same, am I right if I conclude that she has alcoholic and exhibitionistic tendencies? Must I worry that she will drink on the job? Perhaps not. More likely, I’m discounting the situational influences and getting caught up in the idea of individuals as separate and separable from the relationships and situations within which they act.

Even within our own minds, our selves aren’t context-independent and unitary. Current research in cognitive science suggests that the self may be constructed through memory by an independent self-knowledge module in the brain. This module maintains representations of various versions of the self in relationship to different people, such as our parents or our partners. This research also suggests that knowledge of our traits (semantic memory) is stored separately from memory of our actual behavior (episodic memory).

We need more acknowledgement of the many different people one person can be: online, offline, at different points in the life span, when interacting with different people, operating under various constraints and rules. I agree with Josh that we shouldn’t draw a sharp distinction between online and offline life. However, we shouldn’t overinterpret our lives as unified and unitary either. I’m not arguing that we should throw out personal identity entirely–that would be utterly ridiculous. But to counteract our tendency to assume things about other people that don’t hold invariantly, we need to think of people’s identities as more fluid, forming themselves to the contours of the different bottles in which they find themselves. Individualist cultures such as that of the United States celebrate uniqueness and independence–the separate self. People in such cultures are more likely to commit the fundamental attribution error of assuming that other people’s actions are determined more by temperament than by situational factors.

There are practical reasons to lessen a commitment to the self as an abiding, unchanging individual:

• Our children may not work as hard to learn difficult subjects like math, figuring if they don’t get it immediately, they just don’t have the talent for it.
• We might overlook someone for a job they would excel at because five years ago they posted something irresponsible on the Web.
• We sometimes think that expertise mainly requires talent and we don’t put in the time and practice that could make us experts in areas that appeal to us.
• We attribute group behaviors, like women’s use of subordinate language, to inherent characteristics of the group members rather than considering how situational factors force certain types of responses.

I’m touching on a variety of interwoven concepts here including the self, personal identity, and temperament. I offer this not as a set of conclusions, but as a way to continue the discussion of how online life relates to “real” life, of how we might benefit from understanding ourselves and our actions as contextual and changeable. The explosion in online interaction opportunities and the freedom they offer us to act in new ways put the lie to the idea that identity and self are fixed and independent. Now that we have new, more flexible ways of interacting, we need to understand ourselves in correspondingly new and flexible ways.