after a long-held resistance to participation in the various social media sites on the web (besides blogger that is), i've finally succumbed and have slowly added a facebook page, skype id, twitter site, and now a google+ page. the strange thing about all of this is that, for reasons i won't detail, each site is under a different user id. obviously, the chief reason for this approach is anonymity (though some of the sites are under my real name), but this weekend i started wondering if all of these web identities are more harmful than helpful. is each fractioning off of the whole of my identity breaking me into personas that are less than the total sum?
the precipitating event for these thoughts was the setup of my google+ account. i had been invited by a new friend to join in the beta testing group for this latest entry into the social networking arena, and based on the venue through which i know this individual and others he was inviting, i decided to use one of my various user ids as the profile id. unfortunately, what i didn't realize is that because it's google, when i set up my profile name, it also changed the name associated with any other google product, e.g., gmail. so now my gmail account with its related chat function, which had previously been under my real name, was now listed under a pseudonym, meaning that none of the people that communicated with me through that venue would be able to find me, or conversely, would suddenly have this strange user id that they did not recognize as part of their network. so i then spent, with my new friend's help, the next 30 minutes or so frantically trying to fix it (which i eventually did). but through the course of it all, my new friend learned my real identity.
now i should be clear. as i stated to him via chat, i have no problem with his knowing my real name. he seems like a really decent person, but we've met within a venue in which anonymity tends to be the rule rather than the exception (for good reason), and it frankly does feel odd for someone to know my real name but my not knowing his. at the same time, i was so exhausted by the whole ordeal that i frankly didn't care any more. it's not like i'm trafficking drugs for the mob.
but back to the identity question. what's additionally interesting is that rather than being less of me, the other identities likely allow me to be more fully me than my real self does with all the behavioral expectations shaped by societal norms that are placed on that identity. then there are identities that overlap. the one for this blog is a classic example. there are people that know who "clarus65" is in my actual day to day life. i try not to let this fact inhibit me in my writing because this blog is as much therapy as it is recorded history, and in either case, it would do me no good not to do my best to capture how i'm feeling or what i'm thinking as accurately and fully as possible. if people learn things about me that make them uncomfortable then that's just something we're going to have to work through later. still as is obvious from my shying away from certain details (even in this entry) a little self-censorship does take place.
during the clean-up process for google+, i commented to my new friend that i really needed to get my online life in order. in thinking more about it though maybe what i realized is that my "online life" is just a reflection of my offline life, or that maybe, it's really just life whether expressed on the web or in the flesh. to use a phrase that was oft repeated during the whole google+ incident, it's all very confusing.
4 comments:
> and it frankly does feel odd for
> someone to know my real name but
> my not knowing his.
This is interesting. After I learned your name, you commented about not knowing my identity. Thinking you meant had been using "identity" as a euphemism for "name", I asked "Do you mean my name". I knew fully well that this would cause a quandary for you since if you answered "yes" you would seem, say, shallow.
The result was that you didn't learn my name but learned a whole host of information about me (enough, really, to discover my name if you so desired). Thus, while you didn't learn my name, you learned much more about my identity than my name would have given you.
I'm flying on temazepam which allows me to make better connections, and your blog post on fractured identity reminded me of some stuff in an interview with Leonard Suskind in the July Scientific American.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=bad-boy-of-physics&print=true
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One thing that led Susskind to this conclusion is his principle of black hole complementarity, which holds that there is an inherent ambiguity in the fate of objects that fall into a black hole. From the point of view of the falling object itself, it passes without incident through the hole’s perimeter, or horizon, and is destroyed when it reaches the hole’s center, or singularity. But from the vantage point of an external observer, the falling object is incinerated at the horizon. So what really happens? The question, according to the principle of black hole complementarity, is meaningless: both interpretations are valid.
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This is what physicists mean by “complementary”?
Exactly. It turns out that the mathematics of the event horizon of a black hole is very similar to the uncertainty principle. Again, it’s a question of “or” versus “and.” At a completely classical level something falls into a black hole, something doesn’t fall into a black hole, whatever. There are things outside the black hole, and there are things inside the black hole. What we learned is that’s the wrong way to think. Don’t try to think of things happening outside the horizon and things happening inside the horizon. They’re redundant descriptions of the same thing. You describe it one way, or you describe it the other way. This means we have to give up the old idea that a bit of information is in a definite place
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A related idea favoring antirealism is the holographic principle that Susskind and Nobel laureate Gerard ’t Hooft of Utrecht University formulated in the mid-1990s. It holds that what happens in any volume of spacetime can be explained by what happens on its boundary. Although we usually think of objects as zipping around three-dimensional space, we can equally well think of them as flattened blobs sliding across a two-dimensional surface. So which is the true reality: the boundary or the interior? The theory does not say. Reality, in this holographic conjecture, is perspectival.
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The other thing that really hit hard on the idea of classical reality was the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. If you try to describe an object as having both a position and a momentum, you’ll run into trouble. You should think of it as having a position or a momentum. Don’t try to do both.
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first off, thanks for stopping by and reading my blog (note to self: begging actually works). you also have the great distinction of being the first person to comment in quite some time (i attribute the lack of commentary to the fact that many readers are so grateful to have made it through an entry with their sanity and positive world outlook intact that they don't want to push their luck with the further reflection making a comment would require), so thank you for that as well.
i stand by my original response. not out of concern for seeming shallow (everyone who knows me has figured that long ago), but more in validation of what you yourself stated. as you'll recall the revelation of my name wasn't exactly purposeful (though admittedly i suspected it would likely happen based on a combination of the "fix" i made to the problem and my very rudimentary knowledge of how social networking sites are constructed). naturally, i didn't want you to feel that you had to reveal your name as some sort of quid pro quo. people should only disclose what they are comfortable in revealing. equally as pertinent is that your name was less important to me than the other pieces of information I gave as examples of identity and that you shared (which I appreciated and look forward to future dialogues). now, i noticed that you left another comment as well, so i'm off to read and perhaps react to that one as well.
just read the second comment, and i'm first going to set aside any concerns about the fact that your reading of my blog reminded you of a theory related to black holes. instead i'm going to share what first came to mind when i finished reading your comment. what the quotes reminded me of is actually something that i read in richard mcbrien's book on catholicism. i don't have the book here or i would pull the exact quote, however, the concept was that part of the catholic worldview, as opposed to say the evangelical world view, is that life is viewed from an "and" proposition rather than an "or" proposition. it's faith and works, sacred and secular, body and spirit. it's one of the concepts that attracted me to catholicism in the first place (currently lapsed catholic though i may be).
so from this standpoint, i guess it's whole self and fractured identity. and maybe, as in the case of the cells that make up our body where the genetic pattern of who we are in our entirety is still within that subunit, what i experience in one realm of self doesn't mean that it doesn't impact all of who i am or deny that there is more to me or even prohibit me from bringing more of myself to that realm.
well i could go on, but i have another entry i'd like to write before getting into my day. thanks for expanding my thought horizon.
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