Lives on the Screen

Despite all the articles and books I've read, the databases I've scoured, and the heavy comtemplation and the soulsearching I've done, I believe that this project has amounted to, to put it in Turkle's words, an "exploration of surfaces" as opposed to the discovery of a single, all-encompassing, final "answer" to the notion of fractal identities.

"... the postmodern is a world without depth, a world of surface. If there is no underlying meaning, or a meaning we shall never know, postmodern theorists argue that the privileged way of knowing can only be through an exploration of surfaces." (p. 47, Life on the Screen)

This project very much amounts to a survey of literature and thinking, both old and new, on a topic of endless fascination throughout the ages: identity. As I have hopped from one text to the next, gleaning this idea and that, this theory and that, I realize how difficult it is to produce completely new or original thinking on the topic. What I have done is document an experience that resembles this "exploration of surfaces," but I do believe that I have also contributed new meaning, however small, with fractal identities. It is a new metaphor to add to the heap of terms, phrases, theories, and other metaphors on that elusive complexity known as identity. I will comment in a later entry on what this new metaphor means. Right now, the task at hand is to remark on the brilliant conceptualizations of identity and self Turkle has compiled in the last chapter of her book, Life on the Screen, "Chapter 10: Identity Crisis."

. . .

Turkle may have summed up the concept of fractal identities for me with these words:

"We are encouraged to think of ourselves as fluid, emergent, decentralized, multiplicitous, flexible, and ever in process." (pp. 263-4)

Indeed, my mistake with fractal identities may have been in imagining a static, uniform identity or persona (the offline, "rooted" self) in control of the show that then splits and fragments in online environments. Yes, this identity is based on its relations to others (Goffman's performance), but why did I think of it in such antiquated, modernist terms, that is, as some kind of fixed ego, a "core self" of seeming permanency? Instead, the analog and digital identity more resemble an amalgamation of psychological facets - personality traits, memories, and experiences - that change, each coming and going, on a near-constant basis. Psychologist Kenneth Gergen characterized identity best as a "pastiche of personalities," a "conglomerate of 'ones'":

"[T]he test of competence is not so much the integrity of the whole but the apparent correct representation appearing at the right time, in the right context, not to the detriment of the rest of the internal 'collective.'" (pp. 256-7)

There is a danger to be avoided in conceiving of the self as multiplicities (the fragments of fractal identities) sans a center to hold them together:

"The essence of the [multiple, fluid] self is not unitary, nor are its parts stable entities. It is easy to cycle through aspects and these are themselves changing through constant communication with each other." (p. 261)

This "centerlessness" need not mean our identities disintegrate into nothingness, that not having a persistent core identity will lead to an inevitable nihilism. Rather, while there is no "core" authoritative self commanding the ship, so to speak, this collective of traits can still hold together with what Turkle calls coherence and need not mean identity is binary (either a permanent "core" that fails to hold up against contemporary psychoanalysis or a "hole" full of changing personalities liable to spin into chaos):

"Multiplicity is not viable if it means shifting among personalities that cannot communicate. Multiplicity is not acceptable if it means being confused to the point of immobility. . . . [Robert Jay] Lifton [author of The Protean Self] sees another possibility, a healthy protean self. It is capable, like Proteus, of fluid transformations but is grounded in coherence and a moral outlook. It is multiple but integrated. You can have a sense of self without being one self." [emphasis mine] (p. 258)

Like relationships in the offline environment, a robust identity made up of many facets and traits holds together with communication.

In these passages, it is worth noting that fractal identities share these traits: multiplicity (through repetition/replication?), coherence, integration, communication, and, furthermore, no center. Take any fractal and focus on a segment of it, that segment will seem to resemble to original and yet contain subtle differences and alterations. Focus on a segment of that fractal, and it will resemble the originating segment while exhibiting new, subtle differences. There is no "central" segment, and yet they all hold together. So too are fractal identities fluid, changing, emergent, and decentralized.

. . . .

Moving on to more ideas that I thought were original in my head but they turned out to have been retreads of other people's ideas, we have the object-to-think-with. I considered digital technology, especially social networking sites and online video games, as perfect examples of objects-to-think-with that were not physical objects. Mistakenly, I perceived of Turkle's OtTw in purely physical terms and assumed she thought the same. At the very least, I did not believe she had expanded them to include non-physical digital objects, but my assumption was extremely short sighted. Naturally, the concept - theory - is expansive and flexible enough to extend far beyond the physical. Once more, I'll allow Turkel to put in the last work on how the object-to-think-with need not be material or physical object:

"Today, people are being helped to develop ideas about identity as multiplicity by a new practice of identity as multiplicity in online life. Virtual personae are objects-to-think-with." (p. 260)

And so this item, another critical element in identity-building, can come literally from anywhere: a physical object in the offline world or an event such as a movie that was watched or concert that was attended as well as wholly fictional events such as countless fantasy or science-fiction stories, an experience in an online virtual environment such as Second Life, or the truly intangible, a dream! Each of these objects is perfectly capable of evoking thought and emotion as well as fundamentally defining one's identity. Can I have a thought that is mine and that is original and mine?

. . .

Later in the chapter, Turkle calls upon Donna Haraway whose prescient early-1980's "Cyborg Manifesto" provides another unique angle on identity especially with regard to technology. Naturally, Haraway's self defies simplicity and one-dimensionality. It wallows in the postmodern tropes of ambituity and ambivalence, irony and contradiction, as it resists a facile definition. However, these traits leave it open to all manner of interpretation and meaning building. For Donna Haraway, the "split and contradictory self" is also the "knowing self," and she says of it:

"The knowing self is partial in all its guises, never finished, whole, simply there and original; it is always constructed and stitched together imperfectly; and therefore able to join with another, to see together without claiming to be another."