An Ode to the Modes of the Fractal Identity
As my final formal entry on this project (who knows what may come in the future just for fun?), I ask the question, what is the fractal identity (note the singular here)? It is the Reading Rainbow of identities. It can do anything and be as many things as it wants thanks to the affordances of digital technology. Let us count the ways of being fractal, i.e., the multiplicities that networked digital technology affords:
online avatar (e.g., World of Warcraft, Second Life) - a digital avatar that looks and acts any way it wants, from male to female (or both or none at all), rich or poor, human or animal (or non-human or robotic), brash or bashful, big or small, etc. This form of identity often experiments with the fantastical and represents the most overt form of bricolage in the flesh, as it were. The virtual reality or videogame identity is the playground identity of Sherry Turkle, that is, the identity or identities of play and rampant experimentation. It bears little resemblance to the offline identity while giving it room to breathe, try on new masks and personas, and indulge in the fictional for non-fiction's sake.
social networking site (SNS) identity (e.g., Facebook, blogs, Twitter) - an individual's identity is far more likely to resemble that in "real life" or offline. These sites often require the user to create a profile that contains characteristics of his/her life, e.g., birth date, city of birth, current location/place of residence, level of education, interests, favorite X (books, music, cuisine, etc.), and so on. While characteristics can be fabricated and invented from thin air, individuals are strongly encouraged to put forth an identity that is more honest (perhaps not revealing everything about one's life but nevertheless that is factual, piecemeal or no) than a gaming or Second Life avatar's identity.
bot identity/-ies - this identity is spawned through code and automatically similar to the identities I reported on back in January. Although those were not entirely auto-generated or "bot" identities in the sense that they were purely manufactured via code - they were produced by a bot that mass e-mailed a small number of online forms that numerous offline, real-life individuals filled out and submitted - the true bot identity is not a distant reality, one can imagine. It would only take a very ambitious and determined coder to "hack" a bot identity, rather, bot identities into existence. Much like a fractal begins as short but complex "code" in the form of a mathematical formula, I don't believe it beyond the realm of the possibility for some equally complicated but compact code to be devised, compiled, and executed that results in a countless multitude of identities - all seemingly copies but technically not identical [the fractal way] - that could be used in any number of ways: accounts or profiles in SNSs, message boards, Facebook, and so on to obscure one's true identity; countless "participants" or "conscientious objectors" to a news poll or feedback form to a particular social or political cause; a means to obfuscate one's identity and avoid the harassment of spam e-mail, calls and texts; and so on, things I'm sure I haven't even imagined yet.
multitasking identity - going back to Rushkoff's Present Shock that inspired this project over a year ago, I must include the identity, the offline identity as it multitasks in the digital, that experiences digiphrenia - the stress and demand of divided attention and attempting to match the "limitless real estate" of the digital, i.e., being in multiple places at one time, managing numerous tasks, often completely unrelated and not overlapping whatsoever, at once. This mode or form of identity maintains one of the most tenuous of connections to fractal identities in that it resembles more a symptom or problem that can occur when the single tries to be multiplicitous. More to the point, this is not the case of a single identity trying on other identities or changing identity like the other examples above. There is no experimentation or, necessarily, expansion of one's identity here. The multitasker is an offline identity or persona simply juggling too many tasks, trying to do too much at once. At best, the multitasking idenity is the fractured or fragmented identity, not the multiplied (much as it may want to be or tries), not in most cases the empowered, not the expanded.
??? - are there yet other modes of identity not explained here? I believe the bullet points above cover the primary modes of identity the metaphor, the thinking technology (Haraway), the evocative object (Turkle) of fractal identities seeks to reveal. What other identities do you see when you think of the potentially endless possibilities fractal identities can be?
