By Tracey Follows
Is Identity the Issue of Our Age?
How am I authenticated? What does my biology have in store for me? How can I explore alternative personas in a virtual game? Where does my identity go once I’m dead?
The Importance of Identity
Identity is fundamental not only to understanding ourselves but to enabling other people to understand who we are at any given moment, and therefore decide if they can trust us. Many voices in the 21st Century contend that identity is almost completely illusory (Wolfe, 2013). But it is clear to me that without the ability to identify a person as the same from one moment to the next, the ability to ascribe duties, rights and responsibilities to that person becomes impossible. Roger Scruton goes further than this suggesting that without a sense of identity, even emotions – such as anger, admiration, envy, and remorse – would vanish and the purpose of life on earth would vanish with them (Scruton, 1996). He’s right, since if one cannot ascribe any particular emotion to an identifiable person, how would one even start to relate to others, or form relationships at all?
Moreover, we often need to ascribe emotions to identifiable people in the virtual world, as well as the physical world, for there is a burgeoning number of people who we follow online, who do not physically exist in, what we might call, the real world. Virtual influencers such as Lil Miquela or Shudu or even the attractive computer-generated customer service advisors from Samsung, known as Neon people (Hitti, 2020) have appeared in place of real humans. Many of us are happy to engage with these characters online and even get into deep conversation. Teens from all over the world nervously wait for Lil Miquela’s latest post, whether that be to tell them how she was up all night working on a pitch, or spill the beans on the romantic status of her on-again-off-again boyfriend.
From Persons to Profiles
These characters aren’t real in the traditional sense – they are not flesh and blood – they are code. But that does not matter to the audience, to them they are real. What this might suggest is that the reality and the narrative have become decoupled. In fact the narrative is more important than reality. Or to put it another way, the narrative is the reality. Plenty of my research in this area has pointed to teens being very willing to treat such characters as real. ‘I’ll be friends with a virtual person’ they tell us, and who are we to deny them that, the way the world is today? (Follows, 2021, p.81)
More recently, NPR reported that even many Linkedin profiles are not what they seem (Bond, 2022). By using fake profiles, many companies are reaching out to connect with Linkedin users in the hope of generating a lead. As the report suggests, ‘Demand for online sales leads exploded during the pandemic as it became hard for sales teams to pitch their products in person’ [ibid]. It seems that this is a new way to hire a little bit of help to make a sale, regardless of the fact that it is an infringement of Linkedin’s policy to use wholly computer-generated profiles. Everyone on there must represent a real person, according to the company.
The Profilicity Theory
Amongst all this technology-generated confusion, is a truth about how our human identity is changing today. Where once we talked of ‘authenticity’, now we talk of ‘profiles’. And it is not only because we love to post our likes, preferences and pronouns to ensure we are identified in the way we want to be. It is because we are no longer in physical proximity and now have to rely on an intermediate environment to represent us. Today, we are relying on technology to profile and represent us, for we no longer represent our ‘self’.
This point is well made by Hans-Georg Moeller, in his book ‘You and Your Profile’. He writes, ’Just as sincerity lost its grip on society and individuals with the shift towards modernity, authenticity is now fading away along with more recent changes. Authenticity relies heavily on personal interaction between people. Authentic individuals mutually confirm their identity value, and to do this, they must know one another and be in the same time in the same place. In the virtual world we inhabit today, such ‘real life’ interaction has become less and less important’ (Moeller & D’Ambrosia, 2021, p. 15)
Does it really matter, therefore, that these Linkedin salespeople don’t exist in ‘real life’? They perform an important function in virtuality, and if one feels like connecting with them, is there really any down side?
We may or may not agree on that but what is becoming clear, is that the Age of Authenticity is over. We are entering the Age of Profilicity. That is to say, we are being transformed into data, and to be more specific, ‘data profiles’. We might want to represent ourselves in one way but that will be augmented or limited by whatever the machine can read of us – and that’s what goes out into the world. Furthermore, our identity is now platform-dependent as we surely must acknowledge that our profiles on each of the social networks are slightly different. On Facebook we are a more sociable
Fig 1:
Image Credit:Vadim Bogulov. Source: Unsplash
An artistic portrayal of pixelated imagery, depicting the imprecise nature of a digital image that is resolution dependent but displays incorrectly when appearing in inappropriate media versions of ourselves, on Instagram we appear a more creative version of ourselves, and on Tinder well, more dateable. We are all but layers of digital information in these new spaces.
Fluidity Of Identity
And this challenges us to rethink what we might have taken to be a truth about the real world too. That we do not – and should not – try to represent the same version of our ‘self’ to everyone we meet. That representation should be context dependent.
I have suggested elsewhere that it is time to start thinking of our identity as more like polymorphic code, that is code which mutates while keeping its original algorithm intact. A sum, for example, could be expressed as 1 + 3 or as 6 – 2 with the end result being the same (Follows, 2021, p.190). Our identity would function in the same way. I could use different data in different contexts to project different versions of myself but will always achieve the same end result: me.
A young cultural researcher in China illuminated this point, saying: ‘I have so many different selves, and they’re all authentically me but they’re all different for all different usages, different context, different social circles…” (Follows, 2021 p.90) He was, in fact, describing something akin to profilicity.
Hans-Georg Moeller in Macau, echoes that sentiment in a recent interview, when he suggests that ‘In Profilicity, we can recover this actual art of existence that we have. We’re equally the father as we are the kid…they don’t kind of cancel one another out, they enhance one another. And I think with Profilicity and living and creating and being truly invested in different profiles, we can actually go back to some form of richer existence, why not?” (Follows, 2022).
Where this becomes especially interesting is in exploring new ways to open ourselves up to all our different profiles, all our different selves. Whilst we continue to think in terms of the used narratives of the past like ‘authenticity’ it will never occur to us to think there might be some value in investigating or communicating with the other selves within. But this new approach to identity, which we could term profilicity, will change our inner narratives, and do just that.
Innovation And Identity
Take for example the innovations in digital therapy. One such development previously known as Freud-Me (and now renamed ConVRself) allows a person to become their own counsellor, by employing virtual reality (VR) to access other sides of their self (Virtual Body Works). You start by choosing a ‘self’ avatar, then choose a ‘counsellor’ avatar. Then embodied as yourself, you explain your problem to the counsellor. Then switching perspectives to become the counsellor, you listen to yourself explaining the problem. The idea is that this technology will help you consider a problem as if you are an outsider listening to a patient or a friend and to offer a solution as the counsellor, before listening to it yourself. The developers believe that this can be particularly helpful in tackling mental illness and moves us into the mode of self-counselling.
This is something that would never have been initiated if hamstrung by the used future of authenticity, which to all intents and purposes denies the existence of our many selves. In fact it is reminiscent of the work by Hal and Sidra Stone who propose the need for us to rediscover our disowned selves, explaining, “It is important to understand the concept of disowned selves and to actively accept the challenge of the multitude of life situations that bring our disowned selves to us. The challenge to embrace these selves in a creative fashion is, perhaps, the most difficult task in the evolution of consciousness” (Stone, H. & Stone, S, 1989, pp 822-823). That notion of many selves is necessary for the ConVRself self-counselling approach which, over time, could dramatically alter our approaches to
Fig 2:
A 2 x 2 matrix for scenarios to explore alternative possibilities for identity management and the understanding of self. Author: Tracey Follows.
mental health therapy at a societal level, purely by bringing our many selves to light, through the medium of VR. As Ivana Milojević and Sohail Inayatullah make clear in their paper on Narrative Foresight ‘The narratives we are born into…not only shape our identities, they also provide meaningful frameworks for seeing, indeed, constituting reality’ (Milojević, I., & Inayatullah, S., 2015, p. 153). Once these frameworks of meaning are changed, they argue, everything changes, “reframing is social change’ (ibid.).
The ‘Future Self’ Scenarios
Which brings me to consider some scenarios for the future self, which we can illustrate under the following headings: The Self in Crisis; the Distributed Self; and the Complex Self.
The Authentic Self is the aforementioned self, unable to change over time since unification of that self would render it petrified. Something that may be achievable, albeit uncomfortable, whilst inhabiting a purely analogue world.
The Self in Crisis, however, is characterised by constant struggle. The social expectation is that a person should only behave in those ways that are 100% consistent with the way they have behaved in the past. Growth of the self is hampered because one is living up to the standards of ‘authenticity’ but tension naturally exudes from the self, given the expectation of behaving consistently rather than creatively. The only times that a diversion is permitted is to see behind the scenes, a paparazzi photo on a day without make-up whilst one pops to the shops. A familiar moment in which it has been said that everyone can take comfort, since it echoes the truth that underneath the glamour we put on for social engagements, the authentic self is somewhere there beneath.
The Distributed Self acknowledges that we have moved on from authenticity toward the notion of profilicity, that we exist as data fragments all over the internet, making us machine-readable as individual people online. This scenario does reflect that we are richly layered and interesting because it recognises everything we like, prefer, join, and buy. However, whilst it acknowledges a multiplicity of selves – as in, a multiplicity of platforms we visit where we display a slightly different version of self– what’s really known is only our behaviour: the digital world does not really recognise ‘us’. We need to remind ourselves that there is no identity layer to the web. And as the saying goes, ‘on the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog’ (Cameron, 2005) You could be a real human with many selves but equally you could be a cat with many selves or a dog with many selves.
Finally, the Complex Self. As has already been remarked, “The self is as complex as multiple ways of knowing define it.” (Inayatullah, 1999, p. 817). And it should come as no surprise that in an age of complexity, one scenario is to embrace that complexity within the self, and in fact, celebrate it. It is the acknowledgement that we play different roles in life, and present ourselves in different ways dependent upon the context. As Hans-Georg Moeller has pointed out in conversation, this is an art and one that displays empathy for the others we relate to. This is a more sophisticated scenario which makes for a more interesting future. For one wonders what it offers as a framework for thinking about our changing self over time.
Could it be that much of the complexity of our self, or selves, can best be understood by AI assistants, as they learn to recognise patterns of behaviour within us, that can be translated to others we relate to? Could these AI assistants ‘decode’ our many selves in a way that helps us to be better understood, or provide fresh insights into our selves for us to absorb over time? As Dator (2004) has suggested, artificial intelligence and genetically engineered beings may demand to be treated “first as equal to humans, and then as having rights, privileges, and responsibilities on their own terms” (Dator, 2004, p. 52) in which case, the notion that identity is merely illusory may not only be unhelpful but unjust. Or, could it be that versions of ourselves are captured in ways that can be played back to us at different times of life, as we meet up with our younger or older selves. This is the hope for the complex self, that we can learn more about ‘you’ or ‘me’ from relating to other versions of ourselves, as much as we do from relating to others (whether they be human or non-human).
Applying Causal Layered Analysis
And it is with that in mind, that I set out the Causal Layered Analysis, an approach developed by Inayatullah, S. And Milojević, I. (2015) below, to map out the big shifts that are occurring as we embrace the complexities of our physical and digital identities and say goodbye to the notion of authentic self.
Fig 3:
A Causal Layered Analysis for personal identity which compares current understanding and assumptions about the notion of self with an alternative narrative built for the future. Author: Tracey Follows
This CLA draws the comparison between the dominant media portrayals of identity today and the emergence of newly expressive ways of seeing, and knowing, identity. The levels of litany and social structure here (fig. 2) demonstrate that traditional media is wedded to that ‘used future’ of authenticity. In particular, mainstream media still focuses on headline stories of celebrities or political figures indulging in ‘hypocrisy’, dramatising the ways in which their words or actions are incongruent from one subject to the next, or when dealing with different groups of people. This is all judged by the benchmark of ‘authenticity’. Often, a marker of authenticity has been the spontaneous showcasing of emotion, with those in the public spotlight expected to cry on demand, in order to portray themselves as ‘real’. The Housewives of New York, The Kardashians, and The Apprentice, all famous reality TV shows, derive their viewing figures from the very expectation of an emotional meltdown or public explosion, to be captured on film. But how ‘real’ does this actually feel?
It no longer feels real because new media (web 3, pop-up stores, game worlds with avatars) are community-driven rather than corporate, and actively accommodate a variety of identity performances rather than the limited repertoire of ‘one’. Digital media, and its profiling, encourages us to have a deeper understanding of the plurality of personality and identity performance across platforms. Indeed, it demonstrates the value of having a more accommodating attitude to multiple versions of the self: we have many sides to our identity, many ways to perform, and we exist in a dynamic media that can host many alternative representations of the self, all at once. That ambiguity may render an identity less defined (by the old standard of authenticity) but it also renders it much more creative, and creativity has real social currency in a future that runs on automation.
An understanding of this helps to shift our worldview, from one that prizes the fixedness of identity, to one that celebrates the fluidity of identity. This re-sets our expectations of personal identity from something that should remain fixed and unchanging, to something that flourishes through its fluidity: less expected to be perfectly preserved over time, and more expected to be appreciated for its ever-increasing complexity.
I will end with a quote from Hal & Sidra Stone who sum up both the threat and the value of this shift (Stone, H. & Stone, S, 1989, pp 296): “The concept that we are made up of different selves is sometimes difficult to understand. Some people object to this idea, arguing that such a theory fragments the personality. We feel that it is already ‘fragmented’ and our task is to become aware of this fragmentation or multiplicity of selves so that we can make valid choices in our lives.”
Acceptance of the complex flavours of any self will help us make valid choices in our own lives, but more than that, it would help us better understand each other too.
References
Bond, S. (2022). That smiling Linkedin profile face might be a computer-generated fake. NPR https://www.npr.org/2022/03/27/1088140809/fake-linkedin-profiles?t=1648566001386
Cameron, K. (2005). The Laws of Identity. Identity Blog. https://www.identityblog.com/stories/2005/05/13/TheLawsOfIdentity.pdf
Dator, J. (2004). Futures of Identity, Racism, and Diversity. Journal of Futures Studies, 8(3), 47-54.
Hitti, N. (2020). Samsung’s artificial Neon humans are a new kind of life, Dezeen https://www.dezeen.com/2020/01/15/samsung-neon-star-labs-artificial-humans/
Follows, T. (2022). The age of profilicity and identity politics (No. 5) [Audio podcast episode] In The Future of You. Podcast Labs. https://open.spotify.com/episode/4nMb5DkrBMgwHbFTaeLTjW?si=OCR965TNSLmQbOa1wOX_TA&context=spotify%3Ashow%3A5tvPQVji9uut82dsVjyxme&dl_branch=1&nd=1
Follows, T. (2021) The Future of You: Can Your Identity Survive 21st Century Technology? (Elliott & Thompson).
Inayatullah, S. (1999). A depth approach to the futures of the self. Futures, 31, 813-817 https://www.meta-future.org/uploads/7/7/3/2/7732993/a_depth_approach_to_the_futures_of_the_self_futures_1999.pdf
Inayatullah, S. And Milojević, I. (2015). CLA 2.0. Tamkang University.
Milojević, I., & Inayatullah, S. (2015). Narrative foresight. Futures, 73, 151–162. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.futures.2015.08.007
Moeller, H. & D’Ambrosia, P. (2021) You and Your Profile: Identity After Authenticity (Columbia)
Scruton, R. (1996) An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Philosophy (London: Duckworth)
Stone, H. & Stone, S (1989) Embracing Our Selves: The Voice Dialogue Manual (New World Library) Kindle edition.
Virtual Body Works, ConVRself, https://www.virtualbodyworks.com/homepages/convrself
Miquela (2022). In Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miquela
Polymorphic Code (2022). In Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polymorphic_code
Shudu Gram (2022). In Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shudu_Gram
Wolfe, S. (2013) The Illusion of Self, Philosophy Now. Retrieved November 15th, 2022, from https://philosophynow.org/issues/97/The_Illusion_of_the_Self
Author
Tracey Follows AFWAAS FRSA APF
CEO Founder of Futuremade, the futures consultancy, based in the UK
