Saturday, March 8, 2014

Identity in the Digital Sphere: Is Facebook Fulfilling a Need We Didn’t Know We Had?

[Produced in conjunction with Dr. Christopher Voparil's Ethics After Postmodernism course; Spring 2012, Union Institute and University]


With the exception of the electric light, there never has been a technology that better exemplifies Marshall McLuhan’s aphorism “The medium is the message.” The computer is almost all process. There are, for example, no “great computers,” as there are great writers, painters, or musicians. There are “great programs” and “great programmers,” but their greatness lies in their ingenuity either in simulating a human function or in creating new possibilities of calculation, speed, and volume.            (Postman, 1993, p. 118)

            The nature of identity construction, due largely to the promotion of new communication technologies, has escaped our traditional notions. Should a climate of “almost all process” replace more common modes of representation, individuals may find identification with others, and the seeking of commonalities, a task rendered more difficult due to technological capabilities. This discussion will embrace introduce and illustrate what may be an improvement on the climate of illegimitization of individual identity at work in the mass media in the 1970s and 1980s: the popularization of platforms such as MySpace, Twitter, and Facebook have allowed individuals an ability to define and provide finite information about themselves, their views, and identities, beyond dynamics established by postmodern definitions.

Technopoly, Convergence, and the Power of Technological Literacy

Tim Berners-Lee, the developer primarily responsible for the creation of the World Wide Web, described his intention in establishing a global network of communication: “the original thing I wanted to do was make it a collaborative medium, a place where we [could] all meet and read and write” (cited by Richardson, 2006, p. 1). In J. Bolter’s chapter “Theory and Practice in new Media Studies” (2003), questions related to the origin of identity, and the means by which one’s identity may effect social change (p. 19): “the idea that technologies could work as autonomous agents of social change has been explicitly rejected by cultural studies and by Marxist critics since Raymond Williams (1975). From the perspectives of such critics, it is society that develops and molds new technologies to meet its cultural or economic needs.” While few would dispute that Berners-Lee’s “collaborative medium” has come into existence, as the Internet has become a pervasive spring of information, bubbling up in many directions and locations, Bolter’s chicken-or-the-egg dilemma questions technology as an “autonomous agents of social change.” Does technology itself have an “autonomous” ability to be a forum in which individuals may construct their identity through their actions, or does is technology created to fulfill existing means of human expression?

Technology is a profitable and important industry; since the conception of the original home computers, producers have sought to distribute on a regular basis updated products with additional features and innovative functionality. Separate study of the extent to which the evolution of technology has enabled individuals to create their own applications and software modifications—including the open-source software movement—may focus on the integration of retailers, investors, and those willing to create new implementations of existing technology. This discussion regards the participation of individuals in the World Wide Web who possess no specific set of technical knowledge, but are rather consumers of the platforms made available to general participants of online collaboration. Do individuals’ use of online collaborative platforms for expression represent works of autonomous expression separate from the technology utilized, or are those platforms fulfilling a human need for the original creation and ownership of identity that had been, until recently, previously unavailable on such a wide scale?

In this country, technology has become a pervasive element of our environment: at home, at work, or in transit, computers allow unprecedented access to information. Recent Internet usage statistics identify almost three-quarters of the population of North America, and globally, almost 33% of the world population, as regular users of the Internet (Miniwatts, 2012, table 1). One survey in the United States found 93% of students ages 12-17 are regular users of the Internet, and 64% of those create public content to post on the Internet (Lenhart, Madden, Magill & Smith, 2007, p. 2)—statistics from before the popularization of Facebook, and prior to the invention of Twitter. Disregarding demographic identifications, it is important to understand that populations’ access to the Internet will continue to grow; between 2000 and 2012, Internet access grew by over 500% globally (Miniwatts, 2012, table 1). 

            While the collaborative nature of Berners-Lee’s vision evolves on a daily basis with the creation of each new web site and Internet application, an individual using the Internet may be challenged to master and harness a steady stream of information, and, simultaneously, digest and participate in interaction with other individuals. Maintaining a clear understanding of how information and collaboration are to work together, and, separately, recognizing different delivery methods for the information and collaboration available on the Internet, individual Internet users should feel challenged to understand their own relationship and understanding of technology. Beyond understanding how a web page can appear on a computer screen, educators and students alike need encouragement to gain an understanding about the personal and original information that exists about them on the Internet.

Our understanding of technology—what it is, how to use it, and how to learn from it—is important, as it allows us access to information, and may provide us the ability to complete new and unique tasks. According to an interdisciplinary 2002 report, “technological literacy” may be defined as “three interdependent dimensions—knowledge, ways of thinking and acting, and capabilities… Like literacy in reading, mathematics, science, or history, the goal of technological literacy is to provide people with the tools to participate intelligently and thoughtfully in the world around them” (Committee on Technological Literacy, National Academy of Engineering, National Research Council, 2002, p. 3). This interaction with the “world around” individuals who embrace skills of technological literacy are, by this definition, empowered, “intelligently and thoughtfully,” through which the consumption of information is a rhetorical and educative act—supported by likely only some degree of synchronous human contact.

Jenkins (2006) identifies a “participation gap” (p. 23) among those who use technologies; whether individuals may be identified as digital immigrants or digital natives does not matter unless application and use of technology is evident. “Throughout the 1990s, the primary question was one of access. Today, most Americans have some limited access to the Internet… through the public library or the local school… As long as the focus remains on access, reform remains focused on technologies; as soon as we begin to talk about participation, the emphasis shifts to cultural protocols and practices” (Jenkins, p. 23). Understanding our opportunities to participate in the creation of information on the Internet is critical to a new understanding of technology in education; the Internet is the first and only global, participatory medium, and its volume of information will continue to grow exponentially. Individuals need to stay aware of ways to create new content using technology; students and educators, regardless of their pedagogical focus, need to understand how technology is changing our culture. “Convergence” is a term to define how “the one-to-one relationship that used to exist between a medium and its use is eroding” (Pool, 1983, as cited by Jenkins, 2006, p. 10). Technology has helped change how specific streams of information are received and utilized, and convergence is a term to help identify these changes. This erosion is important to a variety of theorists and scholars, as well as to those who seek a more clear understanding of the relationship between mass media and technological literacy.

Neil Postman (1993), in discussing the use of technology as a means to more efficiently access a greater quantity of information, discusses the importance of “control mechanisms [that] are needed to cope with new information” (p. 72). Using an example of courses that are excluded from an educational institution’s catalogue (p. 74), Postman (1993) structures an argument that identifies a technological climate in which information “is no longer controllable, [and] a general breakdown in psychic tranquility and social purpose occurs” (p. 72). He defines “technopoly” as having “at its aim a grand reductionism in which human life must find its meaning in machinery and technique… the submission of all forms of cultural life to the sovereignty of technique and technology” (p. 52). Previously, technology was viewed in society as a ‘means to an end,’ a tool with which tasks may be accomplished, challenges faced, obstacles tackled. Individuals’ identities are at risk through what Postman names as a “grand reductionism,” as the installation of meaning into actions and the generation of rhetoric renders individual characteristics less important, in an environment in which “psychic tranquility and social purpose” are at stake.

Should Postman’s “technopoly” characterize present-day relationships between individuals and the platforms which they utilize to communicate, use of and interpretation of language becomes an important quality of creative and personal expression.  “Unlike broadcast television or film, then, “resistant reading” is not the only available strategy for digital media, because individual practitioners can produce their own alternative forms. And unlike the theorists of film and television, at least some new media theorists have the opportunity to become new media practitioners” (Bolter, p. 23). The ‘resistance reading’ Bolter describes an informational climate in which individuals participate and evaluate content they and others have created; the collaboration between individual “practicioners” is critical to Bolter’s characterization. Knowing the process necessary to create a MySpace or Facebook page is valuable; more valuable is an individual’s conscious, substantial, and purposeful participation within these networks. Even more desirable is an understanding of how writers and others may help establish norms of practice for new communication platforms.


            Trends in how we use technologies to create and share information are important, for individuals may continue to embrace new ways to communicate with each other, with their communities, and with our world. Neil Postman (1993) guards against the dissolution of individuals’ original narratives, in an environment in which characteristics of identity are surrendered. The ethical disaster of “technopoly” is a crisis of representation; Postman described it as a

… story without a moral center. It puts in its place efficiency, interest, and economic advance. It promises heaven on earth through the conveniences of technological progress. It casts aside all traditional narratives and symbols that suggest stability and orderliness, and tells, instead, of a life of skills, technical expertise, and the ecstasy of consumption. Its purpose is to produce functionaries for an ongoing Technopoly.         (p. 179)

This reliance on individuals’ “technical expertise” may be well-represented by the definition of technological literacy discussed in the previous section. Does this set of skills—of methods of definition through online communication platforms—only fulfill Postman’s nightmarish vision of sublimation, from being a society that values personal expression, to one that seeks to “produce functionaries”? Detailed comparison of online communication platforms—a comparison to include Facebook, Twitter, and Google applications—may yeild useful analysis of each site, for its ability to promote “efficiency, interest, and economic advance” exclusively.

            With basic technological knowledge, individuals are likely to make choices regarding their expression and identification, within the confines of a given platform: even prior to the World Wide Web, thousands of individuals used home computers to communicate via telephone modems and both commerical and homegrown bulletin board services. As these platforms have evolved, individuals have participated in each manifestation of online communication—and have helped refine future products and applications. While present-day software may request users’ participation in constructive criticism towards the revision of future products, little technological literacy is required in the exchange: the feedback provided is essential towards the continuation of a commodity, a full marketplace of technological challenge and innovation.

            The role of the individual in both the construction and propagation digital communication platforms is critical: the climate of identity construction in this effort is increasingly complicated. In “Differance,” Derrida explores the value of definition, of seeing “the classically determined structure of the sign in all the banality of its characteristics—signification as the differance of temporization” (p. 9). What is present and what is real to an individual becomes a question of presence and recognition, of symbols and language. Seeking the origin of language and speech, Derrida’s action of differance is theoretical and linguistic: it is “the name we might give to the ‘active,’ moving discord of different forces, and of differences of forces” (p. 18). While the interpretation of individuals’ actions through the formal and symbolic study in the “human sciences” may aid in understanding mythopoetics, Derrida’s coined term differance is itself a duality, one with a “strange cleavage” (p. 19). While Derrida’s characterization keeps both what is “economical and non-economical, the same and the entirely other” simultaneously—one cannot be part of both the technologically-enabled and the luddite crowds. Derrida’s primary concern seems to be observers’ over-reaching perceptions and assumptions in the construction of knowledge and meaning: “the ‘unconscious’,” as a metaphysical example, “is no more a ‘thing’ than it is any other thing, is no more a thing than it is a virtual or masked consciousness” (p. 21).

            Should our abilities to establish and acknowledge our differences—what is “the same and the entirely other”—in our online rhetoric, individuals’ success may yield abilities of language and expression. The “postmodern condition” described by Derrida may be an individual’s ability, through perception, however skewed and enlightened by previous experience, to come no closer to an explicit understanding of meaning, either through aesthetic illumination or mythic (perhaps epic) repetition. Bolter (2003) wondered if, upon the advent of our improved electronic communication technologies, scholars would “be willing to redefine scholarship to include the multilinear structures of hypertext or (what may be even more radical) the multiplicity of representational modes afforded by digital multimedia? There are powerful institutional forces working against change: for example, the tenure system in the United States, which recognizes printed books and articles as the highest forms of scholarly production. But would anything lead us to expect change?” (p. 23). If scholars of humanities, philosophy, and critical theory were to answer Bolter’s call, and endorse and “expect change” from this, our continuing revolution in our economic, technological, and informational climate, those scholars might discover the need for change within themselves, of how they comprehend the intellectual activities of humans these days: there is at work both a pervasive hypertextuality as well as a new culture of identity construction.

Cornered by attempts to describe the integration of poststructural interpretation of television, Bolter (2003) asserts that a redefinition of critical media theory, after Derrida, has become necessary, due to technology: “many of the qualities that the poststructuralists had been claiming for print—the instability and the intertextuality of the text, the loss of authority of the author, and the changed relationship between author, text, and reader—were realized in a literal or operational way in the computer” (p. 18). While the difference between individuals may continue to provide a theoretical framework for the construction of identity in the present-day public sphere, Bolter supports a reconception for tenets of identity construction because of, and in recognition of, technology’s influence: a new ‘condition’ for our identification and exchange of unique expression.

            The characterization of the public sphere, and the means by which marginalization based on recognition of identity continues to take place, is important to a variety of thinkers across disciplines. Cornel West (1994), in “The New Cultural Politics of Difference,” establishes a valuable framework for the publicity of identity, one that, through technology, has only become more pervasive: a theory and mode of inquiry he names “demystification” (p. 76).

            Demystification tries to keep track of the complex dynamics of institutional other related   power structures in order to disclose options and alternatives for tranformative praxis; it   also attempts to grasp the way in which representational strategies are creative responses         to novel circumstances and conditions. In this way, the central role of human agency (always enacted under circumstances not of one’s choosing)—be it in the critic, artist or         constituency and audience—is accented (p. 76).

West’s framework for a theoretical demystification of identity came as the Internet, and a new connectivity of expression, was still in its infancy: the “complex dynamics” of online chat were yet to evolve fully, and the transmission of images and voices across digital connections was just beginning a new form of archiving, for the extension and creation of human knowledge.West’s theory of demystification is important to an understanding of our present-day methods of identity creation: the “complex dynamics” of power at work in our spheres of discourse and expression has challenged what West named as “the central role of human agency.” No matter the roles or groups we choose to adopt as our own, the means by which our identities are shared have continued to weather “novel circumstances and conditions”—namely, the rise of unprecedented means of human communication and expression. The demystification, and full ‘tracking’ of the relationships of power and authority  Cornel West’s “New Cultural Politics of Difference”: “distinct articulations of talented (and usually privileged) contributors to culture who desire to align themselves with demoralized, demobilized, depoliticized and disorganized people in order to empower and enable social action.”

Redefining the Function of Authority and the Construction of Knowledge

            In Lyotard’s two-fold construction of knowledge, efficiency and performativity become criteria for what knowledge and experience humanity may consider legitimate and useful, of value and meaning: “Power is not only good performativity, but also effective verification and good verdicts” (p. 47). An individual’s relationship to technology is critical in Lyotard’s human world of inquiry, a world built of procedural explorations and critical, selective knowledge consumption—actions our information networks have come to excel at performing. Lyotard appears to predict the movement during the last decades of the twentieth century in support of vocational education in American public high schools, as well as the rise of community college enrollment during this decade and the last: he predicts knowledge “will be served “a la carte” to adults who are either already working or expect to be, for the purpose of improving their skills and chances of promotion, but also to help them acquire information, languages, and language games allowing them both to widen their occupational horizons and to articulate their technical and ethical experience” (p. 49). Our immersion in the “language games” of another—the intersection of individual narratives, which are likely (if anything) to hold power on a mystical plane—comes alongside the responsibility of knowledge.

            Here, I am intrigued by the value Lyotard places on dissensus as the root of innovation, not innovation itself—paralogy—and how our present culture does, or doesn’t, assimilate or stomp out dissensus, the “pragmatics of knowledge” (p. 61). Lyotard found the moments when scientists (and governments) appear on television to announce ‘discoveries’ likely to be efforts that make “epic” (p. 10) the knowledge-finder’s narrative; these moments are important not for human ego but for the transmission of knowledge. While university policies are central to Lyotard’s discussion, the nature and method of human inquiry, and changes to the construction of knowledge through technology may be one of Lyotard’s most notable insights. In my research area, music, productive dissensus—brought about by new ways of producing, distributing, and making money from original music—is alive and well, and was a large part of why Wikipedia went black yesterday, as content providers seek more control over the distribution and resale of recorded media. Lawmakers were trying to save a dying industry, one built around record stores and not digital virtualization, in trying to wrangle up those who peddle or simply pass around freely copyrighted content: a new pragmatics of knowledge.

            Should the “author function […] disappear […] in such a manner that fiction and its polysemous texts will once again function according to another mode” (Foucault, p. 119), we that seek to build our own creative expression and fictionalization of our experience, our authority to do so is, in Foucault’s view, trumped by our narrative’s historical impact. The stories we tell, however fictional, if not spoken with an authority that appears inaccessible in Foucault’s characterization, may merely relish and reiterate what has been said before. Foucault’s most succinct delineation of this may be on page 113: those who write fiction are locked in step with “jurisdictional and institutional” systems, and are not, in fact, “spontaneous attribution” but doomed to production through a “series of specific and complex operations”. These, his first and third points regarding authorship and ‘authority’ on p. 113, combine to establish a sense of Foucault’s assessment of the relationship between the creative artist and their subject in seeking a more meaningful society; the artist’s fictional representation of our limitations and conscriptions as a whole may be part of what Foucault is guarded against—that institutions and systems may come to represent themselves a commodification of expression, a means to which no end is apparent.

Technology and the Language of Identity Construction

            A dilemma similar to that of the parallel between subjectification of the individual and traditional power dynamism exists in the construction of identity, as feminism, a specific ideological movement, has suffered from the fragmentation of groups based on sub-categorization and individual details (p. 166). Butler seeks the acknowledgement of a metaphysical centrality and “psychic center” to gender, calling necessary a total reconceptualization of identity categories, one that supports the language that we use, and have available. In this call, Butler hopes we may find our identities constructed using language that itself constitutes “a site of permanent openness and resignifiability” (p. 166); this “site” within one’s self-concept is critical to this extension and evolution of feminist identity, and the development of useful and salient critical theory.

            In her 1990 essay,  Butler advocates not for a blanketed postmodern nature to identity, but for the subjection of “notions of the body and materiality to a deconstructive critique” (p. 168). Butler calls for a situation in which our physicality remains at the core of the construction of gender, but rests prior to any preconception or categorization: that the terms we use to define our identities might more fully take root in a mobilization of identity, the fulfillment of which is “productive, constitutive, one might even argue performative” (p. 168). This latter term would become utilized by scholars and theorists, to encapsulate Butler’s reconceptualization of gender and identity; in a 2011 video interview, Butler further defined the characteristic of performative identity as “producing a series of effects […] our acting or our role-playing is crucial to the gender that we are and the gender that we present to the world” (Butler, Feb. 2011). These “effects” of our identity, our behavior and our choices, may not necessarily be in line with previous, institutionalized concepts of gender, but specific and unique to individuals.       

            Butler identifies the construction of identity as a process of experience and as having its own significability, to the individual at hand as well as the institutions that individual functions within and around. “I think there is a real question for me about how such gender norms get established and policed and what the best way is to disrupt them and to overcome the police function. It’s my view that gender is culturally formed, but it’s also a domain of agency or freedom” (Butler, Feb. 2011). Within this “domain” rests responsibility for Butler’s construction of identity, beyond contextualization and categorization.

            One example of Butler’s centrality of the body to her construction of identity came through in remarks she delivered on October 23, 2011, in Washington Square Park in New York City, in support of the Occupy Movement. In striking irony, Butler delivered her message through the a “human microphone,” or “people’s mic” technique employed at Occupy Movement sites, to subvert regulations that prohibit electric amplification. In this poetic speech, Butler’s call for physicality in protest illuminates and gives example to supplement her theoretical framework established decades earlier:  “It matters/that as bodies/we arrive together in public/As bodies we suffer/we require food/and shelter/and as bodies we require one another/in dependence/and desire/So this is/a politics of the public body” (Butler, Oct. 2011).

Conclusion: The Ethics of Identity Construction in the 21st Century

What “cultural protocols and practices” surround secondary students’ use of the Internet, or their cell phone? The rituals and habits that develop around the use of technology may become critical elements of students’ and educators’ identities.  Sufficiently represented by web sites and social networking profiles, technology users can exist, interact, and share information in new, individual, unique venues: daily profile updates on social networking sites, blogging, and other Internet applications allow students to generate information almost constantly.

Discussing Jenkins’ (2006) “participation gap,” it is important to remember that the media—or, the streams of public information available—evolved during the twentieth century in a predominantly linear fashion. Newspaper reporters’ stories appeared in newspapers, and television broadcasters appeared on television. These streams of information, while requiring users’ participation, created a one-way network of information delivery. 

But once again, this has not been all that is needed. When you think about how the Web is today and dream about how it might be, you must, as always, consider both technology and people. Future technology should be smarter and more powerful, of course. But you cannot ethically turn your attention to developing it without also listening to those people who don't use the Web at all, or who could use it if only it were different in some way… The Web has been largely designed by the developed world for the developed world. But it must be much more inclusive in order to be of greater value to us all. (Berners-Lee, 2008, para. 15)

      Works Cited

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