A Few Thoughts on Prismatic Identity 19-10-2011

moot, or Christopher Poole, or whatever he is going by these days, said something completely and wonderfully insightful at the Web 2.0 Summit on Monday. According to ReadWriteWeb's Jon Mitchell:

"The portrait of identity online is often painted in black and white," Poole said. "Who you are online is who you are offline." That rosy view of identity is complemented with a similarly oversimplified view of anonymity. People think of anonymity as dark and chaotic, Poole said.

But human identity doesn't work like that online or offline. We present ourselves differently in different contexts, and that's key to our creativity and self-expression. "It's not 'who you share with,' it's 'who you share as,'" Poole told us. "Identity is prismatic."

The article goes on to elaborate precisely on how Poole believes Facebook and Google+ in particular are "eroding options" and "consolidating identity" for its users (by users I mean products, let us not forget). I am not interested in enumerating my thoughts on Facebook or Google+ or any other particular social network or service in this regard, at this time; it gets into many fuzzy, challenging issues that would take up an essay on their own. Ideas such as whether or not users consent to identity erosion just by signing up, whether it is ethical to sell user data to third parties, whether it is "evil" to prevent people (particularly those in oppressive areas of the world) from using pseudonyms. These are all extremely interesting. But... not now. They are ancillary to this discourse.

What I am more interested in, right now, is this notion of prismatic identity and why it is important for any self-respecting individual to proactively defend.

Prismatic Identity

Let us quickly (perhaps too quickly, maybe haphazardly) reach the conclusion that what we term "identity" is completely and wholly subjective. Identity is a concept of interpretation and perception, not rigorous, objective examination. It cannot be boiled down into a list of attributes and methods like a POJO. For one, every thing and every one is temporary (every thing ends and we are constantly changing); as such, conceptualizing identity, over any period of time greater than an instant, as a static, near-permanent concept leads to rapidly (theoretically immediately) outdated images. And second, characteristics and behaviors are inherently subjective. How a person views and reacts to the qualities of an identity is unique from how any other person perceives these same qualities, including the person in question. I might like individuals who are somewhat shy and reserved while you might find them drab or even suspicious. I might be drawn to interaction with people who identify as confident while you might see them as overly arrogant and be repulsed. This, in turn, leads to differing perceptions of a given identity as a whole. There is no objective measure or evaluation in existence for a given attribute or action, or anything else for that matter. It is infinitely interpretable. Extending this: identity is infinitely interpretable.

But, even having established and agreed upon this premise (hopefully!), we are still viewing identity as singular. A perpetually evolving and subjective entity, yes, but still singular and distinct. This is incorrect: Poole's description of identity as prismatic and multi-faceted is much more accurate. How a given person represents their self, how a given person behaves and acts, both in action and reaction, are determined by situation and circumstance: who is being interacted with, what environment this is taking place in, when this is taking place, how one is "feeling" at the time in question and infinite other considerations. This is not to conflate identity with anomalous action: if I fly off the handle and punch an elderly woman at a crosswalk, it is not necessarily indicative of some new facet or instance of identity. But if it happens again under similar circumstances, maybe we start asking questions?

The point, as Poole states, is that a major question to be asked in any given action or interaction is who we are sharing as. Every one, to some degree no matter how miniscule, shifts some trait in some direction depending on the situation. People routinely describe their work lives, their personal lives, their sex lives, their whatever. They are effectively describing their own personal abstract wardrobe of identities to throw on. Attempting to delineate a person's identity as One Grand set of attributes completely ignores this simple fact. And attempting to describe identity as some union or intersection of these differing identities, as the major social networks tend to do, is imprecise and incomplete. You cannot encapsulate this infinitely mutating and expanding identity set in any conceivable way. Nope.

Representing one's self differently in different places and times is not just indicative of a singular identity that changes: it is symptomatic of an individual who has numerous unique identities. Perhaps they are all tied together by some shared qualities (such as largely similar self-perceptions of physical traits or a pervasive nice streak in seemingly every situation), but they are all separate. They continue to persist and exist in the background of Self, ready to be called upon as a new "face" whenever so desired. Furthermore, the plurality of identity is exemplified by the simple ability of one identity to affect another.

For instance, say that I have a personality marked by quietness and introversion when I am out in public, but, when in the private company of my lover, I am gregarious and warm. Now say that my warmness is so well-taken and positively responded to by my companion that it emboldens and encourages me to extend these qualities to my more public Self. That is one identity touching another: how I identified with one particular person changed how I identified with nameless, faceless, amorphous crowds.

To summarize: each one of us has a vast number of distinct, subjectively perceived, constantly metamorphosing identities inside of our selves. "Identity is prismatic" because of our tendency to change identity as we see fit, be it consciously or subconsciously.

We all wear a medley of masks. Some are just more visible than others.

Why It Matters

So, after processing this revelation, you might ask, "Okay, so what?" Well, the importance of protecting one's prismatic identity in the face of large, influential forces which would have you categorized and slotted into neat classes and groups based on how they have singularly, rigidly defined you is, to me, apparent. In the case of social networks such as Google+ and Facebook, extensive data mining is done over a given user's information (personally identifiable or not) to provide extremely (perhaps arbitrarily) detailed classifications of the user to interested third parties, primarily advertisers, law enforcement agencies and governments. They try their hardest to monitor and track all activity of individuals, to restrict users to one account which is clearly defined and wrapped around a single identifiable person and to force (some may even say "trick") users into sharing as much information with the System as possible.

(Facebook is particularly egregious in these latter regards, but that particular discussion can be had another time. In fact, it already has been had basically everywhere already. In the interest of disclosure, I am coming from the perspective of someone vehemently in favor of individuals' privacy rights. But I digress. Back to the action.)

These concerns over the singularization of your identity in this way are particularly problematic when you consider what can be done with the shrink-wrapped You. Of course it can be used to target advertisements toward you, but that is somewhat innocuous. More concerning is the threat of your identity being summarized and sold to The Man (for lack of a more precise and less cliched term).

"Facebook in particular is the most appalling spying machine that has ever been invented." - Julian Assange

Oft-quoted. Completely on point. Background checks are now trivial with the advent of systems that have somehow convinced so many to hand over their privacy and identity, wholesale. If users were allowed multiple accounts for whatever reasoning they had, with whatever names or handles they desired (hi, Google!), these concerns could be somewhat mitigated with a bit of user vigilance and care. But, when you are One User with One Identity that is quite clearly, plainly, unobtrusively described and summarized, you are remarkably easy to track and monitor around the Web, to predict future behaviors of with the use of sufficiently sophisticated algorithms, to be oppressed by those who would wish to shackle you with constraints on your action and movement.

And to believe that it will not happen is stupidly naive. Coming from an organization that is well known to play ball with the world's governments, and another whose former CEO and current Chairman who had the gall to utter, "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place", any platitudes about data privacy and user protection are meaningless. They absolutely cannot be trusted. All aided by the fact that, in their massive digital archives, you are a singular identity.

You might remark, "Well, Schmidt is right. I have nothing to hide!" Well, get the hell out. That's inane. You might instead remark, "No one's forcing you to use their services." That is completely true. Which is largely why I do not use them myself. And neither should anyone else who does not wish to see their unique self boiled down into a neat and tidy data structure and sold to the highest, or most politically and legally powerful, bidder. Not without great care and responsibility, at least.

Even so, because of their massive, nearly impenetrable tendrils into the rest of the Web, even non-users can be tracked and categorized. Some tools can be used to help prevent this, but it is still scary to the extent that your identity can be warped as strongly as some organizations have the capabilities, and motive, to do.

But even beyond what some may think are the paranoid delusions of a luddite (totally infactual, but an insult that is not infrequent for those who share some of these worries), it is also about self-respect. You are an individual who is wholly unique in so many ways. Though you cannot control how you are perceived by anyone, be it a network's database or a close, trusted friend, you can have a say. You proactively do this every moment of every day by exercising your ability and right to identify in whatever fashion you wish. Why allow any entity to restrict this capability for any reason? Resist!

The Internet is a place that enables never-before-conceivable modes and methods of communication. Anonymity and pseudonymity are major parts of this. The ability to multiplex yourself and separate your identities, your groups of friends and contacts, your very lives... this is critical to being who you are, whatever that may be. The one thing that I do know you are, whomever you are, is prismatic. Embrace it. Refuse to let others throw you into their self-serving, simplifying categorizations.

"We're about to sacrifice something that's valuable, and it's special." moot was right. Do not sacrifice your identities, for any one.

I implore you.

Nota bene: As I was writing this, I read that Vic Gundotra (Senior VP of Social at Google) stated that Google+ will allow pseudonymity by supporting "other forms of identity." A biting rebuttal.