Fragmentation of Identity

In the future everyone will be an actor. I say this, because the Internet increasingly asks you to define yourself within the confines of social networking sites (or games). For example, I’m supposed to give a rough overview of my personality on facebook: what I like, my interests, and my friends. Not to mention, one photo (or “profile pic”) that captures my essence. Like filling out college applications, it’s hard to distill who you are down to the bare minimums. Also your identity is always changing as you’re exposed to new ideas and influential mentors and peers. If you want the world to know who you are, you continually have to update your profile, because who you are is always changing.

Let me briefly share with you a quick, little anecdote about how the Internet can capture your identity indefinitely. In sixth grade, I made a website. A pretty primitive website, but at the time it was something special. I even somehow managed to program the HTML so that my website featured pong (which was one of it’s selling points). I put all of these jumping DragonBall Z .gif files all over it and added an obnoxious .wav file rendition of Sweet Home Alabama. I haven’t messed with the site since the sixth grade, so it’s a perfect distillation of my middle school psyche.

That website represents my middle school self, but I wouldn’t say it’s a fairly accurate representation of who I am today, or at this very moment. Yet it is online, and it compromises part of my online identity. This blog too is part of my online identity, and so is everything I’ve contributed (whether it be deviantART or YouTube). All of these fragmented versions of me are available to anyone in the world via the Internet. Whether or not the consummation of these entities add up to me is completely debatable, which brings me to animosity.

The Internet can showcase who you are, while at the same time providing a convenient buffer (or mask) to hide behind. Truth is almost impossible to discern on the web. You run across this in numerous places like chat rooms and Second Life. In high school, I interviewed a silkworm farmer for a creative writing project via email, but for all I know this person could’ve been a…. well, anything! The Internet allows you to connect with people globally, but whether or not you’re actually conversing with someone from another part of the world completely depends on the veracity of the other person. And there is no way to check that veracity, or prove that the person is lying. Sure, I could’ve organized very detailed silkworm specific questions for my interviewee. But where would I learn silkworm-farming techniques? The Internet (which a dissembling silkworm farmer would easily have access too). The mendacity is frightfully agitating.
According to Sherry Turkle, “Internet role-playing allows people to create parallel or alternative personae that can facilitate their negotiation and transformation of identity in real life.” (337) This essentially is the basis of theatre. Like the Internet, the theatre was often criticized as a realm of overt mendacity. But from the perspective of the actor (at least for me), all characters originate from you; they are a mixture of your identity and imagination. From an optimistic perspective, the Internet is a new tool for self-exploration. Then again, the scary thing about the Internet is that some people are dissembling, while others are not. A hybrid form of theatre.