The Digital Era: Examining Culture, Socialization, and Identity in the Cybersphere
While much internet use perpetuates the illusion of freedom that comes with the manufactured needs of the culture industry, it also provides a safe, limitless place for those whose voices may not have been heard otherwise. Internet usage spans across various demographic groups, although not everyone has access, including those who are classified as low-income, the elderly population who may not have the resources to learn new technologies, and those who are geographically isolated from internet access. In their Dialectic of Enlightenment, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer criticize the nature of capitalist culture, noting how mass-produced entertainment aims to reach vast audiences, and therefore loses some of its cultural capital. They argue that this form of culture results in a passive audience, that falls victim to an illusion of freedom under the guise of enlightenment. The digital age perpetuates this illusion, as it provides a forum for passive consumption, while giving advertisers the ability to attract consumers on a personal level. Conversely, the internet can destroy the illusion, by threatening private ownership, allowing for reflective identity formation, and creating a participatory culture that encourages active expression.
Adorno and Horkheimer’s theory of the culture industry was inspired by Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism, the idea that capitalist culture causes individuals to assign intrinsic value to objects that only hold economic value, resulting in the fetishizing of such items. The internet can be seen as advancing this theory, as it often serves primarily as a vehicle for advertising. It facilitated the formation of constantly growing amounts of commercially focused virtual spaces, as there are now websites for products that are designed solely to accelerate the creation of commodity signs. The internet has provided a space for consistent brand recognition, while data mining has allowed companies and organizations to advertise specifically to those whose interests pertain to their product, based on one’s internet usage history. Through facial recognition software, cameras in stores are now able to trace the social networking profiles of customers and determine their shopping habits, consumer preferences, political leanings, and sexual orientation. Furthermore, the invasive nature of consumerism has led to the notion that individuals are commodities, where socialization has taught people to accumulate as much social capital as possible. As Bauman states in Liquid Surveillance, social media users “are simultaneously promoters of commodities and the commodities they promote. They are, at the same time, the merchandise and their marketing agents, the goods and their traveling salespersons.”
While it is important to examine the economic impact of internet usage, it is equally as significant to study its social impact in the digital era. It is easiest to review such effects by looking at the theory of the habitus as described by Pierre Bourdieu. The notion of the habitus refers to the values, lifestyles, and attitude of various social groups that are developed through everyday activities, while embodying social structures such as gender, race, and class. The theory is defined by Bourdieu himself as
“systems of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures, that is, as principles which generate and organize practices and representations that can be objectively adapted to their outcomes without presupposing a conscious aiming at ends or an express mastery of the operations necessary in order to attain them.”
This definition of habitus relies on cultural definitions and assigned cultural capital, and can be applied directly to internet culture. The digital age allowed for the formation of cyber social norms, a sort of virtual habitus that varies amongst different networking sites. For instance, one might observe a specific culture for interactions on the social networking site Facebook, while noticing an entirely different culture on the microblogging site Twitter. Thus, the internet allows for the development of limitless sets of social standards, where those participating are influenced by the social environment they find themselves in. Many have claimed that internet use increases social ties amongst users, specifically those who find themselves marginalized. To consider that stigmatized communities across the globe can create transnational networks seems entirely revolutionary, as it provides a space for the sharing of experiences, identity formation, and political organization to a group that otherwise may have remained distant. While the internet provides a forum for the continuation of established social groups, it also creates new social groups, and therefore, new sets of social standards, while disrupting assumed social patterns.
The internet habitus can best be examined when looking at the concept of sharing, the exchange of information over social networks. In order to effectively use social media, users must select and present content with the receiving crowd in mind. In other words, one must acknowledge and understand the established habitus of the platform which they are functioning within, and in turn share information that reflects this set of standards. This framing results in self-subjectivation, where such deliberation causes users to define themselves and their experiences in a way that would appeal to those who will receive their posts.
While many claim that the internet, being bodiless, raceless, genderless, and classless, transcends social standards by providing a forum for equal expression, marginalization still occurs within the internet habitus. In her studies on gender differences in text based virtual reality, Lynn Cherry demonstrated that sexism still exists without physical gender cues, stating “Studies have shown that the absence of gender cues in online discussions does not eliminate sexism or hierarchies of gender.” While various social schemata may not always present the marginalization of women or other groups, one mustn’t look further than Google, the dominant search engine in the United States, to see how vast the marginalization really is. As the tool provides suggestions for searches, one finds that when typing “united” into the search field, Google provides the most commonly searched terms that are associated with “united,” such as “United Airlines,” “United Healthcare,” and “United States.” However, when one begins to type “women shouldn’t,” the autocomplete suggestions include “women shouldn’t have rights,” “women shouldn’t vote,” “women shouldn’t work,” and “women shouldn’t go to college.” These suggestions are prompted by previous searches of Google users, then ranked by popularity, reflecting the marginalization that still occurs within the assumedly equal internet habitus. Conversely, groups such as the Everyday Sexism Project demonstrate the opposite end of sexism within the digital sphere. This project defines itself as “Documenting experiences of sexism, harassment, and assault to show how bad the problem is and to create solidarity,” as it functions on the microblogging network, Twitter. Users are asked to compose a tweet, a text message of 140 characters that is published to those who follow one’s Twitter account, that catalogues instances of sexism on a day to day basis, which is then shared by the Everyday Sexism Twitter account.
It is essential to examine the process of identity formation, then, within the context of the established cyber habitus. As Manuel Castells stated,
“In a world of global flows of wealth, power, and images, the search for identity, collective or individual, ascribed or constructed, becomes the fundamental source of social meaning. This is not a new trend, since identity, and particularly religious and ethnic identity, have been at the roots of meaning since the dawn of human society. Yet identity is becoming the main, and sometimes the only, source of meaning in a historical period characterized by widespread destructuring of organizations, delegitimation of institutions, fading away of major social movements, and ephemeral cultural expressions. People increasingly organize their meaning not around what they do but on the basis of what they are.”
The various sets of social standards present on the internet greatly influence one’s identity formation, as they must be aware of the platform that they are functioning within and present themselves accordingly. While one may present themselves in a certain light on Facebook, they may completely alter that public self through their profile on Twitter. The vast number of social networking sites contributes to the multiplicity of identity in the digital age, as users must acknowledge their purpose before they can begin to deliberate the self. When examining the process of identity formation, it is significant to consider the effects of self-censorship that come with the panoptic nature of the internet.
Michel Foucault initially adapted Jeremy Bentham’s panoptic prison model to the field of philosophy, focusing on the intersection of power and knowledge. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault states,
“Hence the major effect of the Panopticon: to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power. So to arrange things that the surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action; that the perfection of power should tend to render its actual exercise unnecessary; that this architectural apparatus should be a machine for creating and sustaining a power relation independent of the person who exercises it.”
His theory of panopticism demonstrates how effective total surveillance can be, as it guarantees the function of power without continuously asserting it. Adapting this theory to the cyber sphere, one can replace the notion of visibility with the idea of traceability. While internet users are not always under surveillance, any form of internet usage leaves an electronic trail that can be traced back to the user. This knowledge creates a sense of fear in internet users, as more and more employers look into social media usage when reviewing potential employees. Researches at Carnegie Mellon University conducted a study on employer discrimination based on social media, and found that discrimination if often linked to political party affiliation. The lead researcher, Dr. Christina Fong, stated that “online disclosures of certain traits can have a significant effect on the hiring decisions of a self-selected set of employers who do look for candidates’ personal information online.” This forces users to self-censor, as they acknowledge the depth of the platform they are participating in, and must consider the effects of their published cyber identity. As Bauman states in Liquid Surveillance, the anxiety of being watched is “now recast into the hope of ‘never again being alone’ (abandoned, ignored and neglected, blackballed and excluded), the fear of disclosure has been stifled by the joy of being noticed.”
One can argue that the cyber sphere has moved past the panoptic model, into post-panopticism. Rather than a few guards watching many prisoners, as in Bentham’s model, the internet allows the many to watch the few. This is exacerbated in consumer society, where the masses are conducting surveillance on the few culturally significant individuals, such as newsmakers and celebrities. In this post-panoptic model, the notion of social surveillance of contained individuals transitions to social observance performed by the willing masses.
The malleability of the cyber self is an essential aspect of identity formation in the digital age. Whereas individuals are normally seen as physical beings first, and their race, gender, and apparent class factor into their public appearance, the internet allows for the molding of one’s own self without the association with the corporeal. As Mark Poster states in CyberDemocracy: Internet and the Public Sphere,
“the fact of having to decide on one’s gender itself raises the issue of individual identity in a novel and compelling manner. If one is to be masculine, one must choose to be so. Further, one must enact one’s gender choice in language and language alone, without any marks and gestures of the body, without clothing or intonations of voice.”
By having the option to choose one’s gender, internet users are inherently more self-aware than those who are not developing cyber identities. This bodiless atmosphere can be seen as helpful to those who break from heteronormative standards of gender, as they are able to assert their own identities without their perhaps contrasting physicality. Conversely, in Technologies of the Gendered Body: Reading Cyborg Women, Anne Balsamo argues that this “escape from the corporeal embodiment of gender and race” has negative effects on one’s self-perception, asserting that “the conceptual denial of the body is done through material repression of the physical body.”
When looking at the formation of identity in the cyber sphere, one must review the recent
phenomenon of the selfie. A “selfie” is defined as “a photograph that one has taken of oneself, typically one taken with a smartphone or webcam and uploaded to a social media website,” by the Oxford Dictionaries, chosen as the dictionary’s Word of the Year in 2013. The popularity of the selfie can be seen when looking at how frequently the word was used in every billion words on the public internet:
A study of Facebook users conducted in 2013, “Tagger’s Delight? Disclosure and liking behaviour in Facebook: the effects of sharing photographs amongst multiple known social circles,” found that users who often posted selfies had lower levels of social support from Facebook friends, as well as lower levels of intimacy. Selfies appeal to social media users as they are easy to create and share, and furthermore give the user the ability to define how they are presented. Ben Agger, who authored Oversharing: Presentations of Self in the Internet Age, asserts that the selfie is “the male gaze gone viral,” where “women realize that there is a photographic traffic in bodies.” Agger argues that women self-objectify in an effort to receive affirmation. In a recent study of the effects of internet use on adolescent girls, researchers found that of the 96% of young girls who have some access to the internet at home, 72% had uploaded pictures of themselves. The head researcher of the study, Dr. Amy Slater, states “Our findings demonstrate a worrying correlation between excessive media use, particularly social media and the internet, and lower self-esteem, body-esteem and sense of identity and higher depression.” These statistics reflect the growing concern that identity formation on the internet has real repercussions in the physical world. Anne Ngai, author of Our Aesthetic Categories, argues that the selfie contributes to the commodification of women, where the capitalist influence over the cyber sphere makes us voyeurs of one another and objects of surveillance by government organizations. These studies demonstrate the negative effects of the selfie, the ultimate representation of the formation of the self in the digital age. It reflects the consumerist influence over the manipulation of self-image, and the commodification of the body in the cyber sphere.
The internet can serve to break the illusion of freedom set forth by the culture industry, and actually provides virtual freedom to many marginalized groups. The disabled community, often the most stigmatized in society, uses the internet as a means of escape from the marginalization that they often fall victim to. After conducting a study on the social benefits of the internet, and specifically online gaming, Aleks Krotoski concluded that the virtual realm offered anonymity to the disabled population, a group that is normally unable to “pass” in the physical world, but is able to experience great liberty online. Krotoski states, “the disembodied nature of online interaction gave them a sense of control over how they were perceived and transformed the power dynamics that exist offline when a disability is overt.” She also asserted that the virtual realm gave her subjects a sense of empowerment, as they felt they were able to decide their own destinies. Krotoski believes that the limited access to the internet that is present in marginalized communities only perpetuates their marginalization.
Organizations such as GO ON aim to expand access to all parts of society, asserting that they “want to ensure that everyone and every organisation…is able to enjoy the social, economic, and cultural benefits of the internet.” The Pew Internet and American Life Project found that while 81% of Americans without a disability use the internet, 54% of those who identified a disability use the internet. The Internet Society aims to increase internet accessibility among the disabled community, claiming that “through removing barriers, persons with disabilities will be better able to use and contribute to the richness of the Internet by participating independently in the communities of their choice.” While the cyber sphere provides a forum for freedom and liberty to marginalized communities, the limited access to the internet only further perpetuates the digital divide.
In conclusion, the socialization that takes place in the cyber sphere is complex in that it provides both benefits and hindrances to identity formation, in that it allows users to develop their identities without their physical markers, while also leading to negative perceptions of oneself and the continuation of body image issues. Internet use both perpetuates and discontinues the illusion of freedom that is associated with the culture industry, as it still leads to passive consumption and marginalization, while conversely generating participatory habits and providing voices for the voiceless. The examination of the internet habitus demonstrates how the cyber sphere disrupts assumed social patterns and allows for the development of support groups, although it shows how the importance of sharing on social media leads to self-panopticism and self-censorship. The digital divide causes further marginalization of certain populations, and widespread access to the internet must be attained in order to truly examine the socialization of all users. As John Perry Barlow stated in A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,
“Cyberspace consists of transactions, relationships, and thought itself, arrayed like a standing wave in the web of our communications. Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live.
We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth.
We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.”
While the initial intention of the internet may have been to create a truly free forum, the developments of cyber advertising and platforms for marginalization have led to a less utopian virtual atmosphere. Perhaps by examining the evolution of internet usage, one can learn more about the process of human socialization in its entirety. The human manipulation of the internet could serve as a reflection of the status of humans in the newly entered digital age, as our cyber habits may entail more about our society than we are willing to acknowledge.
