Distributed Identity
Social Media and the Fragmentation of Self
If a single piece of a ship — however small — is replaced is it still the same ship? Following this tangent, continuing to replace pieces of the ship until eventually every piece has been swapped out, all the requisite pieces are now available to make another ship. Can these original parts be recombined into a clone? A copy? Or do they represent the original, having been slowly replaced by an impostor.
Through the proliferation of social media we have come to recognize the digital footprints of other individuals as their direct personifications in a sort of ordinary way which is almost taken for granted. Our lives are increasingly moderated through digital lenses, these having become the primary means of communication and discourse in contemporary society. When I read someone’s blog, chuckle through their tweets, or flip through their Instagram, I imagine this material as representative of them as a discreet entity.
I see a digital presence as a lens projecting the individual apparently in ownership of it, but what if its not?
A web presence is fraught with temporal schisms, with things falling out of sync at the speed of the last update. Is my LinkedIn profile representative of me or a past version of myself, the version which worked at Microcorp before I went back to school, changed my career, or moved to Thailand to retire? This may just be a derelict piece of a ship, the ship having long since moved on. How far from the present must a digital snapshot drift before it is considered separate from the whole? Perhaps in these cases it is the individual who is separated from their own public narrative, cut adrift in a poorly documented everyday, forever trying to catch up and climb back aboard.
Image crafting is a natural symptom of this modern type of digital representation, with certain individuals of sufficient means having accrued such a following that they have brought on someone -or a team of someones- to handle one or more aspects of their web presence.
If I pay someone to run my twitter feed and you tweet at me, who is tweeting back?
Presumably I have hired and vetted this individual to represent me but not made the fact that they are not me explicit, allowing individuals to interact with an entity they understand to be me. As I outsource all my digital appendages my web presence becomes more active and I become less active. The ship is being replaced, piece by piece, and the pieces scattered. Eventually my online persona is everywhere and pervasive, perhaps driven by an entire social media think tank, and yet as an individual I am nowhere to be seen. Is the individual the heart of the ship? If an online presence can no longer be considered a direct embodiment of the individual then what type of entity do millions of followers interact with and aspire to?
In a culture prescribing to the cult of the individual I see our gods being split into discreet nonhuman entities, outsourced and fragmented into a series of carefully crafted personas.
Our lives are increasingly defined by our networked interactions and experiences; in this process our online personas, while operating under our name, are growing increasingly distant from one another and our personal reality. There may now be many ships, the individual almost forgotten among any number of online personas, lenses which have taken on a life of their own.
