Online Identity and the Digital Self Identity A term that gets used in a number of different (and not always fully compatible) senses: personality, self, some resultant of life history and circumstances, certain properties to which a person feels a sense of attachment or ownership etc. In the broadest terms, some sense of identity is an answer to the question who am I? 1
Personal Identity in Philosophy A much narrower and more specific sense of identity has a long history in philosophy: numerical identity the relation everything has to itself and to nothing else. (Cf. Leibniz Identity of Indiscernibles ) In the case of persons, this transposes into questions about the persistence of personal identity: I.e., what is it that justifies saying that a person remains the same person from one time to another? Put more formally: If a person x exists at one time and a person y exists at another time, under what possible circumstances is it the case that x is y? Desiderata An adequate theory of personal identity has to attempt to deal with two problems at once: The Problem of Difference (synchronic): What makes you different (i.e., distinct) from others? The Problem of Sameness (diachronic): What makes you the same person now as compared to, e.g., the baby you were 20+ years ago? I.e., what justifies the claim that you are (i.e., share an identity with) that baby? 2
Some Candidates (after Perry, 1975) Same Body Theory : I.e., physical continuity x at t 1 is the same person as y at t 2 iff x and y have the same material body. (But see: The Ship of Theseus ) Same Soul Theory : x at t 1 is the same person as y at t 2 iff x and y have the same immaterial soul. Psychological Continuity Theory: x at t 1 is the same person as y at t 2 iff y at t 2 has some psychological relation (e.g., memory) to x at t 1 (e.g. Locke s theory) Singular, Centred, Identity The (old, seeming endless) philosophical debates about personal identity needn t concern us much here. Notice, however, that there is potentially quite a lot at stake in philosophical questions about personal identity: life after death, reincarnation, eternal reward or punishment temporal reward or punishment (Locke, Nietzsche) Answers to identity questions typically seem to depend on specifying some one thing (or some unified set of properties): A (more or less) stable, unified account of personal identity 3
The Modernist Aesthetic The label that Sherry Turkle applies to the understanding of selves and computation that demands rationality and linear, logical calculation. For modernists : There is a (fundamentally singular) right way for a program to function; there is a (fundamentally singular) right way for a self to be put together as (more or less) consistent, rational, authentic, and centred Who Am We? according to Turkle, however, the computer and the virtual worlds that it makes possible have led us to a postmodern aesthetic of complexity and decentering (149), characterized by interaction and simulation. The windows metaphor: We cycle through the different windows open on our screen; move back and forth between RL and various virtual worlds. The self becomes a multiple distributed system, RL becomes just one more window (149) 4
MUDs In studying users of Multi-User Dungeons (or Multi- User Domains in any case, MUDs), Turkle notes that many users construct and develop multiple identities, different personalities, in some cases choosing gender identities, cultural identities, or personality traits different from their RL identities. Turkle: As (text-based) virtual worlds, MUDs are both games and communities a new kind of social virtual reality (151) Toy Situations and this could be something genuinely new and exciting; something potentially beneficial, a way of coping with a world in flux (198). In particular, the anonymity of MUDS gives people the chance to express multiple and often unexplored aspects of the self, to play with their identity and try out new ones (152, emphasis added) 5
yet not all MUD users regard the experience as ultimately positive; their RL problems may simply come into starker relief against their MUD experiences; they may become (or feel that that they have become) addicted to MUDing. E.g., the case of Stewart/Achilles Virtual sex in MUDs can cause pain and resentment in RL relationships. E.g., the case of Janet and Tim Turkle: The culture of simulation may help us to achieve a vision of a multiple but integrated identity whose flexibility, resilience, and capacity for joy comes from having access to our many selves. (198, emphasis added) But people can get lost in virtual worlds VWs are not just play; we ignore their power at our peril. 6
Really Real Selves For Turkle, as we ve seen, life in VWs is a concrete instantiation of the decentered, postmodern self. RL exists as just another window alongside other online identities: this may be an appropriate response to a world in flux ; it may provide an opportunity to usefully explore and develop aspects of personality that couldn t easily be explored in RL. But, Turkle implies, if the VW self isn t somehow integrated with the RL self, a disorientating loss of reality may result but how could RL and VW identities be integrated, such that they constitute a (more or less) unified personal identity? After all, some (many?) VW users say that their VW actions and experience (despite being very different from their RL experiences) are really real to them. How could it be the case that both RL and VW actions and experiences count as actions and experiences of the same person? 7
Personal Identity & Narrative In her examination of the VW Second Life (SL), Marya Schechtman offers an explanation of how, at least sometimes, the actions and experiences of the offscreen user and the online avatar are ontologically the actions and experiences of a single person. Schechtman: This is possible just in case VW and RL actions and experiences can be integrated into a (more or less) unified, identity-constituting narrative The Narrative Self-Constitution View (NSCV) On the NSCV, the identity-defining relation isn t same soul, same body or psychological continuity (< Locke), but narrative unity. Schechtman: We constitute ourselves as persons by coming to understand our lives as narratives with the form of the story of a person s life (335). This doesn t have to be undertaken consciously or explicitly, but such a narrative conception is necessary in order to perform Lockean forensic activities i.e., to make normative judgements and to understand ourselves as subject to them 8
I.e.: In order to deliberate and to make evaluative judgments about ourselves (e.g., about integrity ) we need to organize our experiences: A person experiences what happens in the present in light of what has come before and what is expected or planned for the future and in this way temporally remote times are brought into present experience (335, emphasis added) I.e., what we experience, the nature of the experience, depends on how it fits into a unified narrative. Constraints But not just any narrative will do for constituting a proper agent. Reality Constraint: Narratives must conform to fundamental and largely uncontroversial facts about the nature of the world (336) e.g., no invocation of impossible occurrences/properties. Articulation Constraint: When asked, we must be able to articulate parts of our narrative locally. ( How old are you?, Are you single ) 9
Narrative and VWs Do the actions and experiences of SL users and their avatars share a single ( resident ) narrative? The answer is trivially yes in the case of games and fictions: I (RL self) move the thimble (avatar) around the Monopoly board; An (RL) author or actor creates/performs a (virtual) character. In cases of this sort, however, the actions of the avatar are incorporated into the user s narrative as a fiction (337) For some SL/VW users, this fictional relationship may be the only relevant kind of unity. (I.e., VW experiences are just fictions, they aren t really real.) Could it sometimes be otherwise, though? From the avatar s perspective the parameters of the reality constraint would clearly have to be different: Some avatars can fly, disappear, change sex on a whim, etc. 10
And, given this difference in reality constraints, there is likely no coherent way to include SL events in one s narrative as if they were indistinguishable from RL events (338, emphasis added). But, at least sometimes, avatar-perspective narratives can impact user-perspective narratives, and vice versa. For instance, in SL, avatar actions can generate in-game revenue (denominated in Lindens, $L) that can be converted into RL currency. In sufficiently large quantities this could change the resident s RL life story Similarly, SL performances, lectures, art works, etc., can lead to RL gigs, money, reputation. And, of course, SL sexual, romantic, friendship relationships can lead to (or impact) RL relationships. Conversely, user-perspective narratives can impact avatar-perspective narratives: AFK, I m typing with one hand 11
The Vegas Narrative What been shown so far may not be all that different from certain divergent narratives developed exclusively in a RL context. The Vegas narrative (341-3) suggests that differing reality and articulation constraints need not prevent a narrative from being integrated. And that integration need not be linear in a simpleminded way (342) So perhaps RL and VW actions and experiences can (optionally) be integrated into a single identityconstituting narrative. ( Optionally Given that you are motivated to regard VW actions and experiences as part of your narrative and are prepared to take normative responsibility for them.) But (?): Sub-narratives need not all have the same status Indeed, they probably cannot. (343) 12