Post Category → digital identity

for a very important date

In about ten days, I’m heading to a conference in College Park, Maryland. It’s being thrown by the editors of cyborgology, an exceptional resource site for all things social & technological, for hybrids and cyborgs of all stripes.

The conference is titled Theorizing the Web. The panel I’m on is titled Cyborgology: see the abstracts? Cool stuff.  The program? Augmented realities, counter-discourses, digital agency. I don’t get to have these conversations very often. And I’m rooming with an old blog friend whom I’ve never actually gotten to meet in person. So all in all, this will be good.

(It’s also pay-as-you-can. You should come.)

But there’s one hitch. My paper’s not quite done.

I’m doing a paper on theory work that will be the body of my dissertation. Some of the premises I’ve worked out, largely. But I’m still at the pre-proposal stage of my doctorate, so I’m writing this stuff for the first time. Which is good. And bad.

Writing, for me, is like a binge on the “Eat Me” cakes in Alice in Wonderland: it changes everything. I start somewhere and then I writhe in circles and dig up research and cringe horribly at my own naivete and spit stuff out anyway and then push and pull at words in a recursive fashion that sloths would call tedious. Stuff gets out there, eventually. But I learn more than I know how to say, how to cram together in a coherent trail. And I wish sometimes that it would just hurry up and get easier, this theory writing, this massive learning curve I’ve set ahead of myself like a ski jump.

I assume it does. I assume someday I’ll at least understand most of the grounding principals I’m working with, in this strange hybrid field of the social and the technological and the educational. But right now, every idea I eke out is a croquet game detouring into the bushes.

Someday, all this will not be novel. For me, for now, a lot of it still is. It’s slow-going, and I need to giddyup. But it is still the most interesting work I’ve ever done. I hope I can pull it together enough in the next ten days to do it justice.
***

Here is my abstract: the Coles notes. Input & critique welcome. Hurry.

The Branded Self: Cyborg Subjectivity in Social Media
My work takes up the question of who we are when we’re online. Participatory, reputation-focused online platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and blogs allow people to perform their learning, their sociality and interests, their narrative histories and their minutiae in newly public, connected ways. The premise of my research is that these ongoing interactive performances open up new conceptions of self and subjectivity, and create new horizons and challenges within the field of education.

Donna Haraway called her original A Manifesto for Cyborgs (1991) an “ironic political myth”. In the late 20th century, she named the cyborg as our ontology, a representation of our societal and cultural politics. In reviving her cyborg for the era of social media, I explore its mythic potential for the relational and participatory knowledge-making sphere of social media, where new stories of self are told and reflected. With a deep bow to Haraway, my exploration of the branded cyborg subject aims to be an ironic educational myth for the 21st century.

I think of all of us using social media as branded selves, cyborgs whose online and offline lives blur. We are cyborgs because we are hybrids; because our “real lives” play out in part in cyberspace. We are branded because the cyberspace environment operates by branding – and socializing – all who enter: social, financial, and cultural capital are as central to the circulation of power and knowledge online today as the technologies and the human networks which form its infrastructure. The identities through which we connect with others and engage in the shared creation/consumption cycle that marks the social media economy are branded identities, even if we never monetize our brands.

Informal polls of cyborg subjects who live large portions of their lives online suggest that they generally consider their digital identities simply as extensions of themselves rather than as anything separate and distinct. I utilize Judith Butler’s notion of performativity to examine the constitution of subjectivities both online and off: those of us who become cyborg are always already subjects, yet the life that our stories and selves take on in cyberspace impacts our everyday lives in turn. Thus there is no dualistic divide between digital self and embodied self.

Nonetheless, the digital performance of identity warrants specific focus. The conventions and operations surrounding online interactions are not the same as in so-called “real life,” even when cyborg subjects try to conduct ourselves similarly across environments. The speed of connections, the different structures governing hierarchical relations, and the different conventions and etiquettes of online and offline life alter the subject positions that the environments create and privilege. The discursive field of social media – which my work posits as the site or stage on which the cyborg self performs and circulates – deviates from that of the broader culture. Some things are more speakable online than in real life, and the ways in which people interact and build knowledge within networks differs. My work treats our digital identities as offshoots of previously existing subjectivities, learning and engaging in augmented digital environments but always in a recursive relationship with our embodied selves.

why cyborgs are education

In writing my way through the drafts of what I hope will eventually be my dissertation proposal, I keep coming up against what appears to be a glaring absence, a hole in my work. When I talk about what I’m doing, the hole gets reflected back at me: politely but quizzically, a frequent “yes, but…” response.

The name of the hole is education.

I’m in a doctoral program in Educational Studies. I identify as an educator: I’ve been at this professionally since I was 22 years old. I’ve been a high school teacher and a special ed teacher and a travelling ESL professor and a sessional lecturer in academic writing. I’ve done educational project management and educational program development, written curriculum, designed rubrics. I’ve worn all kinds of different hats in my work life, but almost all of them have been in some sense or other education-related.

Then I enter a Ph.D in Education, and I stop.

What I’m writing about? Subjectivities. Cyborgs. Identity in social media. Technologies and reputation and social capital and cultural capital and money all circulating within social media networks, all of them shaping us just as we shape them by tweeting about our breakfasts. It’s big and messy and interesting and I haven’t even gotten to the part where I talk about knowledge or learning. It’s philosophy and sociology, with a nice smattering of psychoanalysis thrown in for good measure. I can’t blame anybody for asking where the education is.

It’s there, though, I’m convinced of it.

In the opening lines of The Cyborg Manifesto, Donna Haraway claims that her cyborg is faithful to its origins “as blasphemy is faithful” (1991, p. 149).  The next time somebody asks about my research’s location within the field of Educational Studies, I’m going to claim blasphemy. My research emphasizes – and critiques – the theoretical underpinnings of current educational practices, though its scope is not contained within notions of classroom or curriculum. And any work wherein education intersects with technology is vulnerable to visions of post-institutional worlds and DIY education. Yet as Haraway points out, “blasphemy has always seemed to require taking things very seriously” (191, p. 149). I have two children on the cusp of entering the public education system: there is not much I take so seriously.

Haraway called The Cyborg Manifesto “an ironic political myth” (1991, p. 149). I aim to make my exploration of the branded cyborg subject an ironic educational myth, one that visions possibilities for the public trust of education through a more detailed understanding of social media.
***

My almost five-year-old son did his first dinosaur podcast this past weekend, with his dad. Charlottetownosaurus, Episode One. Because if you are Oscar and you’ve been busily devouring all things dinosaur for almost two years now, you’ve accumulated a great deal of knowledge to share with the world. And because when you’ve accumulated knowledge or ideas or just plain passion for something, whatever it is, sharing it and getting feedback from other people on it? Matters. Even if you’re not yet five. He found out his babysitter listened to it and tweeted me about it and you would have thought he’d won an Academy Award.

He has been in full-time preschool now since September, in the daycare attached to the French school he will attend come next year. He went in with only a cursory vocabulary in French: now, he’s almost comfortable in the language. He’s certainly comfortable correcting my stilted Anglo pronunciations, and I grin at him and try again to match the sounds that suddenly, wonderfully, roll off his tongue.

His teacher’s experienced, and kind, and I think she’s good at what she does. But even after six+ months in a French class with only ten kids, this boy who’d happily eat and sleep dinosaurs all day long and has picked up five-syllable Latin terms just from having books read aloud to him still doesn’t know any dinosaur names in French. Nor the words for fairly familiar concepts like “herbivore” and “carnivore.”

Not a deal-breaker.  Not a personal criticism of his teacher, whose (underpaid) job it is to teach themes of seasons and foods and holidays, to organize and facilitate (rather beautiful) crafts with the kids, to read stories at circle time (which Oscar inevitably interrupts because he wants desperately to tell about the things he knows).

She is a good teacher. She makes homemade play-doh. He is learning from her.

But he is not learning that the things that drive him and the things that he can do are exciting and engaging, things to be built on. He’s not learning that his interests are valid or worthy of creative attention. He’s not learning how to participate in a produsage or prosumer world, where consumption and creation blur.

And that’s okay, I think. He’s not five. And he’s learning some of that stuff at home. And learning to take turns with the play-doh matters, absolutely.

But in terms of his subjectivity, his sense of himself in the world and the stories he belongs in, school – in this traditional model of learning to engage on externally-set terms – makes me a little sad.

He’s a pleaser and a connector, by nature. That’s where the interruptions at circle time come from, however misguided: he’s a kid who will offer up every last thought he can think of in hopes of gaining the engagement and attention of another human being. When that happens, and a positive reflection of himself shines back at him, his world’s complete.

We all need to learn to deal with our worlds not being complete all the time. I work hard with Oscar on a daily basis to help him see – and seize – moments when others might be open to engaging, and when they’re just busy with the damn dishes and getting him a glass of milk, thank you very much.

But humans who need to connect aren’t well-served by systems that externalize what happens to us, that are structured to emphasize compliance and passivity over the scramble to share all the wonders that flit through our brains. It is human to clamour, but it is particularly hard to pay attention to clamour in systems where the audience for the clamour is smaller than the number of clamourers. School is an anti-clamour system at least in part because there are almost always more students than teachers, and human engagement does not thrive in that climate of division, nor on demand.

Human engagement can survive division, however, if it is not required to physically respond to multiple demands at once. Particularly if it has some agency over what it engages with. Clamour, I would argue, is alive and well.

It’s online, in social media.

My Twitter feed is full of people scrambling to share the wonders flitting across their brains. I learn from some of it. I am moved by some. I tune some out – but I don’t need to hush anyone for demanding anything of me, because they’re not. They’re just putting their stuff out there, in a forum where others can engage or attend if they want. That kid who was always waving his hand around in preschool circle time, the one the teacher probably wanted to throttle? He may have grown up to be one of the richest resources out there in his field, connecting and sharing and repackaging what he knows, just in case you want to know too.

He’s a cyborg, and social media is the world’s biggest circle time.

And so that gap between my emerging dissertation and education? I don’t think it’s there. I have a lot of work ahead of me to try to understand what it means, subjectivity-wise, to engage and live and learn in the clamour, but I hope eventually to be able to show that the clamour is not the enemy of learning, only of a model of schooling which need not be the alpha and omega of the field of education.

That would be an ironic educational myth, indeed.

 

the branded cyborg manifesto: identity in the public domain

It’s just me.

A person isn’t a brand.

If “online” is just another place to manage identity, why does digital identity deserve special treatment?

Thanks – big thanks – to all of you who gave me input on digital identity and how you think of it and name it. The paraphrased quotes from the last post’s comments all helped me dig deeper into the specifics of what I’m aiming to explore with this dissertation-in-the-making. I both agree and disagree with each: the conversation hones my thinking and my writing, and I am grateful.

Here’s what I think: the specific kind of cyborg identity that interests me is new. People have, arguably, depended on technologies to construct and perform identity for thousands of years: the wheel created social structures that shaped who people were and how they saw themselves, and writing – to Socrates’ chagrin – enabled a persistence of self over time that has deeply shaped our notion of what it is to be human.

But what I call – for now, at least – the branded cyborg is a particular hybrid of human and social media platform that creates a circulation of identity different from previous incarnations or understandings of self. It is a reputational identity with tangible, visible, measurable attributes, and the economy in which it operates makes demands on the entity who generates it.

In this sense, I think the branded cyborg – for those of us who are one – is us and reaches beyond us, at the same time. It is identity in the public domain. And I think how it operates matters.

That’s why I think digital identity deserves special focus, even if it is perceived by social media users as a simple extension of themselves. Operations of power and interaction are not actually the same online as they are in so-called “real life,” no matter whether we try to conduct ourselves the same or no. The speed of connections, the flattening (to an extent) of hierarchical relations, the reputational and corporate economic aspects of social media, and the ways in which power circulates and allows for different performances and different recognition of performances all change the subject positions that the environment creates and privileges.

Donna Haraway first wrote her particular version of the cyborg into being in 1985: a creature without origin and without innocence, resolutely committed to “partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity.” A couple of years ago, in response to the irritatingly popular mythology of the digital native, I wrote a tongue-in-cheek cyborg momifesto, on the cyborg nature of mommybloggers. We perform aspects of self for each other, intimately, but accept that the whole is seldom represented. We often parody notions of what motherhood should be in an effort to resist the discourses that frame our identities. We are hybrids of human and technology just as surely as our children are touted to be.

My ‘we’ has expanded since then, but I still find the figure of the cyborg valuable as a representation of the particular kind of digital identity I want to explore. In my dissertation, I’ll revision Haraway’s late 20th century version of the cyborg as a 21st century digital subject; an entity of social media.

Now, I don’t think everyone online is a cyborg, or at least not a branded cyborg, not really. It depends on what we DO online. Those of us who live “in the open,” to an extent, who engage in the creation/consumption sharing cycle of the produsage economy and who put our own work out there to our networks and actively try to grow audience for those networks under a particular name (or names) that represent us? WE’RE branding. If you have a Facebook account and the rest of your online activity is mostly surfing, maybe you’re not branding. It’s about level of engagement in that reputational, rhizomatic economy. It’s about sharing, putting aspects of self out there, seeking recognition and being open to new connections in the network. It’s about reciprocity, as well: sharing the work of others, leaving comments, participating in the circulation.

So the digital identities of cyborgs are multi-faceted representations, contributed to and amplified by others as part of the etiquette of social media. Cyborg subjects involved in social media produsage networks ‘create content’ such blog posts, tweets, video work, slideshows, or comments attached to a particular digital identity that circulates in the open, building social – and potential financial – capital for its creators in the process. Traditional media appearances or in the online work of others will sometimes factor into a person’s digital identity: the traces that register with Google as a part of our digital identity are not always fully under our control. However, as Google’s page rank works on scale of views, longterm commitment to a particular digital profile or identity means that sites or accounts managed by the user will usually end up outranking random facets of identity originating with other subjects. The identity can encompass many platforms: depth and frequency of use lend gravitas, as do statistical data like blog pageviews and public rankings like Klout.

For Judith Butler, we are called into being as subjects by the operations of power and discourse, and our agency is concommitant with our subjectivity. What does this mean for digital identity? Cyborg digital identities are the product of already-formed subjects: the traces of us that circulate online are deployed in that environment by subjects always already navigating discourse and power. The digital identity may be constructed the same, psychically and discursively, but operates in a different environment. It is the agency of the digital subject – and whether the digital environment offers alternative opportunities for agency not previously available to the subject in embodied form – that interests me.

As an educator, I’m also interested in whether these potentially new digital subjectivities and their agency then impact the embodied subject and his or her expectations. In other words, what does it mean to teach a branded cyborg in an educational system premised on very different subject roles and agentive constructions than are available here online?

This is why I don’t believe that your online identity is simply ‘you.’ When a subject chooses to engage in the produsage economy, creating and sharing content and contributing to the consumption of others’ content as a means of connecting and building visibility and reputation, a cyborg digital identity comes into being. This digital identity, I will argue, cannot be identical to the subjectivity of the embodied person creating the content, even if the person intends it to be. The digital identity will almost invariably end up being recognized and interacted with differently than the embodied person, because the medium allows for and privileges different types of engagement. Few people, even if they write for a living, walk into an office in the morning and are told outright what a wonderful writer they are. Few students can walk into schools, even with the most well-intentioned teachers, and say Hey! This really amazing/terrible/striking thing came across my radar last night and I’d like to take this morning to respond to and share it creatively. Not everyday. And I’m not sure school should be about that every day, though I’m not sure it shouldn’t. But most students learn from their earliest years that schooling means a set of power relations that tend to preclude and sanction statements like that. They learn a different subject position, one with a very different sort of agency than they will encounter online, as cyborgs.

In this context, then, new forms of agency and specifically digital subjectivity are indeed jointly called into being. The discourses and power relations that create the specific subjugation that calls each individual into cyborg identity would, I assume, be individual: I will want to explore Butler’s work on desire and on giving account of oneself in order to consider the myriad of ways this may operate. Certainly, in my own experience, it was subjugation to and representation by a discourse of motherhood that I felt excluded my experience of loss and attachment that led me to try to narrate my own story online, visibly: in creating cribchronicles, I created my own agency to speak a counter-discourse.

This all sounds delightfully, misleadingly emancipatory. I don’t mean it to. I see change as carrying good and bad, cultural gain and cultural loss: I want to explore both. Social media is neither saviour nor sin, in my mind. And lots of people, I’m sure, go online mostly for the porn.

My read of both Haraway’s original cyborg and Butler’s notions of subjectivity and performativity is that the messiness is okay; that clean trajectories are to be mistrusted, interrogated, that porn – and all the aspects of humanity that it stands for – are part of the package I’ve taken on here, in looking to study identity in this public domain of the digital.

My hope, really, is that in exploring what it means to be a branded cyborg I will stumble and grope my way to a more complex understanding of what it means to be human, here and now.

the man who sold the world

We passed upon the stair, we spoke in was and when
Although I wasn’t there, he said I was his friend

– David Bowie, The Man Who Sold The World, 1970

(Of course Bowie makes me think about identity.)

I need a word.

A year or so ago, long before I started this theoryblog lean-to on the side of ye olde cribchronicles, I started groping my way towards exploring something, trying to capture something I’d never heard named. I assumed it had been named, somewhere, probably a few times over, but was both amorphous enough and fast-moving enough to have refused reification, mass currency under a single title.

I called it brand, half tongue-in-cheek. I’ve always found brand a vulgar word, flagrant and blatant in its commercial intent. The online universe – especially in the education and narrative blog circles I run in – is not always so open about its own embeddedness in the capital exchange process. I chose the word to provoke, to try to force that conversation.

But mostly I chose it to keep me honest.

It forced me to look at my commercially lilywhite self and own that I am as embroiled and invested in online circulations of capital and power as the trashiest review pimp out there. Because you cannot use social media and not be embroiled. As you connect and share and have your work recognized by others, your social capital is amplified. As your social capital is amplified, your capacity to leverage it increases, often exponentially. You don’t have to: the monetization of the sphere is not obligatory. But ignoring it doesn’t mean it’s gone away.

I wrote three posts in quick succession on the subject. In the last one, I said it like this:

be it beauty or ideas or humour, it matters not. if you put it out
there and it works, it builds reputation. reputation can be leveraged,
sometimes into capital, sometimes into opportunity, sometimes
simply  into connection. we all have our eyes on a prize; we are
none of us pure, without want.

branding is what is read on to you, how you are perceived, what
you signify in the eyes of everybody else. it is not you, but a version
of you. it is an act, and a group act, one that does not exist without
a network of some sort to reflect and amplify it. it is ephemeral, a
wisp on the wind. it is not about content or truth.

it is about image and perceived capacity.
(own it, cribchronicles.com, June 8th, 2010)

I think of all of us out here using social media in our myriad of ways as branded selves, branded cyborgs whose online and offline lives blur. Within the walls of the academy, where the branded cyborg is my dissertation topic, I tend to use the words digital identity or digital subjectivity to describe the idea, depending on which discipline I’m addressing. I see them all tied together in Butler’s idea of the performative: that subjectivities are created by the constant and ongoing citation of the (gendered) societal norms that circulate in discourse. What makes me different from you is how I perform myself – online or off – in relation to those norms.

And what makes me a branded cyborg is that the circulations in which I reference and identify myself include the spheres of social media and concommittant capital. And some version of me – my brand, or my digital identity – continues on performing me in circulation even when I’m not there. Ahem. That’s all. But that’s not an easy thing to explain.

It’s hard to name a social aggregate, an “it” in circulation. As Bruno LaTour puts it in Reassembling the Social, “…Social aggregates are not the object of an ostensive definition – like mugs and cats and chairs that can be pointed at by the index finger – but only of a performative definition. They are made by the various ways and manners in which they are said to exist” (p. 34).  The performative definition of a group draws attention to the means necessary to keep it up, and also to the contributions made by the fact of it being studied or analyzed.

Goody. I need a word to cover the performative definition of performativity in the world of social media.

Amber Case (here at TEDWomen) is a cyborg anthroplogist, which basically means she studies human life as a product of humans and technologies, or objects. She calls the ephemeral us-ness that others interact with online our “second self.”

I’m wary of this term. The idea of a second self ignores the fact that the identity distinctions between online and offline life are increasingly minimal and blurred and often meaningless: tomorrow, for instance, I’ll travel to another province to hang out with a bunch of bloggers, word made flesh. The transition from screen narratives and flurries of Twitter conversation to clinking glasses will not be particularly jarring: in fact, because the group of us interact far more regularly than most of us do with friends we know only in the flesh, the awkward stage of polite catching up will be largely bypassed. We are intimate, because we are regularly online together. Are you listening, Sherry Turkle?

Nathan Jurgenson of cyborgology – who adeptly critiques the binary implicated in the second self idea here – calls it a Profile, an aggregate sum of all the data out there about you. I think we’re on the same page conceptually. There’s something fluid about the word: its connotations are less laden than that of brand, or identity. Yet to me it suggests something flat, surface-like, easily tied up. Does it allow for complex performances of digital identity? Does it represent who we are when we’re not there?

I need to talk this out. Last time I asked – when I asked who you think you are online – I got an extraordinary collection of responses and discussion. This is part two, the simpler question, really: what would you call this you I know out here, your online doppelganger, your disembodied you? Profile, brand, second self, digital identity…what works?