A bit behind the times here, but I wanted to put down some thoughts about identity that I’ve been mulling over since JISC published the Higher Education in a Web 2.0 World report. Shortly after the report was released, Andy Powell and Nicole Harris both critiqued the report’s lack of attention to identity management issues via Twitter, and Andy followed up with a couple of posts on the issue, stating that:
“The important point is that learners (and staff) will come into institutions with an existing identity, they will increasingly expect to use that identity while they are there (particularly in their use of services ‘outside’ the institution) and that they will continue using it after they have left.”
It therefore logically follows that the challenge is around building solutions that allow this kind of portability, ideally a flexible one.
Since there have been theories about the web, there have been theories of subjectivity around how the web would both make apparent and facilitate the constructed and multiple nature of identity. Web 2.0, it follows, is simply an example of this postmodern ‘prophesy’ writ large. Cultural conjecture aside, I do find the recent conversations around practically ‘centralising’ one’s web presence on the network level interesting on a couple of levels (Lorcan Dempsey wrote about this only yesterday). They gave me pause to reflect on my own ‘identity management’ (and potential lackthereof) and its relation to my subjectivity, and particularly my mediated ‘digital’ selves.
First, I am struck by how impossible (or desirable) it might be to ‘centralise’ online identity — and this is not about whether such centralisation is technically feasible or not. I suppose I am what could be termed a digital native, possessing multiple online presences/i.ds for quite a few years now. This multiplicity produces some real tensions. This blog itself is a good example of this. I started it three years ago when I realised that I needed another voice, a separate space from a ‘personal’ blog that was becoming increasingly academic and ‘meta’ in its reflections about blogging and what it might all mean. The old posts below reflect me trying to work through this disjuncture.
The fact that I did not keep up the blog is in part to do with the massive life change I was about to undertake (moving my family from America to the UK) but probably more because this particular written identity was less comfortable and more risky for me, and I was less sure of my audience. Ironically, upon moving to the UK, my ‘personal’ blog suffered a similar crisis of faith, as I realised that that particular voice was bound up in a different cultural identity. This sounds rather handwringing, but the fact is that the blogging community I was part of was largely educated North American women, who shared my views about the tyranny of parenting manuals, breast pumps, and Good Housekeeping. When I moved back ‘home’ I felt completely ripped from this context, and the blog dwindled as a result. (That, along with taking on the most demanding job of my career).
Right now I have a relatively established identity on twitter, which foregrounds my professional role (and has proven an invaluable networking tool already) but is also sometimes a space for that lost personal voice (Within reason. My boss follows me, after all, but so far he’s not called me to the carpet for anything). Although I now feel more comfortable and ‘authentic’ in that voice, issues of audience and which ‘identity’ I am enacting at a given moment still elicit crises of confidence every so often.
The ‘decentredness’ that we might be trying to overcome might not adequately take into account the fact that identity is always already multiple, constructed and mediated through the various spaces in which we enact them. I emphasise the term multiple over fractured, as the latter suggests a certain ‘brokenness,’ which might be more useful when considering how a particular instance of one’s identity (a professional one, for instance) could be fused back together. (Lorcan wrote about precisely this act of fusing identities).
Multiplicity suggests different selves in different spaces, and this brings me back to digital literacy and JISC ‘Higher Education in a Web 2.0 World’ report. I agree with Andy that identity management should be addressed as an issue for digital literacy, and indeed the report suggests that while students are not literate in terms of critical skills in information seeking and evaluation, they are literate in terms of understanding the boundaries of webspaces. “Using web 2.0 technologies leads to a new sense of communities of interest and networks, and also a clear notion of boundaries in web space” (6). The report does not explicitly connect this with issues of online identity, but I do think we can extract from this point that students understand how to ‘be’ in online spaces, and that being will shift and change according to the rhetorical context of the space — the fact that discomfort over tutorial presence in social spaces is indicative that students are intuitively aware that the context is not right – another identity is required.
Web 2.0 foregrounds how our different identities are mediated in different contexts. Students are likely more savvy about this rhetorical fluidity than many of their tutors. This is rich territory from an e-pedagogy standpoint, and a starting point for discussions about rhetoric and what online ‘being’ actually means (and I’d agree that this might need a reimagining of what ‘information literacy’ might actually mean).
Ultimately, I’d agree with Lorcan’s final point yesterday, that while we consider how we make our identities more portable online in a flexible way, “we also retain the ability to support decentralised identities which may not know very much, or anything, about each other 
“
