On Personhood, the Self, and Technology

“Who are you?” That is the question that the caterpillar asks of Alice in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. When I’ve taught Carroll, the lazy student’s reaction to the work is to attack the author and say, “He was on drugs?” or, perhaps, they’ll point out how odd his relationship with Alice Liddell was. This is one of several passages to which I try to bring them in order to show that the work itself has merit beyond the bibliography of the writer. “It doesn’t so much matter who Carroll was,” I might say, “What matters is what the text says.” And here I’d usually go on about the idea of aesthetics and the artist – about how the artist and the art are separate in their identity and their effect.

But still, the person who creates the work does, in some way, extend him or herself into the work and creates a creative hybrid which uses an artistic form (poetry, prose, film, image, etc.) which serves as a carrier of whatever bit of identity the artist expended in the work. In this way, Shakespeare, talks of the immortality that is made possible through poetry in several settings (the last couplet in sonnet 18 is the most memorable example: “So long as men can breathe or eyes can see/ So long lives this and this gives life to thee.”) And, indeed, a good number of authors, artists, poets and speakers live on through the medium of their work.

I’ve been fascinated with the concept of the self and our construction and projection of identity for quite some time. In grad school I encountered Donna Haraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto”, which was quite ahead of its time in 1991. In it Haraway expresses the idea that people living in a modern world wherein we have records, licenses, etc. are all already cyborgs of a sort because our informational selves (social security numbers, credit scores, etc. – this was pre-internet) are a technological extension of the self. She also explored, to a certain extent, the ways in which medical technology was creating actual cyborgs at the time (artificial hearts, organ and skin transfers from non-organic or non-human sources, etc.) This all was pre-Matrix. To Haraway, the cyborgification of humanity was inevitable and desirable. Humanity was evolving into a combination of its organic origins and its technical creativity.

What has happened since? Well, the Internet has blossomed and social networking sites such as Facebook and Myspace have given those with internet access (might we call them homo sapiens technica?) the ability to extend their identity into a world-wide web of connections and interconnections. It is even a noted fact that in several cases the “wall” or public comment space of a person who has died and whose account has been frozen in time (but yet still exists because they aren’t deleted and no one else has the password) has become a place where friends and loved ones leave communications aimed at the deceased in a way that indicates their continuity of self. This then is a new sort of digital eternal life. The physical body of a person might die and be interred, but their digital self – be it blog, MySpace, Facebook, or email account continues to exist, and to a certain extent function. In some ways this new media technology is no different from the journals that people in the past left behind (notable “famous” journals come from people like Franz Kafka or Emily Dickenson who were not famous during life, but who became famous after their posthumous works were published.) It is a bit different, however, because we (that is those with access to technology) continue to “exist” in a form that is not controlled by our closest friends and family, but which is accessible to the public. An article in Popular Science recently said that the average American has a digital identity that is approximately 65GB in size. Of that they weren’t specific about how much of it was public (Blogs and public web pages), semi-public (Facebook profiles, other limited access records – medical reports, insurance, criminal record, etc.), and private data (data that is currently only on a private hard disk drive – assuming that no one has installed a rootkit or other data miner that has brought the private into the public). But that is a huge amount of information and creative product regardless of what level of information we are considering).

I thought I’d do an audit of how much of my identity resides outside of the “mortal coil” that is this body. That is to say, if I were to be hit by a bus, a flying boar, a meteorite, or a falling piano tomorrow and killed, what would remain.

Here goes (Skip this if you are bored by detail):

There is evidence of the me of the past that is currently in a around my house. In a box in the attic somewhere, there are the journals that wrote between the time I was 16 and 21, a good number of the academic papers I completed in grad school, and a few scrapbooks and year books from high school. There are also a number of boxes of unsorted photos from the late part of college (in grainy disc picture style), the early years of our marriage, and up through about 2002, when we got a digital camera and stopped printing most photos. Just this weekend my wife pulled out our photo album from our wedding a bit more than 17 years ago.

I’ve also got a bunch of old ID cards: My CIEE Student Travel Cards from 1986 and 1990, my undergrad ID card, the ID cards from my grad school(s), my old passport, my current passport, my Czech Subway Pass ID card, my faculty ID cards from 3 different universities. All of these have a number of different looking pictures of me.

What do these things tell about me? A handwriting analyst could look at my handwriting from high school to now and would say that the slopes, loops and whirls (or lack thereof) give a pretty good sense of who I am, but the handwriting has changed over time in the same way my body has. One of my students was looking at a wedding picture and said, “You look like you are at your prom.” And it is true – the me of now is 17 years older and about 60 pounds heavier. I’ve grown a few gray hairs and had quite a few experiences that have modified, changed, challenged, and made me different. This paper trail is flooded with emotional remnants – Friends, hopes, dreams, children, heart-break, love, relationship and community. It is the record I kept for myself, and it does, indeed serve as a certain sort of material echo of me (or the multiple me’s strung together in temporal continuity) who has (have) lived through these years.

Somewhere out there in an increasingly connected electronic landscape is another me – a digital doppelganger – who abides in the records of others. There is the me of library records. There is the me of school transcripts. There is the me of credit transactions. There is the me that consists of my medical data. There is the me who owns bank accounts, who is paid a paycheck, who pays taxes, who registered for the selective service when he was 18, and who has voted (most of the time.) This is the me that can be stolen, the me that is targeted in what they call “identity theft.” Strangely, though, this most vulnerable me of credit card and social security numbers, is the least real, the least substantial, and, ultimately, the least important of the versions of myself that currently exist. It is the part of me that feels the least real – that seems to be an imposition or perhaps a prosthetic made necessary by operating in our interconnected world. It is like an artificial limb that has to be used in some circumstances, but which will always feel like it is artificial – never really a part of the whole.

Other digital extensions of myself that seems more authentic, though still mediated through technology are the electronic means by which I attempt to extend my social reach: my phone number, which allows remote voice contact with people around the world (mostly friends and associates); my email addresses, which serve as a conduit for particular, directed textual expression, this blog, which serves as an outlet for thoughts that I feel are fit for public consumption but which aren’t particularly marketable, and, most recently Facebook, which has served as a way of connecting with friends and family who are physically beyond my reach. Facebook has been interesting because, it, like email allows for an asynchronous communication that has some advantages over phone calls (no worry about awkward messages on machines, the ability to think a bit before you “say” something). It also, though serves as a place where you can 1) Connect with old friends; 2) Keep in touch easily with others, and 3) answer the question “I wonder what happened to _________?”

I’m more emotionally connected to this second group of digital extensions. They feel more like an organic/technological synthesis that one might call “natural” or at least “genuine.” And yet, is my FB profile really me? In some ways it is more permanent than me, and yet it is controlled, massaged, and managed by someone else, and the data it possesses becomes, in some way, immortal beyond the account. I remember reading that the actress in the YouTube hit “Lonelygirl15” was outed as a fabrication because someone was able to access a social networking profile that she had “deleted.” I think that happens with a whole host of things, so that, when I’ve posted one of these blog posts, it is most-likely permanent in some sense. It will have been backed up somewhere, and if anyone ever desires to check my fitness for a job of some sort, they will be able to look up what I once believed about the space program, China, the Bush presidency, and the theological questions of my children. The funny thing, though, is that all of those postings are static in a way that I am not. Once I’ve written this post, I will, most likely not go back and revise it. The “I” who is here typing will have moved on to something else, and this “me” will be left floating in cyberspace, accompanied only by the hope of occasional hits and comments.

“Who are you?” It is a deceptively simple question, with no conclusive answer. Nevertheless, I remain interested in the quest of creating and discovering the person that I have been, am, and am becoming. May all of our journeys be full of hope and blessing in this new year!