Digital Identity
May I offer you my card?
In January I decided Jane & I were getting cards.1
Having sold hats online, it seemed logical to define a milliner’s digital identity. I purchased cards for Jane’s Etsy Shop, Cheshire Hat Studios.2
Having scribed online, it seemed logical to define a writer’s digital identity. I purchased cards for my Substack site, Musings, Et Cetera.
QR Codes send one to our respective sites:
The card is an introduction to and a definition of one’s presence.
The same principle applies to one’s digital self.
How does one define oneself?3
I define myself in person as anyone does, by my actions. “By their fruit you will recognize them.”4
The same principle applies to one’s digital self.
How does one comport oneself online?
First, one decides where one exists online.
Hence, my calling card.
Online, I exist on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Substack.
I have a Facebook account. I use it as my primary “friends and family connector.” I share life event updates, post humorous items, and periodically post smart sayings from Stoic philosophers.
I have an Instagram account. I started it during “The Plague,” and have used it to showcase photographs I’ve taken or moments I’ve enjoyed. I also use it to publicize my Substack site.
I have a Twitter account. I use it to read what passes for “news.” I do not “tweet from the hip.” I also use it to publicize my Substack site.
Finally, I have the aforementioned Substack account. This is the site where I formally think, which is what writing is, so this is the site to which my QR Code directs those who scan it.
I introduce you to my thoughts to introduce you to myself.
Introducing myself to someone by introducing them to my family and friends (Facebook) or the pictures I take (Instagram) or the news I read (Twitter) is NOT the primary way I wish to begin a new relationship. Those are also means of introduction, but not ones I choose to emphasize. One’s mileage will vary.
I suppose this is putting my best foot forward. This makes me just like everyone else online.
Models, both real and aspiring, will lead with Instagram accounts. Politicians, journalists, and academics will lead with Twitter accounts. Your grandparents will lead with both sets of Facebook accounts (because they’ve forgotten the passwords to the first ones, but since you’re friends with both sets of accounts, it’s all good).
Thinking of where one lives one’s digital life naturally leads to consideration of how one would live that digital life. The sites I occupy give some indication. When we move to a new physical location, do we not consider how we change? If we don’t, we should. So too in digital life.
Actually, my card tells you where I want to tell you where I exist online.
I might also exist on a school forum, that is specific to a part of personal history.
I might also exist on a forum of people with similar tastes, that is specific to a personal interest.
I might also exist on any number of places online that I choose to share or not for whatever reasons people have for choices in such matters.
A reason people share information online is pride. A reason people do not share information online is privacy.
People have public and private sides to their lives. To our family and closest friends we extend intimacy and empathy. To those further out from our understanding we erect privacy as a fence and extend compassion as a consideration, empathy being overpowering and rightfully reserved, or should be, for our closest intimates, given its power over our minds.5 Privacy can be a measure of literal distance in the physical realm, and metaphorical distance in the virtual realm.
Of course, another reason for privacy is shame.
Shame leads to privacy. We can even give this shame its formal name: “existential shame.”6 This is both the shame of one being changed from subject to object, but also the shame of being caught merely in the act of being, usually in contravention of some norm of behavior or thought.7
Searching for a framework within which to understand the structure of a digital identity, I became introduced to this aspect of shame from an essay by Niamh Jiménez entitled “Reject the Rules of the Social Media Game.”8 I say introduced, because even though I have a copy of Being and Nothingness9 on my bookshelf, it has been 37 years since I braved it on Ft. Myers Beach during the summer of 1985, and it is easier to remember sun and fun as opposed to Sartre, or at least it was for me at age 20.
In her essay Dr. Jiménez outlines her arguments for personal privacy. These “rules” provide a framework for measuring one's digital self.
Don’t get caught in the act of being.
Shut up and behave inside the panopticon.
Stay inside the dopamine loop.
Consumption trumps creation.
Don’t think. React.
Rule 1: Don’t get caught in the act of being.
Pride leads to sharing as distance or shame leads to privacy. Here our scale is transparency of presence.
Do you share everything across multiple sites, or does your online presence consist of only an email address? One’s mileage will vary.
Rule 2: Shut up and behave inside the panopticon.
We behave better if someone is watching us, or we think someone is watching us. Religion does have societal utility if only in calming our passions. Parents watching children understand.
Here our scale is anonymity of profile. Are you who you say you are online, or do you inhabit aliases that separate the identity of your digital and real selves?
Given that anonymity can lead to bad behavior, conclusions about the range of your behavior online might be inferred but from one’s name.10
Rule 3: Stay inside the dopamine loop.
Validation online is instantaneous, given one can find a group online that shares one’s interests or beliefs.
Posting, and checking for “Likes” or the equivalent frequently, would indicate a type of developed pathology that shows one has bent the knee to “The Algorithm.”
Here our scale is frequency of narcissistic review. The name has negative connotations, passing normative judgement on a human behavior. Irrespective of the fact we all want to be liked and look to see if we are, this is a negative given the cravenness of the behavior; there is no other way to shoe this horse.
Rule 4: Consumption trumps creation.
Here our scale is creative participation. Do you only consume what is online, or are you a contributor as well? Is sharing and re-tweeting the extent of your engagement? How balanced is your activity online? Do you create anything original, or are you merely a conduit for another?
Rule 5: Don’t think. React.
How quickly after a post or tweet do you comment, share, or retweet? What is the quality of that response?
Does the response itself show it took time to craft, or was this an almost seemingly reflexive action? Was there a quick insight or one that took time to develop?
Quickly responding is not necessarily a good or bad thing. Short or long responses can show profound depth of thought. One might suspect, however, that always quickly responding with a short statement might lead others to question how much serious consideration a subject is being given.
In a hospital, there are doctors that do nothing but emergency medicine. In a hospital, there are also doctors that do nothing but research. A hospital needs both.
So too do we need to mentally respond to a situation, or meme, accordingly. Our problem arises as we build habits,11 and that conflicts with the fact we can only really do one thing at a time, and that includes paying attention.12 Sometimes not paying attention or not thinking is a habit we create for ourselves.
Do we respond quickly all the time? Here our scale is reflection time.
Thus our rules and measures of a digital life, or “digital identity” version of the Big 5 Personality Traits,13 are:
Don’t get caught in the act of being.
transparency of presence
Shut up and behave inside the panopticon.
anonymity of profile
Stay inside the dopamine loop.
frequency of narcissistic review
Consumption trumps creation.
creative participation
Don’t think. React.
reflection time
How do you measure up?
I can answer for myself.
Transparency of presence is a function of privacy. It is right to have a public and a private side to one’s life. Here we return to the issue of “existential shame;” is the obscured “being” one hides a deviation from the norm, simply a case of “mind your own business," or both? I can comfortably name all my current active sites.
Anonymity of profile is also a function of privacy and the aforementioned “existential shame.” I can comfortably name all my current active accounts.
Frequency of narcissistic review is a function of self-control. I assume I am at the mean on a normal distribution of such behavior. I give myself some points here for purposely NOT looking at my phone as I walk down the street, and NOT looking at my phone once during a recent funeral service. Small victories are still victories; I am as insecure as anyone can be.
Creative participation is a function of ability, innate or acquired, but also a function of self-control. Perhaps acquired ability is a function of self-control as well. I take many pictures, and so post quite a bit to Instagram. I have now written on Substack for a year. I can say I both consume and produce social media.
Reflection time is also a function of self-control. While I am quick to wish a “Happy Birthday!” or “like” a family picture, I rarely comment or respond to many posts or memes anymore. When I put forth on cultural or political issues it is on a medium, Substack, that almost mandates reflection.
All things considered, I am comfortable with my current online behavior and identity.
Note the focus on the present; it was not always so.
We all have pasts, and we all have past behaviors. In my case, my current comfort with my digital identity is a result of past lessons learned.14
How we deal with our digital identity appears to be a function of the 2 primary sources of our rules and measures above: privacy and self-control.
Our digital self is a balance of privacy, mediated by self-control.
With respect to in-person relations, this balance is dictated by the proximity of blood, work, and location. Privacy stands alongside distance in family, like interests, and locale. Existential shame reflects a complexity of presentation, the presentation of one’s personality. The greater the number of faces one can present to reality, the greater the chance of existential shame, as any number of normative boundaries can be transgressed by an individual with unique tastes, which is everyone.
In-person, all of us can be embarrassed, and embarrassing, somewhere.
Online, this potential increases tremendously, as each site becomes a personality facet.
With respect to digital relations, do we have any guiding principle to show us a proper balance for our privacy, both deserved for our humanity and endured due to existential shame for being who we are, and how to exercise self-control in pursuit of that balance?
The Jiménez essay source material provides us with our principle:1516
In this extraordinary interview between MIT computer scientist Lex Fridman and professional poker player Liv Boeree, Ms. Boeree outlines how technological innovation drives social interaction and group formation, which in turn drives “memetic culture,” or the ideas around which we coalesce.
“We need the other way around,” she says. “What are the good memes? What are the good values that we think we need to optimize for that makes people happy and healthy and keeps society as robust and safe as possible? Then figure out what the social structure around those should be, and only then do we figure out technology. But we’re doing it the other way around.”
Ms. Boeree, a professional poker player who has won millions, is a keen student of human behavior; she would have to be. Yet even she is stumped on solving this problem. While describing her solution of reversing the mechanism of technologically-driven idea formation, confesses “I don’t know how it’s gonna do that.”
Social media allows us the ability to express our personalities across multiple sites or realms simultaneously, unconstrained by the proximity of blood, work, or location. Given existential shame’s potentiality grows exponentially online, privacy boundaries gain in importance, along with the self-control to maintain those boundaries.
Perhaps the solution is not a systemic one. I suspect the solution is not something implemented in a centralized fashion, rather individually.
After all, we got into this situation by each of us choosing to let technology drive their own behavior.
One way to take technology out of our behavioral “driver’s seat” is abstinence. After all, the subtitle of the Jiménez essay is “The only winning move is not to play.”
I work fulltime in IT. Being online is something for which I am paid, in addition to the leisure activities we all enjoy. I am online a lot.
But every Saturday, I work an 8 hour shift as a cashier selling groceries at the Willy Street Co-op. I sometimes find it impossible to greet the cashier right next to me for 3 hours at a time, let alone look at my phone, we are so busy. I am engaged in rapid-fire, in-person interaction. I am lifting heavy objects and then engaging in “food Tetris” as I pack owner groceries (not customers…remember, this is a co-op). The physical work is tiring, but given my other job, I see things differently.
For 8 hours on Saturday I’m paid to socialize, and every 5 minutes there’s a math test.
It is comforting to wallow in a sea of humanity. This is the lure of the digital realm. We are social creatures. Online we can find a site for each aspect of our personality, allowing a level of personal expression of which creative artists before the Internet could not even dream.
But absent the constraints that act as guardrails in the physical world, the structure and complexity of the digital realm overwhelms our ability to mediate our privacy. In-person, distance cues our privacy. Online, everyone is your next-door neighbor.
Self-control is necessary.17
Self-control also takes practice. A break from social media provides practice at in-person interaction. These days that is a gift. It might also be an online survival technique: idea formation leading to social structure leading to technology?
“The other way around.”
Periodic abstinence from social media may be good for one’s digital identity. It seems to work for me.
Meanwhile…may I offer you my card?