A further quest for identity

I have been continuing my exploration of identity, after some carefully worded searching on the Open University library (not sure what I am going to do without it). The next few blog posts are a summary of some of the papers that I read on my long train journey yesterday to see family.

The Extended Self in a Digital World (Belk, 2013)

Russell Belk is a professor in business and marketing and his discussion focuses on how possessions are an extended part of our identity. This paper was so fascinating that I even discussed it over lunch. It is interesting to come to discussions about identity from a different place, and his paper looks at rewriting an earlier work about possessions, and how digital possession might change how we view and create identity. The digital world means that many of our possessions are now ‘invisible’ (like music, film), and what was once private collections has now become public. The paper discusses whether that means that we no longer view possessions in the same way, or does it mean that we alter how we use and view these possessions as a wider part of our identity.

The key concept is that possessions serve as markers for others to form impressions of us, and are cues for individual and collective meaning. Belk notes that digital good can change our behaviour. They can stimulate consumer desires, and help actualise possible daydreams or impossible fantasies (by becoming a wizard in world of Warcraft or building a village), but they also serve to facilitate experimentation. However, the problem with digital possessions is the uncertainty over ownership. Belk asks if their roles change when we turn off the device, but I think this is no different from the collections you keep in the attic, or the music and films that sit on shelves.

This prompted discussion during lunch around how digital things might have change our own personal possession. We are moving house soon and have started to ‘declutter’. We have ‘got rid of’ a number of dvds (from a collection of over 500), books and cds. Several years ago I said that I would never have a kindle – now – I wouldn’t be without it. I have come to realise that my love of books wasn’t the physical object, but the places that they took me. I still feel the same emotions towards reading and treasure some of the stories, but I don’t need to keep the physical book. I love my kindle and find that a physical book constrains me being able to just pop it in my bag for those odd moments. It’s the same with music. My whole music collection fits on a disk that fits in my phone. I have listened to more music in the last year than I did the previous ten years before. Why. Because it fits in my pocket, and I can play it whenever there is a moment. My walk to work everyday has afforded a great deal of opportunity to revisit albums from my youth, and long train journeys home from training weekends, let me rest my brain and listen to new albums.  So music suddenly has been repackaged and repurposed in my life. I guess this is about the fact that possession are extended parts of us, and it’s how we use it, rather than the physical presentation of it that is important. But what digital possessions have meant for me, is that I get to explore my heritage and discover new things that will potential help me reconfigure my identity for now.

Getting back to Belk, there are a number of other points he makes, which many others also make, about the natural of the digital world. Our representations of ourselves can be fictional (online games and virtual worlds) or real-life (blogs, forums and social media). What we have started doing more of, is sharing our possessions, as a way of enhancing our sense of self: self-portraiture, self-reflection, and self-confession. I really important point that I had not really consciously considered, but is acknowledged by many of the writers about digital identity, is that less face to face contact encourages more self-disclosure. And most social networks afford self-disclosure as the heart of their existence. Belk tells us that this means there is more self-revelation (and this is acceptable, in fact a necessity) , a loss of control, more shared digital possessions and aggregated self (there’s lots of little bits of us joined together) and a shared sense of space. It means that the construction of self is more social, and focus on affirming our existence in a social world, while building an ‘extended’ self. But it also means that we start to have a more distributed memory, where the digital world gives us digital clutter, as well as different narratives of self, and digital cues to our sense of past.

Belk, R. W. (2013). Extended self in a digital world. Journal of Consumer Research, 40(3), 477-500. [online] Available at: http://www.dies.uniud.it/tl_files/utenti/crisci/Belk%202013a.pdf