I'm ready for the negative karma, I guess... but I just have to wonder why people insist that identity isn't singular or that it can't be singular.
What is the apprehension? I understand the privacy concerns but when it comes down to identity being multi-faceted, that seems like a social issue rather than a personal one.
What I mean by that is that the only reason it is multi-faceted is because someone who likes to do X and also Y, for some reason doesn't want the people in group X to know that they also like Y and vice versa. Why? Not because X and Y aren't both part of their identity, but because members of X might scoff at their participation in Y.
Your identity is singular, it's you, you know who you are, but by segmenting your identity, you're just trying to hide part of who you are from others because either you are worried about how others will perceive you or how you might be treated differently if others know you as you know yourself. That's too bad.
Pseudonyms and anonymity are great for letting you try new things and fail without spoiling others' perception of your actual identity, they let us get a feel for new environments, but they are not a new or segmented identity, they are just a channel through which we can experiment with and get feedback on our identity.
Just a thought, I'm sure others have much more comprehensive ideas about this so if I'm way off, sorry.
People are used to acting one way around their work colleagues, another around their parents and relatives, another around their buddies they've known since college, and yet another way around their children. Behaviour changes, vocabulary changes, language changes, even accent changes depending on what identity you're presenting.
Identity isn't singular. It's the product of you interacting with other people. You don't present yourself in the same way to the local shopkeeper as you do in bed with your lover. To suggest that you have the same identity in both situations, that you present yourself in the same way, is completely absurd.
I don't think of identity in the same way as you. I suspect you strongly believe there is some "real you" inside your head, with some solidity and independence from your immediate surroundings. But I don't believe that myself for a moment; not just personally, but the science doesn't support it either. The Milgram experiment and Stanford Prison experiment show that people's actions are strongly influenced by their roles and relative social positions. The thing you think of as "self" isn't as unyielding as you seem to think; I believe it's largely illusory, in the much the same way that perceived free will is mostly narrative storytelling wrapped on top of unconscious actions - look at the research around split brains etc., e.g. http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/literally-psyched/2012/0...
I think a lot of people don't experience it as singular.
The extreme is actors. You will here a lot of them talking about their characters in the third person. Even if they are the only one in the world to play that character, even if they have created the character, they experience that fraction of their identity as so distinct that "I" doesn't mean that.
Most people don't experience it as that fragmented, but I still think it's common for people to have in-person identities that feel very separate to them. I know that's true for a lot of consultants and therapists; their client-facing persona is quite distinct.
Identity simply is not always singular. If it was then the study of psychology would likely be much simpler.
To further participate in this discussion on the question of 'apprehension' we're going to have to request access to your Facebook, Gmail, and MySpace account if it still exists. Thank you for your cooperation.
Personally, I agree that it is not ideal, though I know in the real world it is necessary as a workaround sometimes, though in the long term I agree that the problems really should be fixed if possible.
Yep, it's definitely a workaround, but I feel like people writing essays about it see it as a fundamental necessity to protecting their personal identity/identities.
They can't possibly use site X if they can't use it as both Bill Jones and Vampomire Phantasmogram, and therefore, site X is violating their personal rights (not their preferences).
It's not always clear what is a "right" and what is just a socially encouraged preference. Do people have a "right" to keep their employer oblivious of their sexual orientation? Would people care about making it a "right" if they lived in a society where nobody discriminated on the basis of sexual orientation? If society is screwed up in such a way that enough people need to use workarounds to do innocuous things, at some point it might make sense to say that people have a right to use those workarounds.
If there were a single identity provider that supported multiple personas, and if it only exposed a persona of your choice and not your underlying identity to websites that used it (so that only you could associate your various personas with one another), and if this identity provider were highly trustworthy (preferably using cryptographic tricks to tie the provider's own hands), maybe it will be OK to ask everyone to sign in using that identity provider.
What is the apprehension? I understand the privacy concerns but when it comes down to identity being multi-faceted, that seems like a social issue rather than a personal one.
What I mean by that is that the only reason it is multi-faceted is because someone who likes to do X and also Y, for some reason doesn't want the people in group X to know that they also like Y and vice versa. Why? Not because X and Y aren't both part of their identity, but because members of X might scoff at their participation in Y.
Your identity is singular, it's you, you know who you are, but by segmenting your identity, you're just trying to hide part of who you are from others because either you are worried about how others will perceive you or how you might be treated differently if others know you as you know yourself. That's too bad.
Pseudonyms and anonymity are great for letting you try new things and fail without spoiling others' perception of your actual identity, they let us get a feel for new environments, but they are not a new or segmented identity, they are just a channel through which we can experiment with and get feedback on our identity.
Just a thought, I'm sure others have much more comprehensive ideas about this so if I'm way off, sorry.