“The knowing self is partial in all its guises, never finished, whole, simple there and original; it is always constructed and stitched together imperfectly and is therefore able to join with another, to see together without claiming to be another”

(Donna Haraway as quoted by Turkle, 1997, p. 79)

Internet users who adopt multiple identities online, using Internet communities such as Facebook, Internet Relay Chat (IRC) channels and Multi-User Domains (MUDs) to express themselves, are better equipped and healthier mentally, emotionally and socially because of their experiences online. I will argue that using multiple identities online is a healthy expression of social and personal identity and I believe this to be true because people who actively undertake identity management online across multiple audiences tend to have larger social communities. They are not as affected by stress or negative experiences because of their wider and more diverse support systems, and by virtue of discovery are more self-aware and often use multiple identities to further their mental, personal and emotional growth and development. In adopting the use of multiple identities online, users embrace the theory of self-complexity as well as constructing a multifaceted understanding of their identity.

Self-complexity is defined by Christina Brown and Allen R. McConnell as the self being:

… comprised of multiple self-aspects, each representing a meaningful domain of one’s life (e.g., doctor, spouse, athlete). A person who possesses many different self-aspects that are comprised of unique and differentiated attributes (e.g., cooperative as a spouse but competitive as an athlete) is said to be greater in self-complexity than an individual with fewer self-aspects that share more attributes in common (e.g., competitive as a doctor, spouse, and athlete) (2009, p. 366).

Because of this, self-complexity plays a large role in the use of identity online. Users who possess a higher level of self-complexity are more inclined to use Internet communities as an outlet for expressing aspects of themselves or exploring social identities “that one does not often have validated as real by the significant others in one’s life” (Bargh, McKenna, & Fitzsimons, 2002, p. 36). Research has found that users who believe their self-aspects to be an important part of their social identity are intrinsically motivated to have these self-aspects recognized and respected as an authentic identity; part of their self-construct and in some cases part of their real world life (Bargh, McKenna, & Fitzsimons, 2002).

Expanding on this relationship between self-aspects and self-complexity it has been found that “people lower in self-complexity find it more difficult to get self-relevant events out of mind because their highly interconnected self-concept structures make mental regulation more difficult” (McConnell, Strain, Brown, & Rydell, 2009, p. 824). Users with lower levels of self-complexity would therefore be less inclined to use multiple identities to explore the virtual world for fear of a domino effect should they encounter conflict or negative feedback. Research has found that these people experience poor performance following stressful experiences, have a greater tendency to let their feelings of a situation guide their behaviour and are more prone to avoiding or removing themselves from situations of uncomfortable self-awareness (McConnell et al., 2009). Described as “affective spillover” (McConnell et al., 2009, p. 824) this effect:

… occurs more strongly for people lower in self-complexity because feedback about a particular self-aspect represents a larger proportion of their overall self-concept given that they have fewer self-aspects and because feedback concerning one self-aspect also implicates (i.e., spills over onto) other self-aspects (Brown & Mcconnell, 2009, p. 824).

Using this research as a guide it can be expected that the opposite might also be true making people with a higher level of self-complexity more inclined to quarantine or limit the effect of stress on their lives, be more independent as they have a wider variety of aspects and experiences to use in guiding judgement and behaviour, and be more interested in exploring issues of self-awareness, development and growth.

McConnell, et al., anticipated their laboratory work would show that people lower in self-complexity would experience positive events stronger than people with higher self-complexity, that they would show a higher correlation regarding “relationships between factors known to promote well-being (e.g., social support, positive personality characteristics) and outcomes such as self-esteem, depression, and physical illnesses ” (2009, p. 824). However it can be hypothesized that the “affective spillover” relationship would be just as important to those with a higher level of self-complexity despite the dissimilarity between their aspects. This might occur because the factors discussed as promoting well-being are implicit with the possession of a larger, more diverse social community, active community participation and a wide variety of interests thus creating a relationship between the expression of higher levels of self-aspects and the factors that translate well-being into positive healthy outcomes.

From an understanding of the characteristics of self-complexity and its relationship between multiple self-aspects we now can think about how a user’s identity and their definition of ‘self’ can be affected by the use of computer mediated communication tools. As discussed by Sherry Turkle in her article Multiple subjectivity and virtual community at the end of the Freudian century “online experiences challenge what many people have traditionally called ‘identity’; a sense of self is recast in terms of multiple windows and parallel lives” (1997, p. 72). It is within these multiple windows users begin to take possession of aspects of their identities and translate them into their own personal virtual reality. With users conducting more of their lives online and much of this taking place across multiple Internet communities at the same time, this issue presents a conundrum for those who don’t understand how a person and their characters relate, how or why a person would want to be involved in more than one MUD or chat at a time or why this stretching of resources, of identity, of self would be appealing.

Turkle discusses how the theories of self or a “society of selves” are constructed when users “become authors not only of text but of themselves, constructing selves through social interaction” (1997, p. 74). It is through this interaction that identity and the concept of self become intertwined just as “MUDs blur the boundaries between self and game, self and role, self and simulation. … Players sometimes talk about their real selves as a composite of their characters and sometimes talk about their MUD characters as a means for working on their ‘real’ lives” (Turkle, 1997, p. 74). This depth of involvement of the self and identity encourages Turkle to make a comparison between MUDs and psychotherapy. She believes that “virtual worlds provide environments for experiences that may be hard to come by in the real. … not the least of these experiences is the opportunity to play ‘an aspect of yourself’ that you embody as a separate self in the game space” (1994, p. 161). If we start from the position of anonymity within an Internet community our own “society of selves” makes it necessary to choose how we represent ourselves in this new community just as we would in real life.

While cyberspace makes talking with strangers easier. The fundamental point of many cyber-realms, such as chat rooms, is to make new acquaintances” (Kang as quoted in Bargh & McKenna, 2004, p. 582) which through “the anonymity of the Internet enables people the opportunity to take on various personas, even a different gender, and to express facets of themselves without fear of disapproval and sanctions by those in their real-life social circle” (Bargh et al., 2002, p. 34). Howard Rheingold similarly discusses the embodiment of identity within MUDs arguing that:

… by creating your identity, you help create a world. Your character’s role and the roles of the others who play with you … give people new stages on which to exercise new identities, and their new identities affirm the reality of the scenario (1993).

This creation and embodiment of an identity is an important yet problematic part of Internet communities. Without it users do not experience the depth of growth, friendship or discovery that are the benefits to the experience. However by embodying an aspect of self online it is important to be aware that the boundaries between self and virtual, self and identity and self and reality can and will become blurred the deeper into an Internet community a user delves.

In Marilynn Brewer’s article The social self: on being the same and different at the same time she discusses how critically important group membership is “to individual functioning, both cognitive and emotional” (1991, p. 475) and how social identity is derived “from a fundamental tension between human needs for validation and similarity to others (on one hand) and a countervailing need for uniqueness and individuation (on the other)” (1991, p. 477). This need for community, acceptance and individuality drives users to seek out multiple Internet communities to support their divergent interests, self-aspects and characters in environments that offer a safe haven for this expression. By exploring their self-complexity in different environments users begin to embrace a multifaceted concept of self. But in taking these opportunities to reach out and “play with one’s identity and to ‘try out’ new ones” (Turkle, 1994, p. 159) users must understand the need to actively undertake identity management to protect their personal identity and their individual growth and discovery experiences from becoming blurred between real life and virtual reality.

Brewer’s definition of personal identity as “the individuated self – those characteristics that differentiate one individual from others within a given social context” (1991, p. 476) can be thought of as the building block of identity, it is through this foundation we explore social identities which categorize “the self into more inclusive social units that depersonalize the self-concept, where I becomes we” (1991, p. 476). I may create a Facebook profile, or I may create a character on World of Warcraft, but it is we – the mediated public (of the MUD or users social circle) that views that profile or interacts with that character. By being a member of MUDs, IRC channels or discussion board’s users are involved in intellectual and emotional relationships with communities of other users. These relationships and the topics they cover might be considered controversial in the real world, but as Internet use grows and we put more of ourselves and our life online the issues of what should be made public and what should be kept private become over overwhelmingly important.

In her article, Why youth (heart) social network sites: the role of networked publics in teenage social life, danah boyd discusses the rise of Facebook and MySpace amongst teenagers, and how as teenage users undertake and understand identity management in regards to their online profiles they encounter issues with the need to “be able to interact but need the ability to filter that information to the relevant people” (Ladner, 2009). Mediated publics – which are “environments where people can gather publicly through mediating technology” (boyd, 2007a, p. 2), especially those that are networked such as Facebook, are finding privacy a contentious issue within their Internet communities. Changes to Facebook such as Beacon and Connect have highlighted the:

… fundamental disconnect between our online and offline identities. In the offline world, we don’t present ourselves in the same way to all people in our lives – we show different sides of ourselves to our mothers, our friends, our employers. And even in the age of fine-grained privacy tools, those tools do not eliminate the complexity of figuring out how to best present oneself in a multi-use public space, particularly for those who have personal, professional and family contacts on these sites (Lenhart, 2008).

Stories of personal posts made public, people being fired over their representation online and misunderstandings about what is acceptable behaviour online:

… highlight how context is constructed and maintained through participation, not simply observation. When outsiders search for and locate participants, they are ill prepared to understand the context; instead, they project the context in which they relate to the individual offline onto the individual in this new online space (boyd, 2007b, p. 17).

This is the dark side to social interaction on the Internet; the need to be social, be available, be yourself and yet be appropriate for all the varied contexts we live our lives in.

The reason identity management is seen as so important for users with more than one identity is because all activity in mediated and networked publics, your conversations, images, videos and self are governed by four main principles. danah boyd describes them as persistence, searchability, replicability and the invisible audience (2007a, p. 2-3). Persistence is the way that Internet communities such as forums, social networks and blogs enable communication (2007a, p. 2). By being asynchronous, multiple conversations can happen at the one time and be spread across time, but this also means that those records of conversation stay visible after you’ve moved on, and for as long as the website is accessible (2007a, p. 2). Searchability, implies not only the ability to search for old or current conversations, but also the ability to use the persistence principle to track a user down and find out who they were talking with, about what and when (2007a, p. 3). Replicability takes that one step further by acknowledging that in the online world anybody can copy and paste your conversation, essay or ideas and not only use them as their own but they can also be altered and used out of context against you (2007a, p. 3). Lastly the invisible audience describes not only the inactive or hidden members within your community but also, “in mediated publics … persistence, searchability, and replicability, introduce audiences that were never present at the time when the expression was created” (2007a, p. 3). Active identity management is being aware of these issues and knowing how to manage them effectively to ensure that the dangers posed by these issues do not outweigh the benefits of Internet communities as a tool for self development and self discovery.

By embracing the limitations of Internet communities and users’ individual comfort levels with regards to how they wish to express their self-aspects online, it can be shown that Internet users who adopt the use of multiple identities online are better equipped and healthier mentally, emotionally and socially because of their experiences. Users are more knowledgeable and confident in understanding identity management across multiple audiences and are also more self-aware and able to use their self-aspects and multiple identities to further their mental, personal and emotional growth and development. They also tend to be involved in larger social communities and have access to more diverse support systems than users who do not. Using multiple identities online is a healthy expression of social and personal identity and having been inspired by Sherry Turkle’s articles to discuss this topic I feel it appropriate to end with a quote taken from her writing.

“Health is when you are multiple but feel a unity. Health is when different aspects of self can get to know each other and reflect upon each other. Health is being one while being many”

(Bromberg as quoted in Turkle, 1997, p. 78)

Bibliography

Multifaceted identities: Personal growth in playing with more than one character by Emelia Sutton is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 2.5 Australia License.

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