Discovering Identity: Between Tyranny and Chaos
“We are all citizens and strangers depending on the circumstances. Our identities are never owned by any of us, or entirely self-determined; rather, they are negotiated with others and serve higher purposes of order and participation.”
In this paper, Jonathan Pageau describes how the speed of technological transformation has impacted how we view ourselves and how we participate in communities. The digital world makes people simultaneously more open and yet more closed. In response to the extremes of identity, some thinkers have tried to deconstruct it, while others have pursued the radical fixing of identities, two tendencies which play off each other.
Summary of Research Paper
How we view ourselves, our participation in our communities, our national identities, and our participation in an inter-connected world has been influenced significantly by the rapid acceleration of technological transformation. Technology has simultaneously accelerated the centralising and unifying aspects of identity, while also contributing to the deconstruction of identities.
The digital landscape has dual effects: it protects and fragments, frees and enslaves. But to understand how the digital landscape changes the nature of identity, we must first understand identity itself. This paper explores the complex, layered nature of human identities—how different forms of identity give us order, but can also be destructive.
Identity is the most controversial and important topic today. It underpins the political minefields of nationalism, immigration, war, gender, social classes, and racial differences. It contains both the good and the ill of all “isms”. Identities are necessary for existence and coherence, and we cannot escape them, for they are the way the world is ordered. But when identity is formulated only as uniformity or in opposition to the “other”, it becomes a danger.
The digital sphere offers the capacity to facilitate collaboration in ways that once were impossible, but it also reinforces the strength of increasingly smaller and more specialised identities. The use of pseudonyms, avatars, trolling, and other behaviours distort the human identity.
As technology has advanced, so has the surveillance state, reaching its tentacles into democratic societies and threatening privacy, with our devices passively listening to us, gathering personal data, and creating our digital twin.
The advent of artificial intelligence presents a whole set of new challenges. It makes humans more powerful than ever, while calling into question the very primacy of the human itself.
How do we address these questions? The answer is the abandonment of pride for the sacrifice of love. It is to remember the “golden rule” and prioritise “love of neighbour”. It is to be involved in community, and to recognise that identity is found in giving and not taking. It is the exercise of responsible citizenship, on an individual, local, national, and international level, and to appreciate the digital world as a tool, always subject to the heart of the matter and to be used with the right outlook.