multiple selves

It has become almost redundant to refer to the web as the technological apparatus for the emergence of multiple selves. Sherry Turkle talks about the way that web allows us to “recast identity in terms of multiple windows and parallel lives” and explore multiple aspects of self in parallel. Laura Robinson notes that “these technologies present self-ing opportunities for an ephemeral self, without commitment to a masterself that becomes an ‘I’ or ‘me’.” 

Clearly, the theoretical paradigm of multiple selves reflects the postmodern critique of the narrative of the essential self with its attendant rejection of the ‘myth of wholeness’. And it is the desire to preserve this revolutionary potential of multiple selves - the choose your own identity riff that Chris Poole lionises - that has led to so much uproar around ideas like google passport.

But how much are we actually walking the walk of all this prismatic identity talk? More and more the read-write-webverse seems to be trending towards an interconnectedness of self that forces us to be one person online. 

In fact, an emerging consequence of the collapsed contexts of the web seems to be that we are perhaps more our selves online than in the real world - I am me in ways I didn't have to be me before, I am the same me to my mum and my boss and my friends, even when once I would have preferred to keep those versions of my self separate and distinct.

Is this leading to a situation - like a certain social network founder would have it - where privacy itself is no longer a relevant ambition? Is the web finally going to catch up to the Australian legal system? Or are we going to find new ways to carve out private spaces in the share-everything landscape of the web? 

Of course, it's still early days in the evolution of the web and it's hard to predict what it will look like five years (or even a year) from now. But I worry that the longer we allow things to continue as they are - where we rely on the privacy settings of corporations with absolutely no interest in protecting our privacy - the more we will disenfranchise ourselves from the conversation and handover control of a big part of our identities to 'the man'.

What do you think? Can we still have private places in open spaces? Or do we need locked wall garden internet communities to keep our secrets for us?