Chapter 3: Creating You — The Future of You: Can Your Identity Survive 21st Century Technology? (2021)

Chapter 3: Creating You. In 1893, Agnes Richter, a seamstress from Dresden, reported that members of her family were stealing from her and that she feared for her safety. Examined by a local doctor, she was declared to be suffering from psychiatric problems and was promptly admitted to the City Lunatic Asylum, where she would spend the next 26 years of her life. During her incarceration, Agnes took up the needle and thread of her old profession and set to refashioning her asylum jacket. Not only did she embroider it with colourful thread, she used it to spell out messages and statements such as 'I', 'mine', and 'I am big', along with 583, her unique identifier number at the asylum. Look up the name Agnes Richter today, and you will see that her jacket, and therefore her story, has been preserved as part of the Prinzhorn Collection at Heidelberg University Hospital, which is dedicated to art created by men and women with mental disorders. In a world that had labelled her insane, her little jacket was the only available medium through which Agnes was able to express the most human of impulses, the urge to assert her own identity. Today, we enjoy more freedom than ever to satisfy this impulse. Advances in communication, the emergence of the internet and social media, have transformed the way that we create and control our identities, and will continue to do so. We can now connect with a vast network of people across the world. We can choose how to express ourselves to them in a much more creative way, we can decide how we wish to be perceived, and control our own narrative. Through virtual avatars and mixed reality, we can create and explore new versions and visions of identity. We are in a position to create who we are. The question is, how real are these digital portrayals of ourselves when they are so carefully edited and maintained to present a very particular picture of our lives? Does it matter if they don't match up with reality, or do we need to embrace a more fluid concept of the relationship between identity and reality? In which we are more comfortable with creating different versions of us. In the 21st century, the self has given way to the selfie. Today, selfies have become the ultimate expression of how we choose to present ourselves, offering a unique mix of subjectivity, autobiography, and self-portraiture. Academic Laura Buscetta, from the University of Messina, whose research centres on representations of the self in visual culture, believes this is especially evident in the popularity the similarity of selfies taken using a mirror. On the one hand, she says, there is a mirror, in which the body of the subject is reflected. On the other, there is the art of the selfie itself that can reflect the personality of the individual. There's a depth of meaning in these double mirrored images, which Buscetta suggests is best captured in the subtitle of an exhibition for the Art Selfie Project: Let us see you see you. Selfies aren't simply images of ourselves for others to look at. They are representations of how we see, or want to see, ourselves. Of course, selfies are only images of who we are at a particular moment, and Buscetta believes that this temporal dimension is too often overlooked when we consider their significance. '24-hour exposure gives us the ephemeral satisfaction of being seen by others,' she says, 'and it satisfies our impulse to be visible, present, and always seen.' But there is also something reassuring, Bissetta adds, about the way in which each selfie is only a fleeting appearance. There is a seriality to selfie culture, an ongoing self-monitoring and constant editing of the self for the audience. —with each new image soon to be replaced by a more recent one. Each picture, says Buscetta, can be seen as fragments taken from the story of an individual. In its January 2020 issue, the magazine MIT Technology Review published an essay by 18-year-old Taylor Fang about the importance of selfie culture to teenagers. In it, Fang writes: Selfies, as many adults see them, are nothing more than narcissistic pictures to be broadcast to the world at large. But even the selfie, representing a mere 'I was here', has an element of truth. Just as Frida Kahlo painted self-portraits, our selfies construct a small part of who we are. Our selfies, even as they are one-dimensional, are important to us. They aren't just pictures. They represent our ideas of self. Like Puseta, Fang emphasises the 'seriality' of selfies—their ability to help teenagers construct a narrative about who they are, as well as where and when they are too. For, while Gen Z certainly want to be looked at, they don't want to rely on just one profile picture. They want to capture how they looked and felt at every moment, sharing whatever aspect of their richly interesting and complex identities is on display at any given time, and they are always open to new ways to do so. This is why there are always so many new social media apps and platforms that encourage us to momentarily express ourselves in many different ways, editing our self-image as we go. Now, everyone can be creative when it comes to their identity, endlessly experimenting with new features and entertaining effects. TikTok, Snapchat, and all manner of emerging augmented reality tools allow us to conduct a never-ending experiment in reimagining the self. Unfortunately, for all of its creative potential, social media can have destructive effects. We have come to see our online presence as so integral to our identity that every interaction becomes highly personal. Far too often, we see clashes between individuals, exchanges of insults, threats of violence, and worse. Whenever I think about the dynamics of social media, I'm reminded of something that media communications theorist and philosopher Marshall McLuhan said back in the 1970s, which was, "All forms of violence are quests for identity. When you live out on the frontier, you have no identity. You are a nobody. Therefore, you get very tough. You have to prove that you are somebody." Ordinary people find the need for violence as they lose their identities. They are determined to make it somehow, to get coverage, to get noticed. McLuhan was talking about extremists, but I think the link he draws between violence and identity explains much of the brutal communication that happens between complete strangers on social media platforms today. As the 2 billion people on Facebook will no doubt attest, social media is about the collective as well as, if not more than, the individual. In its connectivity, it can bring together disparate communities who have no physical proximity, binding them through their shared interests. It encourages people to form groups, to become part of communities, and to get together to support causes. It is, in short, social, but it is also tribal. Sometimes this can serve to encourage conformity rather than individuality. Belonging to and participating in a group can lead us to perform all of its rituals too. Liking what our friends post, muting those who disagree with us, clicking to be seen to support the right causes, and excluding anyone who is not part of our tribe or does not conform to the established narrative of our group. Given the pressure to conform, what does that mean for identities we choose to portray online? Do we create identities that reflect who we truly are, or do we present an idealised version of ourselves? 'Are we performing a role, or is it just a performance piece that projects an idealised version of you?' Perhaps, to paraphrase Florian Culmer, a leading academic in the field of sociolinguistics, personal identity is no longer something we have, or something we are, it is something we act. And today we have infinite ways in which to control the performance of our identity creations. We are determined to present the best version of our lives, to the extent that many people can spend hours and days curating the perfect Instagram feed or filming daily activities in order to feed the perfect image of themselves to hungry audiences. Of course, this too brings its own pressures. When everyone around you is busy filling their social media feeds this way, we can end up feeling like we have to do the same thing. Posting more content, showing ourselves engaged in endless different activities, living our best lives. During the pandemic, for example, it wasn't enough to sit at home and enjoy nature, do a spot of gardening, make yourself a meal, relax, try to get some quality sleep. On Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and everywhere else, we were bombarded with posts, articles, and self-help videos telling us how to be more productive, And if you didn't have a novel or an album or an online basket weaving course in you, you were made to feel like a failure. We don't yet know the long-term implications of this kind of self-presentation for the way we think about ourselves or others, but the initial signs don't look promising. A recent survey in the UK's Stylist magazine revealed that more and more of us are falling victim to comparison culture. Feeling inadequate and jealous when we compare our own lives to what we see other people doing online. The survey found, for example, that 44% of readers were unable to resist comparing their own experiences with those shared by others on social media, and that 38% used the perceived experiences of their peers as a benchmark for where they were in their own lives. Given that we tend to post only the best things that happen in our lives—the parties, the engagements, the wedding days, the new babies, the the new cars, the new homes, the new bodies. Is it any wonder? Even if we don't compare ourselves to others, we can often find ourselves making unfavourable comparisons between our idealised online lives and our everyday reality. If we only post pictures that have been heavily edited, for example, how does that affect the way we think about our un-Photoshopped appearance? And if we project too idealised a version of ourselves, are we setting the bar too high for all of our future behaviour. Won't we inevitably make some ill-judged remark or post something that people judge to be hypocritical, inauthentic, or unacceptable, and then risk being cast out into the web's wilderness? When was the last time you saw a Hollywood celebrity exhibit scepticism over climate change, for example? Even if some of them have their doubts, they know that transgressing the tribal codes is not permitted, When we think of identity as a performance, we are often just hiding away some aspects of ourselves and exaggerating others, because we know that one false move and we could be shamed forever. The pressure of keeping up appearances has seen the rise of a new trend on Instagram for having two accounts: a Rinsta and a Finsta. Your Rinsta is your so-called "real" Instagram account, the one where you present yourself carefully curated, a perfect persona, aiming to impress and so build up a reputation as someone worth following. If you're wondering whether 'real' is quite the right description for these accounts, you're not alone. An article in Dazed magazine recently revealed that social media influencers regularly hire out a grounded private jet to produce images that suggest they're on a luxury flight. Conversely, your Finsta is your fake Instagram account. This is where you would post more candid and personal stories and, shockingly, express how you really feel about something. Tellingly, your Finsta is more likely to be kept private, permitting access only to your close friends. In the world of Rinstas and Finstas, the concept of identity has been turned on its head. The real you is the fake you, and vice versa. When we are creating and sharing ourselves via social media, it is often not so much for our own self-expression, but a performance for our group. The advent of social media has made it hard to distinguish truth and fiction in an even more fundamental way. In 2016, a new social influencer burst onto the scene, a 19-year-old who went by the name Lil Miquela. Her Instagram feed showed her sitting on the front row of major catwalk shows, wearing the latest fashion labels, supporting campaigns such as #PlannedParenthood and #BlackLivesMatter, preparing for a big meeting at work, dealing with her account being hacked, and even breaking up with her boyfriend. Her mix of everyday drama and glamorous lifestyle saw her quickly amass 2.6 million fans, earning her a high-profile promotional campaign with Prada and, in 2018, a place in Time magazine's 25 most influential people on the internet. But that was on the internet. Off it, well, she didn't actually exist at all. Lil Miquela was the world's first ever computer-generated influencer, created by a company called Brood, whose business plan was to create a virtual celebrity and turn that fame into money in the same way that real celebrities do, by negotiating various sponsorship and advertising deals. For quite a while, many people didn't realise they were interacting with a synthetic identity. But even when Lil Miquela was outed as a bot, the blurring of the line between real and fake continued. Lil Miquela released a statement blaming Brood for leading people to think that she was real. But of course, those very words were also being typed by her creators, the people she was saying could not be trusted. And Lil Miquela is not alone. In 2017, a striking new model entered the fashion world. Tall, stylish, beautiful, and Black, her name was Shudu, and she had everyone wondering who she was. She quickly accumulated thousands of followers on Instagram and became hot property, with various companies wanting to book her for their campaigns. She first appeared in a collaboration with the brand Solsky, and then on social media reposted by Rihanna's brand Fenty. And like Lil Miquela, Shudu is as fantastical as she is fantastic, another computer-generated creation, this time of longtime Barbie obsessive and top fashion photographer Cameron James Wilson. Shudu has since become known as the world's first digital supermodel, appearing on the COVID of fashion magazine WWD, featuring in an editorial for Vogue, and posing in Cosmopolitan, which wrote a makeup look created uniquely for her. And like Lil Miquela, she has evolved into a campaigning activist, as Wilson explains. Now Shudu has a life of her own and hopes to champion diversity in the fashion world, collaborate with creators from emerging economies and underrepresented communities, and get together with up-and-coming designers. Wilson has even started using real-life models to create looks inspired by Shudu and posting images of them on her account almost as if they are fans emulating her image. Layer upon layer, real and virtual, the meaning of identity is becoming ever more difficult to decipher. We might dismiss these manufactured characters as deceptive, vacuous, and even harmful, but the reality is that everyone on Instagram enhances their selfies and edits their photos. Many passionately post their support for social justice causes, but often do it just for the likes. And many influencers sell out their principles for a commercial deal and are seen in social media posing with a brand that they would never in reality use. Perhaps that's why Lil Miquela fits so comfortably into the Instagram feeds of her fans. Research conducted by Lucia Comagin, director of insight and strategy at communications giant Telefónica, shows that young consumers don't mind that Lil Miquela and her virtual friends are computer-generated. As one fan puts it, "We love them. We discuss them when we hang out after school. If they have cool content and cool outfits, why not? I'll be friends with a virtual person," she told me. In a way, these virtual influencers are an inspiration for real teens, showing them how to manipulate and create different versions of themselves in a way that doesn't have to bear much adherence to reality. They are the ultimate digital natives. And the young have much in common with them. Many of the younger generations have lived their lives as much online as off, with their first image often posted on the internet before they've even taken their first breath. In their fascinating essay 'From Mass Media Studies to Self-Media Studies: Strategies of Self-Representation in Pregnancy Video Diaries', academics Deborah Toshi and Frederika Wille show how modern imaging technologies, such as ultrasound, have accelerated the speed with which expectant mothers begin to think of their unborn babies as separate beings. These images, argue the authors, give concreteness to the unborn child who can be introduced to relatives and friends even before his or her birth. And they also encourage mothers to, quote, personify, build, and make a narrative and a precise social identity for the unborn baby, even assigning personality traits to the images of the fetus. The first ultrasound image of a fetus is almost akin to the child's first selfie. It might be posted by the parents rather than the subject, but to all intents and purposes, it is there to say, 'I am here,' to document the existence of a self. And once the child's identity narrative has been set in motion by its parents, it continues at astonishing speed. A report from the UK Children's Commissioner estimates that by the age of 13, a child's parents have posted around 71 photos and 29 videos of their child to social media every single year. That's a stunning 1,300 images shared of a child by the time he or she is a teen, giving them an online identity whether they want it or not. Given that this is the case, it is hardly surprising that once young people have the ability to post their own selfie and curate their own social media, they want to escape the childhood identity that has been part-created for them and explore the creation of their own identity for themselves. In fact, parents need to be ever more mindful about how and when they should include their children in the decisions over what images they choose to post and what story they choose to present. When, in short, should their children be allowed to craft their own digital identity, rather than having one imposed upon them? In her article for MIT Technology Review, Taylor Fang suggests that she and other members of her generation are well-equipped to curate multifaceted identities for themselves using the ever-increasing supply of social media tools. 'To grow up with technology as my generation has,' she writes, is to constantly question the self, to split into multiplicities, to try to contain our own contradictions. But for an increasing number of people, the question is not how best to harness social media to live out our best lives, it is how to free ourselves from the constraints and expectations of real life by turning to the escapism of virtual worlds. Life in the real world can be hard and sometimes painful. For children and adults alike. Parents can have unrealistically high expectations of a child or set ideas on how their child should represent themselves in the world. And thanks to social media, as we have seen, adults can feel themselves to be under constant scrutiny, forever being judged by their family, friends, and even complete strangers, so much so that they believe they cannot show their true selves. In the immersive 21st century technology of virtual reality, We can all escape the pressures of the real world, invent and reinvent new identities for ourselves, play and have fun. In an article for Teen Vogue, entertainment news editor Claire Dodson writes about how she turns to the life simulation game The Sims when, as she puts it, life gets unmanageable. Something she found herself doing more regularly during her COVID-19 isolation, when real-world socialising was not possible. Feeling under pressure, as many people did, to, quote, finish your novel, or read great literature, or do frankly absurd amounts of at-home workout videos, Dodgson found that there was something soothing about pretending to do those things in The Sims. Her Sim character masters the writing skill and goes on to produce masterworks that actually pay her a living wage. She can then go and party all night long before she goes on to master gardening or gourmet cooking. Money is no object, neither is time or personality or even natural talent. Anyone can be anything in The Sims, she writes. Dodgson wasn't the only one to feel this way. Participation in The Sims reached an all-time high of 20 million unique players worldwide during the pandemic, with game designer and futurist Jane McGonigal describing gaming at the time as an incredible act of self-care. In lockdown, isolated from other human beings, many people struggled to understand who they were anymore and experienced what Leslie Jameson, novelist and fan of virtual world Second Life, describes as the siren call of wanting an alternate life. She explains that it is not just the promise of an online voice, but an online body. Not just checking Twitter on your phone, but forgetting to eat because you are dancing at an online club. The experience is more than a version of the real you, it is more like a totally separate life. And who didn't want an alternative reality during the dark days of the coronavirus lockdowns? Virtual worlds such as The Sims, Second Life, and Animal Crossing allowed us to play out a life which is not only beyond what was possible during the pandemic, but was also beyond what we could ever hope for in our real lives. As Claire Dodson puts it: The lives I build in Sims 4 are infinitely more glamorous, successful, and well decorated than my own, but it doesn't spark the same aspirational jealousy that, say, scrolling through Instagram does. Looked at this way, Dodson is using her Sims character to act out her own aspirations, outsourcing what she cannot or does not want to achieve to her synthetic twin, thereby alleviating the pressure on her real-life self. When you explore what motivates people to enter these virtual worlds, you hear the same answers come up time and time again. There are "no rules" in these worlds, it's "just for fun," and "not everything has to make sense." This suggests that there are places where people can fully explore their own identity, liberated from having to act in accordance with any one given identity or the weight of expectation that others might place on them. Nowhere is this fluidity of identity more overtly expressed than in the avatars that we create to represent us in these worlds, which we can increasingly customise to look and sound however we would like to be seen. A great example of how fun this can be is demonstrated in a TED Talk given in 2019 by Dr. Doug Roble from visual effects production company Digital Domain. In it, he first addresses the audience from a screen high above the stage. Hello, he says, I'm not a real person, I'm actually a copy of a real person. Let's bring him on stage. The real Doug then walks out dressed in a motion capture suit designed to feed all of his expressions, gestures, and words into some machine learning software to generate a 3D avatar that he can control live in real time. It is an outstanding sight because Digidoug looks anything but digital. Instead, he looks completely photorealistic, conveying every expression on Doug's face, every wrinkle, every vein, every blink or twitch of an eyelash. It's undoubtedly a superb technological achievement. But why bother creating an on-screen avatar that looks and moves and sounds exactly like you? Couldn't you achieve much the same effect using plain old live-feed video camera? But the real magic comes later in the presentation, when Digiduck is suddenly transformed into a cartoonish old man. "This is Elbor," says the real Doug, to gasps of astonishment from the audience. "With the push of a button, I can deliver this talk as a completely different character, and whilst I've changed my character, the performance is still all me." And it's true. Everything about Elbor Even the way he speaks, slightly out of the right side of his mouth, is clearly generated live by Doug Hezzy's speaking on stage. The implications of this for the worlds of film, television, and all kinds of live performance are immense. But as Doug also says, the next time you make a video call, you will be able to choose the version of you that you want people to see. It could be you but with great makeup on, or you with a different haircut, or you as you looked when you were younger. It is genuinely awe-inspiring as a presentation. It makes me think that perhaps in the future, we will each develop our own portfolio of virtual personas that we can choose to wear like outfits from a wardrobe. We could attend a virtual job interview looking for all the world like a serious professional while actually sitting at home in our pyjamas. Or if we want to meet up with mates online for a bit of fun, we could pick out a more carefree appearance. Perhaps this kind of technology could allow us to meet up with different versions of ourselves in a virtual world. Or versions of ourselves at different stages of our life. Perhaps in this way we can literally exist not only in the present, but in the past and possibly the future as well. We could develop an identity capable of travelling through time. How we choose to design our avatar and present ourselves online has more importance than you might think. Because it seems that our digital appearance can actually influence our behaviour. Stanford University researchers Nick Yee and Jeremy Bailenson call this the Proteus Effect. In a series of virtual reality experiments, the authors observed that people altered the way they acted to match the behaviour associated with the appearance of their avatars. The more attractive the avatar, the more willing the person was to approach strangers. The taller the avatar, the more willing the person was to make an unfair offer in a negotiation. The shorter the avatar, the more likely a person was to accept such an offer. As Bailenson concluded, people in taller avatars negotiate more aggressively, people in attractive avatars speak more socially, and people in older avatars care more about the distant future. This reflects the behaviour that we might expect in the real world, but of course in the real world there are far more limitations on how we can present ourselves, and therefore on how we behave. What makes these experiments really intriguing is that the avatar that people thought they were controlling in the virtual world was not the avatar that other participants in the experiment could see. In other words, People were behaving differently because they saw themselves differently, not because others did. This means that the Proteus Effect should pertain even if we are alone in a virtual world. Regardless of whether there are other users or players interacting with us, our own behaviour is likely to be modified according to the avatar we choose. So what does this mean if we choose an avatar of a different gender to our own?— or a different race? Do we behave differently? Do we perceive ourselves differently? What might be the long-term consequences of this on the way we think of ourselves, both in the virtual world and the real one? There's no doubt that sophisticated avatar creation is fast heading our way. Recently I met with a Japanese entrepreneur, Eiji Araki, vice president of the games company GRI., who gave me a demonstration of their mobile live streaming communications platform, Reality. It is an impressive and vibrant platform that allows people to chat to others in the guise of an avatar that they can continually choose to alter based on a long list of characteristics such as gender, hairstyle, eye colour, and facial hair. In the demo, Eiji showed me how the movements of his avatar mirrored his real-life gestures and movements as seen by the camera on his smartphone, a little like Doug was able to in his presentation when he appeared as the character Elbor. E.G. then proceeded to scroll through streams of other people's avatars, each one with a face full of color and character, all inviting us to stop by for a chat. On one avatar's screen, I saw a diamond ring pop up, and E.G. explained that fans can purchase and send all manner of gifts, not just jewelry or clothing, but avatar accessories, like a new hairstyle, or in another case I saw a moustache. What's more, these purchases are made with real money, with IGE estimating that the average spend on such items might be around $50 a month. Importantly, the recipient not only receives the gift, they also get a share of that spend, so the more popular you and your avatar are, the better off you will do financially. According to Eiji, there are other benefits too. Using an avatar, for example, can give people the confidence to unleash a hidden talent, such as becoming a singer or an artist. Liberated of their physicality, people seem to revel in the freedom to express themselves. One couple even met and fell in love as avatars. "Even before they met in the real world, they already knew each other," says Eiji. They knew each other's characters, what they liked and what they disliked. And because they met on reality and had a lot of friends in common, it made sense to host their digital wedding party on another virtual reality platform called Cluster, inviting all their friends to gather online to celebrate. All the attendees, in other words, were avatars. For all these technological advances, there's an argument that these kinds of immersive virtual worlds are still racing to catch up with the way that digital natives think about identity, rather than the other way round. Young people under the age of 25 have already grown up with a much more fluid definition of identity, an idea expressed well by self-proclaimed fashion tech cyborg Damara Inglis, whose work explores the relationship between the physical body and digital identity. Speaking at a London College of Fashion event in 2020, she said, 'As digital natives, we have always lived in between two parallel realities, with a physical body that is designed by nature and a virtual identity that is made of pixels, copied, pasted, shared, and reposted. We already live in an augmented state of reality, in an augmented state of our own existence. It's a view shared by Kevin Li, head of the China-based youth marketing consultancy Youthology, who believes it is a change reflected in our culture more generally. He told me, "I have so many different selves, and they're authentically me, but they're all different for different usages, different contexts, and different social circles. Today there is no such thing as mainstream pop. Everything is its own mainstream. Everything is its own pop. You have such fully fledged, diverse, multiple cultures instead of just one central culture versus outlier cultures that today you don't feel you need to be like anyone else." If this trend continues, I think we will see our identities become more fluid than ever, as virtual media unlocks the possibilities of being who we would like to be rather than settling for who we are. We will no longer seek merely to represent the self, but to invent the self and to reinvent many selves that may coexist in the various worlds we choose to inhabit. Underneath it all, it comes down to an acknowledgement that each of us should be able to create our own identity, rather than have it thrust upon us by external force. That was the impulse that drove poor Agnes Richter to decorate her asylum jacket. She did not want to be identified as a "lunatic" by the powers that be. She was determined to use the available media to preserve her autonomy and her identity. And she had every right to do so. They may have deprived her of her liberty and her privacy, but they could not take her identity. As her embroidered words made clear: I create me.