My Extended I.

Image from my flickr account

Where do we keep our identities? It might seem like a strange question, but somehow intuitively right. After all, if our identity were all in our mind, then it would not matter how we dressed, where we lived or who our friends were. We would still be the same person.

But we know this is not the case. Each and every one of us, change our personality to fit new situations, and to fit new personalities. We behave differently when we are with our friends, and when we are with our family.

You might now think: Well, that I behave slightly differently to different people doesn't make me a different person! Well. Identity can be defined as "stability of personal traits over time". Then if you have one stable way of acting to your father, and one to your friend, one might as well say that it is your identity that changes. But imagine that your friend had not been there at all, or that you had a different friend in stead, then those traits of you that you showed only to that person might never have surfaced. They would never have been developed. You might have been a totally different person.

None of us like to think that we are only malliable and shapable, and have no control over our identity. In fact we reach out and try to control the image of ourselves we show to others. We dress differently, we spend more or less time with someone, we share or keep secrets. And we update our statuses.

Facebook is so direct. Facebook asks you: who are you? And you are supposed to fill in your personality in a small form. Lately this has changed to become a more time consuming and iterative process, where things you "like" around the net are shown in your profile. Your wall on facebook becomes a tightly controlled part of your personality. An important marker of your identity.

I thought long and hard about this. There is a "me" out there. An extended "I". The thought of giving my self up to facebook was at first alien, and then I just accepted it. The alternative would have been to have no identity. No digital face. But there is little control over facebook, and thus little controll over your personality. No room to breathe, one might say. However lenient facebook is in letting you advertise yourself, you are bound by their rules, and you have to conform to their structures. This I did not want to do.

The solution I found, was to spread my different interests around the web. I have an account on vimeo.com for my videos, flickr.com for my images, a profile on linkedin.com for my professional work, and on blogger.com for my writing. But I felt in the end that this did not reflect my identity very well. These pages are meant for the direct sharing of content, and I myself was not content, I was Identity. Me, Emil.

In  the end I found out that the solution was to bring together all these elements in one web page. This I have now done. And today I launch "www.emildanielsen.no", the page to represent my identity online. This page is meant to represent everything I do in a digital form, and to be my (inter)face online. What I'm doing is nothing new. Artists have been doing this for a long time. But maybe this type of self representation will become a trend in the future.