Identity is a powerful force for motivating actions such as learning. How one sees oneself is an important factor in what one becomes. As is how others see us. In an online world, identity is made up by various media elements, social media constructs, tools for presentation such as avatars, game playing characters, Facebook, and many other personas we inhabit and project online.
Identity today is a very complex process, and seemingly the lines of definition are blurring and becoming ever more provisional. Somewhere in this world of changing and multiple identities, is a process that will drive and support motivation for learning. We are tasked with exploring and developing that process for OTL success.
Here’s an essay that attempts to take a reading of where our culture is presently at in regards to shape shifting identities. It’s written by Wesley Morris who won the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 2011, and holds a sort of top level cultural critic post at the New York Times. He offers his own views, through the lens of a sort of survey of identity in 2015 in US, especially in “the media” we consume.
Not to endorse any of Mr. Morris views necessarily, but he does make a compelling case that identities are greatly in flux today, and hints at some of the consequences of this. At minimum provides food for thought on further explorations of “what is going on” with identity today.
What started this flux? For more than a decade, we’ve lived with personal technologies — video games and social-media platforms — that have helped us create alternate or auxiliary personae. We’ve also spent a dozen years in the daily grip of makeover shows, in which a team of experts transforms your personal style, your home, your body, your spouse. There are TV competitions for the best fashion design, body painting, drag queen. Some forms of cosmetic alteration have become perfectly normal, and there are shows for that, too. Our reinventions feel gleeful and liberating — and tied to an essentially American optimism.
After centuries of women living alongside men, and of the races living adjacent to one another, even if only notionally, our rigidly enforced gender and racial lines are finally breaking down. There’s a sense of fluidity and permissiveness and a smashing of binaries. We’re all becoming one another. Well, we are. And we’re not.
Yet it’s also in our natures to keep trying to change, to discover ourselves. In ‘‘Far From the Tree,’’ Andrew Solomon’s landmark 2012 book about parenting and how children differentiate themselves, he makes a distinction between vertical and horizontal identity. The former is defined by traits you share with your parents, through genes and norms; the latter is defined by traits and values you don’t share with them, sometimes because of genetic mutation, sometimes through the choice of a different social world.
Solomon is writing about the struggle to overcome intolerance and estrangement, and to better understand disgust; about our comfort with fixed, established identity and our distress over its unfixed or unstable counterpart.
[gview file=”https://publicservicesalliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/The-Year-We-Obsessed-Over-Identity-The-New-York-Times.pdf”]