On Being Judged By One's Writings

"It is those we live with and love and should know who elude us."

Robert Redford, Narrator, A River Runs Through It (1992).

At A Preponderance of Evidence, Jonas Luster has written on the social issue of how we are, can be, or shall be judged based on our "internet identity." By internet identity, I mean that which is informative about an individual based on those writings, images, links, press releases, and the like that can be linked to the person's name.

Jonas stated that the ability to craft an intricate, if not accurate, internet identity represents an important social change.

All those examples show one thing more or less clearly - the circumference of our actions has increased, the distance between actors and observers is drastically reduced. The effect of actions and affiliations has grown to include those not usually in our direct circle of influence. Not unlike the promise of YASNF (Yet Another Social Networking Fad), separation has lost in influence, while reliance on a proper self-display has been amplified by technology.

Jonas appears to have stated that the separation between the internet identity presented regarding us and our actual, personal identity, our zeitgeist, is decreasing. Another way to think of this may be the notion that we are not only who we present ourselves to be in the real world and under our real name on the internet, but also the fictional stories we present on the internet and those things to which we are linked on the internet. I am, under this theory, not only the lawyer who does not go by my internet moniker TPB, Esq., but also the attorney about whom actions, affiliations, and beliefs can be identified through press releases, publications and scholarly articles, and organizational websites describe memberships. I would take this a step further. I am also the person whose financial and criminal history is available through free and paid searches on Lexis-Nexis, Westlaw, and other sites.

This issue, to Luster, poses a question of whether internet identity mining provides a picture of who we are in light of how we act while online as opposed to while offline.

The danger in online research, however, lies not in its width and breadth. It lies anchored within the differences in social norms, folkways, means, and goals associated with either social circumference. Offline activities are adjusted to remain largely within the mores and laws of this world. Actions and reactions are measured through a sieve of knowledge and compared to those folkways and criteria concurrent with the social settings one hopes to enter or lives in.

Online, aside from the at-large setting of basic benchmarks, smaller groups exist by standards, means, and goals different from the unwired world. The acquisition of capital, the achievement of goals, is possible only through those means or through deviant acts unrelated to acts that might be perceived as deviant in other social settings. In fact, perfectly acceptable and normal behavior online might appear deviant to outside, offline, observers.

The conundrum of online and offline convergence is not easily solved. Responses to this all-too-visible issue range from attempts at an almost complete online anonymity to an adoption of ones online persona in offline settings.

Does an internet mining tell anyone who I am? If I surveil an individual and discover information about that individual that is based on false and misleading statements, stories that are largely hyperbole ("fish stories"), and the like, do I really know that person? Likely not. However, let us take this a step further. If I base an assessment of a person based on my interactions with that person in the "real world," do I really know that person? I posit that we know very little about that individual.

Big Fish, the recent and thoroughly entertaining film by Tim Burton, based on a novel by Daniel Wallace, provided an example of the notion that we know little about an individual based on those stories, but also provides another thesis which I shall address shortly. The film addresses a man (played brilliantly by both Albert Finney and Ewan MacGregor) who, at the end of his life, is seemingly inaccessible to his son. Because the man has spent his entire life telling tall tales, his son feels as though he does not know the father's real identity. This notion of not being able to identify someone or something objectively has been dealt with before, in the Metaphor of the Cave of Plato's Republic, in Wittgenstein's On Certainty, and other works. I focus on Big Fish because of its proximity and its intended audience, to wit, the general public. Plato was intended for the patrician members of Greek society. Wittgenstein was intentionally obscure, and intended his readership to be limited to the community of philosophers only (some might say that he truly intended his readership to be the community of Continental or epistemological philosophers). Big Fish, like most films, is intended for the general public. As an aside, this may be the true benefit of film as an art: that its intended audience, in most circumstances, is global.

If all we see of our fathers, posits the son in Big Fish, is a set of tall tales, do we really know them? To the son (for the majority of the film), tall tales do not provide knowledge of the person. Similarly, do we really know an individual from an internet-based investigation? It does not seem to be the case. We get a remarkably subjective perspective on that individual. This subjective perspective is distorted by the absence some information, the over-exaggeration of other information, and the presentation of false, vague, or misleading information.

Big Fish closes with the sun deciding, effectively, that his father's identity was located within the tall tales he told. Using this theory, we are nothing more than the subjective image we present to the world, intentionally or otherwise, on the internet and in our offline interactions. If, on the internet, one takes on the persona of a scoundrel, one becomes that scoundrel.

I do not believe this to be a completely accurate understanding of self. If the self is only the subjective presentation made to others, we can no longer be understood to have free will. We become completely arbitrary beings, in fact. I, in acting in one fashion or another, determine to behave as I believe is just. I choose to give to charity, or not. I choose to commit an act of violence upon another, or not. If the audience, however, believes that I have struck someone violently, even when I know that I did not do so, and we are to take the audience's subjective belief as identity, then my free choice to not strike another becomes irrelevant. It may be helpful to consider the notion that, in criminal law, a person can be found guilty of a crime, yet there are still genuine questions about whether the person actually acted in a fashion that justifies criminal guilt.

Walt Whitman, in Song of Myself, put it beautifully when he wrote:

I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love.

If you want me again look for me under your bootsoles.

You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,

But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,

And filter and fibre your blood.

Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,

Missing me one place search another,

I stop somewhere waiting for you.

After more than two millennia of philosophical dialogue and 150 years of psychological study, our understandings of the self - the full bounds of the self - appear limited, even if we were to consider whether we know our own identities. The internet presents nothing more than a new way for us to misinterpret the self, to fail to fetch it at first, to miss it in one place and search another.

Comments

[sugarmama]

Nicely written post. In my opinion, interaction on the internet lacks an adequate system of social checks and balances. I think a much higher level of dishonesty (hyperbole, exaggeration, call it what you want) exists on the internet as opposed to real life. Perhaps because I already had the tendency to question everything, I remain doubtful of most everything I read online.

[pops]

At the end of 'Breakfast of Champions' Kilgore Trout finds out that everything he wrote was true.He winds up wandering off into the alternate dimensions he cooked up.

This after much railing at the forces who kept him from being famous.

Hmm, I, or rather the person I play on line, feels a tirade coming on.

[Courtney]

At first I thought your post was very cynical, but then when I stopped and thought about it, I realized that deceit is not only bound up in the image we present to others, but our self-image, as well.

So, despite the fact that we can "see" someone in "meat" space, and thus "know who they are", I'm not convinced that our visual assessment is any more accurate than our virtual assessment - or vice versa.

If anything, our true core personalities tend to show up on the 'Net, because we are what we write/create, there. Rather than being blinded by physical beauty, ugliness, handicaps, or accents, we virtually assess someone based upon their written presentations.

Anyone with a good set of critical analysis skills for writing (esp lawyers) can find the gaps and such which create false 'Net impressions, just as an observant reader of body language is more intuitive about a someone at a party.

We may wish to present a certain image to the world, but a modicum of thought will articulate one's inner self more than we'd like to admit - whether on the 'Net, or in "meatspace".

[Melissa]

Very interesting post.

I'm not sure it's necessarily easier to know someone in real life as it is online. People hide things and present an image to the world whether it is online or offline. Now whether or not that is who the person really is. Well there is something telling in the stories a person chooses to tell the world. Usually someone who feels weak will try to compensate by telling stories of being strong. Things like that.

Man I forgot about the financial data available on westlaw. Craptastic.