"Identity as Multiplicity"

I have seen Sherry Turkle sited in many, many texts I've read and so I decided to see what all the fuss is about. I began leafing through her novel, "Life on the Screen," and I came across an interesting section on identity on the Internet called "Aspects of the Self." In it, she puts forth a few different psychoanalytic theories (from Freud, Jung, and Lacan) and speaks about their relevance to online identity. She begins by stating how Freud proposed a decentered view of the self (ego, id, etc) and then how Lacan moved forward with this idea to "join psychoanalysis to the postmodern attempt to potray the self as a relam of discourse rather than as a real thing or a permanent structure of mind." For Lacan, "the complex chains of associations that constitute meaning for each individual lead to no final endpoint or core self." Turkle believes that online phenomena (for example, online dating) represents this cycling through of different dimensions or lines of self.

In discussing my final project in class yesterday, Night Owl mentioned Lacan and we spoke a bit about some of these ideas. Many current theorists believe that the structuring of identity online is not as radical as people believe. We can't really be a man if we are a woman, we can't be without any identity. But, the question I find interesting in Turkle's work is that we can be different selves, not necessarily unrelated, but through different online discourse. For example, Night Owl and I talked about talking to different people on the telephone. It's not that we're speaking to someone different than the people we know in reality, it's that a different self may be revealed.

Although only a skeletal outline of the argument, I think that psychoanalytic commentary (although feared and scorned by many) can reveal some interesting insight into our everyday experiences online (and elsewhere for that matter!).