Haawwooo <sound of dog/wolf howling in true Blues tradition>

Woke up this morning
On the world wide web
Tweeted my identities
To make one a celeb…   [blues courtesy Ted Fuller, unpublished email]

I thought I’d start this blogpost off with a musical note, although my colleague Ted hasn’t recorded this classic blues piece [yet].  Although it does sum up the debate pretty nicely

In my last post, I talked about the relationship between privacy, identity and status, following on from some great connections with Kieron O’Hara and Tim Greenhalgh.  My main point of career interest thus far has been entrepreneurial identity.  Like many authors, I have recognised the importance of entrepreneurial identity, that is, the need to construct, or perform a role that conforms with society’s expectations of what ‘being an entrepreneur’ is all about.  One strand of the literature acknowledges entrepreneurs as skilled cultural operators manipulating perceptions of the entrepreneurial self to achieve desired outcomes for their new ventures (Lounsbury and Glynn, 2001; Down and Reveley, 2004; Down, 2006; Reveley, Down and Taylor, 2004; Downing, 2005; Warren and Anderson, 200; Down and Warren, 2008; Warren, 2004).

Through these studies, I have come to realise that identity is a much-debated concept in various fields, including sociology, psychology and social psychology.  In all the detail there seems to be  a consensus that identity is not located in the personality of the individual, but instead is constituted through interaction between the individual, society and culture.  Giddens’  (1991) ‘project of the self’ is significant here, as is Goffman (1959), who describes how individuals ‘work’ their roles in relation to social expectations.  More recently, in the 80s/90s, authors such as Turkle (1995), Haraway (1991) and Castells (1997) took the debate into the digital age.  As Steve Wheeler summarises very effectively in an engaging set of blogposts, computers have now become pervasive and ubiquitous, identification through digital mediation has become the new cultural capital (Bordieu & Passeron, 1990).

Of course, the internet ensures that identity production and manipulation has never been easier.  As Reid (2000: 35) points out:

“The freedom to obscure or re-create aspects of the self on-line allows the
exploration and expression of multiple aspects of human existence. The
research on virtual communities is filled with tales of masks for age and
race, gender and class; masks for almost every aspect of identity”.

There is a plethora of discussion on multiple identities from many disciplinary perspectives, not just the technical, and how identity manipulation may be carried out for many motives, good and bad.  Taking twitter as an example, there are many instances of multiple account holding, often for quite valid reasons – the separation of business and personal identities makes obvious sense from the point of both business and personal reputation and privacy. This is an area that would benefit from further study, not just entrepreneurs, but as a broader issue for society, given the links between privacy and status I discussed in my last post.

References

Bordieu, P. and Passeron, J-C. (1990) Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture. London: Sage Publications

Castell, M. (1997), Power Of Identity [Vol. 2: Economy, Society, And Culture], Wiley, New York.

Down, S. and Reveley, J. (2004) ‘Generational encounters and the social formation of entrepreneurial identity – “young guns” and “old farts” ’, Organization 11(2): 233-250.

Down, S. (2006) Narratives of Enterprise: Crafting Entrepreneurial Self-identity in a Small Firm, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.

Down, S. and Warren, L. (2008) Constructing narratives on enterprise: clichés and entrepreneurial self-identity, International Journal of Entrepreneurial Behaviour and Research, 14/1, pp 4-23

Downing, S. (2005) ‘The Social Construction of Entrepreneurship: Narrative and Dramatic Processes in the Coproduction of Organizations and Identities’, Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice March, 29(2): 185 – 204.

Giddens, A. (1991) Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age, Cambridge: Polity Press.

Goffman, E. (1959). The presentation of self in everyday life, Harmondsworth: Pelican Books.

Haraway, D J. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. Routledge. New York

Lounsbury, M, Glynn M.A. (2001) ‘Cultural entrepreneurship: stories, legitimacy, and the acquisition of resources’, Strategic Management Journal 22: 545-564

Reid, E. (1998). “The Self and the Internet: Variations on the Illusion of One Self.”
In Gackenbach, J. (ed). Psychology and the Internet: Intrapersonal, interpersonal,
and transpersonal implications. San Diego: Academic Press.

Reveley, J., Down, S. and Taylor, S. (2004) ‘Beyond the boundaries: An ethnographic analysis of spatially diffuse control in a small firm’, International Small Business Journal 22(4): 349-367.

Turkle, S. (1995) Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet
New York: Simon and Schuster.

Warren, L. (2004) ‘Negotiating entrepreneurial identity: communities of practice and changing discourses’, International Journal of Entrepreneurship and Innovation, 5(2): 25–37.

Warren, L. and Anderson, A. R. (2009) Playing the fool? An aesthetic performance of an entrepreneurial identity, Chapter 9 in The politics and aesthetics of entrepreneurship, New Movements IV, eds Hjorth, D and Steyaert, C., 148-161, Edward Elgar

“Their relative positions on the DZ corporate ladder were obvious to McNihil, just from the density of the swarms of E-mail buzzing around their heads, Some of the execs had only two or three of the tiny holo’d images yattering around them for attention; the bottom rungs had enough that their faces could barely be seen past them……..Harrisch had none; either the corporation was paying for max’d out filtration or he was high up enough to have gone on an elite paper-only status” (Jeter, 1998, p. 14).

Such is the nightmare vision of a post-apocalyptic future where freedom from electronic communication is only available to the corporate elite.  Already, the idea that patterns of privacy and visibility might be clearly delineated in accordance with status is taking hold (O’Hara and Shadbolt, 2010). As yet though, the picture is not so clear.  Notions of privacy are continually being defined and redefined, with each new networking platform providing new pathways and also new challenges to our understanding of who we are in this space.  There are relative periods of calm, punctuated by ‘shocks’ (such as Zuckerman’s statement people don’t want privacy)  that challenges the ephemeral social structures emerging from this new milieu.

Unlike Zuckerman, my colleague Kieron O’Hara speaks of the link between privacy and autonomy, argues that the defence of privacy is a responsibility as well as a right, suggesting that part of being  a socially responsible person, is taking care over what is disclosed.  Another colleague, Tim Greenhalgh talks of the need  for a ‘currency of disclosure’.  Until we know more about the currency of disclosure, we are still placing bets that all will be well if we venture into constructing internet selves (as we are encouraged to do, often by our employers).  Of course there will be solutions, and many colleagues from ICT, Law, Business and Economics all work in this area developing new technology, rule sets and pathways that at heart see privacy as a tangible entity that may also function as a market construct to be assigned economic value.

Yet the complexity of the web is such that it may take some time before these techniques really help us as individuals and as a society.  And legal and economic constructs alone may be too simple to capture the richness of internet life on their own.  This underlying  uncertainty is becoming more pronounced as  we enter a Web 2.0 world, moving from static websites that are narrations of the past to ‘live’  interactive bricolages, where the boundaries between the professional and the private are now blurred in a volatile space (Warren, 2010).  Tim refers to our ‘multifaceted selves’ and in doing so, draws our attention to the widely debated notion of ‘identity’.  This is useful, as this is a good place for social scientists to make a convincing contribution to the debate: we can only defend (or manage) our privacy if we understand how we write our identities into being on the internet.

Influential scholars of identity  such as Goffman, Giddens and Berger and Luckmann have been around for some time.  More recently, in the 80s/90s, authors such as Turkle, Haraway and Castells took the debate into the internet age, once we realised that no-one knew you were a dog.  And of course there have been many others since then, lookimg at the potential of the internet to further decentre and delocalise our fragile postmodern selves.  The challenge for today’s researchers is to take that thinking forward, and also create new ways of thinking about identity, how it is constructed and performed, not only in  Web 2 world, but looking  forward into a web 3 world too.  In doing so, we can make a useful contribution to the debate on privacy – because identity is the nexus between the individual and society, and where so many of the debates are played out.

References

Jeter, K. W. (1998), Noir, Orion: London

O’Hara, K. and Shadbolt, N. (2010) Viewpoint, Privacy on the Data Web, Communications of the ACM, 53/3, pp. 1-3

Warren, L. (2010), The Entrepreneurial Academic in the Digital World: Narratives and antenarratives, abstract submitted for scMOI conference April 2010.