Identifying Identity with Vaia Touna

“Identifying Identity” offers a series of responses from members of Culture on the Edge to the following claim made by Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg:

David Kirkpatrick expressing his ideas about how a person only has one identity

Vaia Touna:

Zuckerberg’s idea on the one identity and the integrity of maintaining one identity made me think of the times when, talking with friends, one hears: “That’s so you!” or “Come on, you are not that person.” Whether one is or not “that person” friends think, I think that who we are doesn’t derive from the inside of us and neither it is “expressed” monolithically onto our behaviours; instead, as Theodore Schatzki wrote in his 2010 book, The Site of the Social: “Identity is a complicated affair”—an affair that involves both me and the way I perceive who I am and act in different situations, but also by the way my friends perceive with whom they think they are interacting and thus the way they expect “me” to act in different situations. Because sometimes they tell me that I’m not being me. No doubt different friends have different ideas of who we are, even on Facebook, for I have no doubt that my posts, whether messages, pictures, etc., are interpreted like texts by different friends in various ways, creating an idea of me that is in some occasions different from what I think of as myself, and over which I have no real control or at least I have up to a certain extent (for I could have not posted this picture or that update).

The question, then, is: Does this largely uncontrolled interpretive variety minimize my integrity as a person?  And even if it does, then it seems to confirm that my self and its integrity are social and not personal, no?

To read the other posts in this series, search the Real Name tag.