Month: October 2014

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Identifying Identity with Steven Ramey

“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

Steven Ramey:

Michael Zimmer’s critique of Zuckerberg’s assertion that people should only have one identity reflects my initial reaction to that statement, as Zuckerberg ignores the strategic ways that everyone presents themselves. Embedded within Zimmer’s critique, however, is a similar notion of the stable self. He writes, “It is not that you pretend to be someone that you are not; rather, you turn the volume up on some aspects of your identity, and tone down others, all based on the particular context you find yourself.” The identity is stable, and we strategically choose what aspects to emphasize here or there. But, processes of identification are more complicated than that. Continue reading “Identifying Identity with Steven Ramey”

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Identifying Identity with Russell McCutcheon

“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

Russell McCutcheon:

It’s no accident, of course, that “integrity” has a direct relationship with the Latin adjective “integer,” as in the word we today use to name whole numbers, in distinction from their parts, i.e., fractions. And so it carries with it the connotation of being complete, perfect, even unblemished. But there was a time when this modern sense of the word might have described not Mark Zukerberg’s apparently ideal person—one who is, I guess, consistently, transparently, and rigorously themselves in all occasions—but, instead, one who was able to moderate that apparent self, all depending on the requirements of the setting, something determined by the other social actors involved (e.g., it’s not “a black tie event” until someone shows up in a black tie). I’ve written on this classical sense of pietas before, I know, but it seems relevant once again to point out that wholeness might instead be the social fiction created by the artful management of the innumerable fractions, some of which may have no common denominator; for the quality of consistency or uniformity is surely the last thing one wants—whether in ancient Rome or in Facebook’s headquarters—when moving from interacting with social superiors at work to the barista at the corner coffee shop to friends at the bar or family at home. These once taken for granted distinctions are obviously challenged not just by the eternal present of the virtual world, where we post and tweet and, now, yak anonymously, but, more importantly perhaps, by Facebook’s own quest to monopolize ownership of that world and thus ownership of the means whereby we produce those selves. Continue reading “Identifying Identity with Russell McCutcheon”

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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.

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Identifying Identity: A Culture on the Edge Response to Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook’s “Real-Name” Policy

A comic about Batman

A four-year-old post by Michael Zimmer has been getting renewed attention after Facebook’s controversial “real-name” policy came under scrutiny for disproportionately affecting certain communities: drag performers, doctors and mental health professionals, and political dissidents among them. While Facebook has issued an apology, especially to drag queens who found their stage names no longer accepted by the site, Mark Zuckerberg’s take on the issue of identity — and integrity, as articulated in Zimmer’s piece — piqued our interest here at Culture on the Edge:

David Kirkpatrick expressing his ideas about how a person only has one identityWith our own interests in code-switching, identifications rather than identities, and competing claims of legitimacy or authority, we think the emphasis on a single identity is ripe for analysis, so we have each offered a brief response… one being posted each day for a week. Continue reading “Identifying Identity: A Culture on the Edge Response to Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook’s “Real-Name” Policy”

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Us/Not Us

Not long after we came to the U.S. from Canada — specifically, moving from Ontario to Knoxville, TN, back in 1993 — we went out to eat to experience some authentic southern food for ourselves. While I’ll defer from talking too much here about the terrible let down that was the side dish that they called “hush puppies” (deep fried dough balls? Really?), what turned out to be even more memorable was the waitress who, likely hearing in our voices that we weren’t local, asked us, “Where y’all from?” to which we answered, “Toronto.” Continue reading “Us/Not Us”

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“You’d Never Ever Phone Up a Friend and Say ‘Hey, Come on Over to My House; Let’s Go on the Internet Together’.”

Picture 1The author Douglas Coupland — who you might remember from his bestselling first novel, Generation X (1991) — was interviewed the other morning on the radio, about his new book, Kitten Clone: Inside Alcatel Lucent, a look into one of the world’s largest telecomm companies.

For some time I’ve been thinking about the normative model of the lone individual (one that’s as much in keeping with Rousseau’s notion of society being the result of separate citizens making agreements with each other as it is with a modern economic theorist’s notion of lone consumers all making rational choices) that is usually presupposed when it comes to warnings about the effects of the internet — and this interview made this all very apparent. For who’s to say what ought to count as an individual? For at least in the U.S., corporations and fetuses now seem to have the status — evidence that there’s an arm wrestling match going on right now over the limits of what counts as a person. (The fact that “we” even debate it should be sufficient evidence to dispel with the notion of individuality as actually describing anything other than the ongoing debate itself.) Continue reading ““You’d Never Ever Phone Up a Friend and Say ‘Hey, Come on Over to My House; Let’s Go on the Internet Together’.””

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You Are What You Read, with Russell McCutcheon (Part 1)

A man standing on a ledge in a library looking for a book

For a new Culture on the Edge series “You Are What You Read” we’re asking each member to answer a series of questions about books—either academic or non-academic—that have been important or influential on us.

1. Name a book you read early on that shaped the trajectory of your career.

I’d have to say that is wThe Scared and the Profane The Nature of Religionas The Sacred and the Profane by Mircea Eliade—in fact, I have my old 1959 Harcourt Brace & World softcover edition in front of me as I write this. I think I’ve written briefly on this somewhere before, but it was the book that was suggested to me by Neil McMullin, at the University of Toronto, and the person who became my doctoral supervisor, as a book I should go look at to see if I could make the case I wanted to make in what was then emerging as my dissertation topic. “Coz if you can’t make it there…,” I recall him saying, perhaps in some vague reference to Sinatra’s “New York, New York.” For by that point in my graduate studies I had moved from an early interest in the philosophy of religion (yes, I was taking courses on Kant’s first critique, Aristotle’s Metaphysics, courses on a several of Plato’s dialogues, etc.) to an interest not in religion but in how it was studied. It took me some time to eventually move on to being interested in the implications of using the category, however it was defined, so back then my interest was in the problems associated with defining it by reference to some special status held by the objects or sentiments so named. Like all of us, I eventually became so focused on that project, as it developed and then as it was rewritten and published as my first book, that it is difficult now to remember what I thought my project was back then—back in 1990 when I bought this edition in a used bookstore (or so my inscription in the front of the book tells me today); but in the marginalia I find in that book—such as my “Why?” scribbled beside his claim that “Religious man thirsts for the real” (p. 80) or “essence of religion,” circled with “Eliade” written beside it in the book’s concluding sentence:

The former seek to understand the essence of religion, the latter to discover and communicate its history.

—I see traces of an earlier self working out an idea, applied first to that specific book, that went in directions that writer surely couldn’t have imagined. But it‘s kind of fun now to page through it and see, beside Eliade’s claim that “The cosmic structure of these objects is obvious,” that younger hand having written: “nothing, when it comes to symbolism, is obvious!”

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Supporting Jihadists

three AK-47 Assault Rifles in a warehouseWhen Sam Harris argues that we need to “defend them [nominal Muslims],” he fails to realize that the way he constructs Islam actually defends the ideas of those he labels “jihadists”. On Bill Maher’s HBO show a few days ago, Harris joined Ben Affleck and others in a robust discussion about representations of Islam, which followed Maher’s controversial comments a week earlier (which were the topic of Reza Aslan’s generalizing critique of generalizations on CNN which I discussed on Friday). While Harris and Maher both employed the language of “facts,” assertions like the following reflect their choices more than any facts. Continue reading “Supporting Jihadists”

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Bill Maher and Reza Aslan, Two Peas in a Pod

President Megawati Sukarnoputri of IndonesiaA scholar, a comedian, and two CNN anchors. While they contrasted their assertions vehemently, were they really so different? Reza Aslan’s take down of Bill Maher on CNN Tonight on Monday focused on Maher’s “unsophisticated” oversimplification of Muslims (which CNN anchors Don Lemon and Alisyn Camerota continued in their repeated generalization of “Muslim countries”). But, to attack them for oversimplifying, Aslan used his own problematic oversimplifications. Continue reading “Bill Maher and Reza Aslan, Two Peas in a Pod”

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How and Why Should You Bring Culture on The Edge in the Classroom

an empty class room with

Pierre Bourdieu, in his 1998 book On Television, wrote: “There is nothing more difficult to convey than reality in all its ordinariness…Sociologists run into this problem all the time: How to make the ordinary extraordinary and evoke ordinariness in such a way that people will see just how extra-ordinary it is?” (21) This is one of my favourite quotes, one that, as a social theorist, drives my teaching approach. Continue reading “How and Why Should You Bring Culture on The Edge in the Classroom”