Information and Identity

We are what we consume.  That’s an old adage from the world of diets, and it has carried a lot of influence.  It’s difficult to deny its veracity - eat well and it shows, while the opposite is also true.  It’s a rule so lucrative that it has launched a billion-dollar industry each year, as people attempt to get back some semblance of their earlier selves.

It’s now becoming better understood that the same holds true with what we permit our mind to consume.  This, too, has its junk foods, appetite suppressants, mass index, calorie intake, and cholesterol.  This awareness arose with the emergence of the Information Age.  To be well-read was to be in good mental shape.  Watching documentaries was designed to help us better understand history and our present world.  Nature specials on television helped in reminding us that we, too, were creatures of the natural order, and that we had a place in its ecosystem.

Then came the Internet and the process eventually began to reverse.  Whereas information was about the broader world, it took effort on our part to read, write, watch, or memorize, in order to expand our understanding.  Then, almost overnight, it became possible to permit the online world to cater to us, providing the information we were searching out.  And best of all, it was free.  The Internet did the work; we just told it what to look for.

What we didn’t realize, until it was too late, was that the digital world was remembering everything we put online about our preferences.  And the more we did it, the more we received only what we were interested in.  In other words, that greater world we had to work so hard to comprehend before now came to us, and we hardly had to do anything.  The former expanded our minds; the latter confined them.

Pretty soon, we were transformed from information seekers to identity cravers.  From that point on, it became easy for everyone to see what we liked, didn’t like, bought, and watched.  It all became about us, not that larger, more complex world that we once had to work so hard to understand.

We began finding others who seemed just like us and we followed, “friended,” and engaged them.  That process turned us into identities - individual and collective.  It is this transformation that eventually drove politics itself into extremes.  If we had a bias about something, regardless of whether it was correct or not, we only got feeds that affirmed that bias and tons of friends who felt just like us.  The ability to understand context, nuance, and  objectivity weren’t required in this new world, and neither was balance.  

The same Internet that we could turn to so we could, in an instant, learn to fix a running tap or a car also coaxed us into thinking we knew what was wrong with the world and which political party would help to fix it.  The Internet had become all about what we preferred and not what we required in order to effectively understand the complexities of the world around us.

But that’s not all.  Where once we were content to put our thoughts, photos, or grievances online, now we don’t want people just to see them.  We want people to spread them.  That transformation turned the Internet into a wildfire of identities and more often than not, anger emerged as a driving force.  As author Jia Tolentino wrote in her book Trick Mirror:

"The early Internet had been constructed around lines of affinity and openness.  But when the Internet moved to an organizing principle of opposition, much of what had formerly been enlightening and rewarding and curious became tedious, noxious and grim  . . . It’s much easier to organize people against something than it is to unite them in an affirmative vision.  Conflict always gets more people to look."

It’s not a bad thing to ask if our online personalities are really who we are, or were?  Where we were once individuals, we are now identities, and frequently linked to an identity group.  That form of “group-think” most often causes us to hear the reasonings of those we disagree with and yet grow even harder in our opinions, not more open.  How can we build communities of compromise out of groups of anger?  

In our hearts, we know that this is a new kind of humanity that we are talking about.  We aren’t individuals learning how to navigate a challenging and complicated world; instead, we’re part of a group that breaks that same world down into simplistic parts, allowing us to undermine it rather than unite it.  

This is the greatest challenge to come out of COVID: will we combine to beat a common enemy or will we remain so divided that it will eventually overcome us?  None of this is going to be easy.  Our opinions matter and identities now matter to us - the digital world trained us in this fashion, and our politics has used it to divide us as never before.  If we don’t all pull back from this kind of simplicity that breaks our world up into sections of animosity, we will never get the chance to help heal that world by allowing information to bring us together.