Who I am varies depending on who I am with. That’s not to say there’s a dozen alternate Chris’ all doing their own thing, but identity is never entirely about freedom so much as altering who you appear to be to different set of people. An example of this; I wanted to apply as an English teacher at a Catholic Sixth Form in Bristol, but I felt my position as an atheist would be problematic at a religious college, despite their equality and diversity statement on the website. I think it’s more me assuming my identity as an atheist to be a problem but as a side comment the college reports that 87% of the staff is heterosexual, 0% is gay/lesbian and the rest are unknown. Infer from that what you will… but if we are to talk identity, that statistic stuck out. Perhaps 0% is realistic, but I don’t believe that to be the case.

My own sense of identity, linked to the question “why on earth do I indulge in social media and put myself out on the internet” is always bashing with my concept of the 1/3 life crisis which I feel I’ve been going through over the last two years. As a teenager, I had my issues but I always knew I wanted to do ‘A’ levels, then university, and it was inevitable that I’d do teacher training. Throughout my life I’ve always known my own path and I’ve barely deviated from it, making my own choices all the way and somehow ending up where I wanted to get to. Yet this 1/3 life crisis is trickier. I’m grown up now, but I feel unfulfilled and I don’t know what I want.

• Do I want to travel the world and never settle? 4 years into a relationship suggests I don’t. So why did I apply to a job in the Middle East last week then? It’s nothing to do with being in an unhappy relationship. I fear I suffer incurable wanderlust.
• Do I want to a cottage in Devon where I can read books and make jam? Of course I do. But I already live in a cottage with lots of space for reading but I find myself wasting time instead.
• Should I go out to clubs? I can’t be bothered, though.
• Why do I even care about quantum physics and why do I keep buying books about it? It confuses the hell out of me and I’m not a scientist!
• Shall I become trendy? Well, I’ve never done that so far so it’d be odd to contrive to be trendy now.

I'm with Labour and I'm not afraid to show it!

The David Buckingham article I read for university this week was all about identity, and a great quote came up about adolescents being ‘incomplete’. If I ever felt incomplete as a teenager, it’s never gone away. If Stern thinks making blogs and websites is all about self-reflection, then I’ve been doing that for over ten years. I love being able to trace back my thoughts to earlier times. I was a lot more frantic ten years ago, my writing was frankly a ton of ideas that sometimes formed itself into a cohesive whole (The Comic Sans Appreciation Society, Sister Bendy Wendy and my advent calendar, Patron Saint Porn Stars) but often it was a bizarre selection of words.

The article had an argument about identifying with our class background. Well, I’m an oddity there because my parents and entire family are working class yet I was bought up in the military which allowed me to skip my destiny as a working-class kid from Birmingham. I can’t even identity myself as a Brummie, let along working class. It’s as if I don’t even exist sometimes. Where do I come from? I don’t know. The best sub-section I could ever associate myself with was the vague notion of the Indie Kids. Yes, if something becomes popular, it’s suddenly toxic and must be avoided and mocked.

Goffman talks about ‘impression management’ and putting on a performance when you are with people. I know this all too well and it’s funny to read about this after I was told twice in a week that I should seek out a niche as a stand-up comedian. That idea horrifies me, yet at the same time I’m well aware I can make people laugh quite effortlessly, and I actually get wound up if I can’t make someone laugh. No doubt about it, I want to make a good impression and my neuroses are such that I spend a lot of time reflecting on my personality and consider how I can get rid of the bits of it I dislike. It’s impossible and exhausting at times.

Similarly intriguing is what Faucault wrote about power, that we need to regulate ourselves and be encouraged to exist within the norms. For teachers who are online, this means we need to not look drunk all the time on Facebook; for MPs, it’s to try and not say anything remotely controversial unless you’re a professional buffoon like Boris Johnson. We are reminded that our data is monitored, that companies can find out what we post online. It can all be held against us in the future and, oh look, suddenly our lives have become a mixture of 1984 and Kafka’s The Trial. Saying this, life doesn’t feel like 1984 because we are essentially free, even if freedom means most major companies know all they need to about me to and much more. I’ve often dreamt of falling under the radar, but have become too obsessed with collecting points on my array of loyalty cards to ever do it.

Thou shalt not allow recruiters to ever see you drinking, even if just one pint costing £6 in Sweden.

dana boyd wrote that youths can ‘write themselves into being’ on social media sites and it’s scary because it’s something I’ve seen. I know of people who have multiple Facebook accounts to deal with their ‘other’ sides…piece together the jigsaw and you just have a person suffering from low confidence trying to invent themselves anew. Social media allows us to re-invent ourselves, but I believe the truth will out in the end. It is interesting to read that there is an argument that we are encouraged to identity with the consumer culture on social media. Facebook is always littered with people’s likes and fan pages exist for everything, Twitter had paid-ads that appear as promoted tweets, gaining many views. Even in our own social media bubble, we give more of ourselves away to content-producers, yet few people question it or change their social media habits because the identity we have created online gives us a certain social capital that we want to cash in on.

I have written previously of my concerns about the way technology is used in education and I’d add to my concerns that I sometimes feel the obsession with the “information superhighway”, “information society” or the “knowledge economy” is just fluff. Or as Jack Dee put it, it’s not a highway, you’re typing on a keyboard in your bedroom.

The internet is of course enormous and bigger than us and therein lies the problem. Students often don’t know how to actually search for anything online, grabbing at the first random webpage that comes up, copying stuff and forgetting about it. It becomes a reflex and nothing is gained of value. So, a knowledge economy and an information society needs to know what to do with this wonderful knowledge but I’d wager that people just store things and do nothing with it. However, could I have successfully planned a ten day trip to Cuba without the internet? I could, using guidebooks, but I’d be a slave to someone else’s opinion of what makes a good bar. The internet has given me a number of viewpoints to work from, so I know where the best beaches really are, and I know how to get the best mojito’s.

This is the identity you want online; studious yet casual.

From my experience, when people make arguments that young people, or digital natives if you will are wildly creative, obsessed with finding out information and making full use of the possibilities of the information available to them, I can’t help but snort with derision. Don Tapscott argues that for young people, “using the new technology is as natural as breathing.” The problem with this analysis is that breathing is as natural as breathing, but just as singers needs good breath control, people need good skills in collecting and interpreting data. These skills don’t just turn up and work with digital natives, they are earned and not everyone can hope to earn them.

There are those who can manipulate the infinite information available out there and make good use of it, and there are those who can competently handle a computer and make good use of social media, but I think as we get more integrated in these social networks, we lose a little more of our privacy and of ourselves. In the end, our identity may just become a mask, a list of likes and dislikes and a Spotify playlist.

What I know of myself, of my own identity is that I am an incurable knowledge-seeker, that I want to stand out from the crowd but not have to appear as an outsider, that I want to show myself online as fun but serious about a variety of issues. Sometimes the identity falls apart but at the core it’s always the same. We just have to try and not lose who we are as the information society develops.