I don't know if this was obvious to everyone else, since to me it
now seems so: The big fuzz about identity is about the loss of
embodied identity in the context of time.
This is how I figured it out: I started to think how I could not
be an artist in the information space we are parts of. I do a lot
of different kinds of things that could not be put under the
same roof these days. Like, for example, if I put my paintings
and my writing in the same place, the writing would "infect" the
viewers minds, not because the paintings and writings have any
inherent contradiction, but because the writing is seen as a
political statement so easily, but the paintings should not.
Then again, if I showed you the videos I produce at work, you
would also be fooled into thinking that I am a different person
as a filmmaker than as a writer.
In ye olden days I would have been clearly one person in one
physical body producing all these different looking results, and
I would have been stretched through time. There would have been
absolutely no qualms about "what my identity is". You would have
seen my latest writing and you would have remembered some random
stuff I have showed you in the past, but due to the nature of
human mind, it would have fit the writing more often than not.
I assume it would have fit almost all the time. The threshold
for noticing a "contradiction" would have been very high indeed
as it was relied on your memory.
Now that the past temporality has been squeezed into the present
(by computers remembering the past for us) the problem is
that my identity is too small for all this stuff since it
was never meant to hold all of it. There are three possible
answers:
1) I deny most of my future development because it does not fit
the present.
2) I fight everyone all the time over some weird misunderstandings
abount who I am and what I am saying.
3) I splinter the personality into categorical aspects. In other
words: Writing, painting, video etc. are in different domains.
My answer is number three, for the time being. It seems that
most people are probably in the first group, to a large degree.
The most noisy people are in the second group. Then there are
a few trolls who have stopped developing (group 1) but have
taken the attitude of fighting (group 2) but are doing it
anonymously (group 3).
I guess there can be all kinds of combinations of these attitudes.
The point is, this is a big part of why everyone is talking
about their identities: It has become almost impossible to
be a part of modern society as a physically embodied temporal
being so everyone is in the business of awkwardly trying to fill
up this multi-dimensional abstract entity.
