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Identity and Personal Narrative & the Digital Age

Kaliya Young · November 26, 2010 · 1 Comment

One of the things you learn early on when diving into the subject of identity is that it means many things.
The sense of self is one of them.  Today I ran across this article via John Hage’s facebook.  Storytelling 2.0 when new narratives meet old brains.
“We are our narratives” has become a popular slogan. “We” refers to our selves, in the full-blooded person-constituting sense. “Narratives” refers to the stories we tell about our selves and our exploits in settings as trivial as cocktail parties and as serious as intimate discussions with loved ones. We express some in speech. Others we tell silently to ourselves, in that constant little inner voice. The full collection of one’s internal and external narratives generates the self we are intimately acquainted with. Our narrative selves continually unfold.
Their are two parts to this – the narrator and interpreter.
[Neuroscientist Michael] Gazzaniga also thinks that this left-hemisphere “interpreter” creates the unified feeling of an autobiographical, personal, unique self. “The interpreter sustains a running narrative of our actions, emotions, thoughts, and dreams. The interpreter is the glue that keeps our story unified, and creates our sense of being a coherent, rational agent. To our bag of individual instincts it brings theories about our lives. These narratives of our past behaviour seep into our awareness and give us an autobiography,”
What they are finding is that different parts of the brain generate internal speech and other parts listen and interpret his speech.
One compelling study used PET imaging to watch what is going on in the brain during inner speech. As expected, this showed activity in the classic speech production area known as Broca’s area. But also active was Wernicke’s area, the brain region for language comprehension, suggesting that not only do the brain’s speech areas produce silent inner speech, but that our inner voice is understood and interpreted by the comprehension areas. The result of all this activity, I suggested, is the narrative self.
So – the article goes on to make a really good point. Digital tools allow for the construction of different kinds of naratives and raise questions about what kind of sevles – what kinds of identities we will have.

If we create our selves through narratives, whether external or internal, they are traditional ones, with protagonists and antagonists and a prescribed relationship between narrators, characters and listeners. They have linear plots with a fixed past, a present built coherently on it, and a horizon of possibilities projected coherently into the future. Digital technologies, on the other hand, are producing narratives that stray from this classic structure. New communicative interfaces allow for novel narrative interactions and constructions. Multi-user domains (MUDs), massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs), hypertext and cybertext all loosen traditional narrative structure. Digital narratives, in their extremes, are co-creations of the authors, users and media. Multiple entry points into continuously developing narratives are available, often for multiple co-constructors.
These recent developments seem to make possible limitless narratives lacking the defining features of the traditional structures. What kinds of selves will digital narratives generate? Multi-linear? Non-fixed? Collaborative? Would such products still be the selves we’ve come to know and love?

What I am wondering about is how the development of Personal Data Stores and the tools to analyze and reflect aspects of our own stories and narratives back to us.  Will is change our internal narratives? What do we want the tools that we build to do to reflect.

Digital Identity, Social Implications brain, neuro

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