The Construction of Personal Identities Online
Lead Research Organisation:
University of Hertfordshire
Department Name: School of Humanities
Abstract
Information and communication technologies (ICTs) are building a new habitat (infosphere) in which future generations will spend an increasing amount of time. So, how individuals construct and maintain their personal identities online (PIOs) is a problem of growing and pressing importance.
Today, PIOs can be created and developed, as an ongoing work-in-progress, to provide experiential enrichment, expand, improve or even help to repair relationships with others and with the world, or enable imaginative projections (the 'being in someone else's shoes' experience), thus fostering tolerance. However, PIOs can also be mis-constructed, stolen, 'abused', or lead to psychologically or morally unhealthy lives, causing a loss of engagement with the actual world and real people. The construction of PIOs affects how individuals understand themselves and the groups, societies and cultures to which they belong, both online and offline. PIOs increasingly contribute to individuals' self-esteem, influence their life-styles, and affect their values, moral behaviours and ethical expectations. It is a phenomenon with enormous practical implications, and yet, crucially, individuals as well as groups seem to lack a clear, conceptual understanding of who they are in the infosphere and what it means to be an ethically responsible informational agent online. This is unsatisfactory. Failing to understand what it means to have a PIO causes confusion and impasse. It leads to uncertainty about ethical guidelines and legal requirements. The research seeks to fill this serious gap in our philosophical understanding by addressing the following questions:
How does one go about constructing, developing and preserving a PIO?
Who am I online? How do I, as well as other people, define and re-identify myself online?
What is it like to be that particular me (instead of you, or another me with a different PIO), in a virtual environment?
Should one care about what happens to one's own PIO and how one (with his/her PIO) is perceived to behave online?
How do PIs online and offline feedback on each other? Do customisable, reproducible and disposable PIOs affect our understanding of our PI offline?
How are we to interpret cases of multiple PIOs, or cases in which someone's PIO may become more important than, or even incompatible with, his or her PI offline?
What is going to happen to our self-understanding when the online and offline realities become intertwined in an 'onlife' continuum, and online and offline PIs have to be harmonised and negotiated?
The first stage of the research will compare and evaluate the standard approaches to PI by analysing how far they may be extended to explain PIO. The hypotheses to be tested are that classic approaches to PI can contribute to our philosophical understanding of PIO; that, however, none of them will turn out to be fully satisfactory by itself, when exported from offline to online environments; and that this shortcoming can help us both to refine our understanding of PI and to develop a new approach to PIO.
The second stage of the research will address the questions raised by PIO, in order to complement the already available approaches to PI. The hypotheses to be tested are that the construction of PIO provides evidence in favour of a dynamic, interactive and distributed (that is, socially- or network-dependent) interpretation of PI, as a relational rather than a substantive property; that this new, interactive approach will be system- rather than single, agent-oriented; and that this approach can successfully compete with the others in explaining PI while overcoming their limitations when it comes to PIO.
The research will be partly descriptive, in order to analyse what a PIO consists in, and partly prescriptive, in order to establish what a PIO ought to be. It will use a new and unconventional methodology, by replacing thought experiments with experiements in silico (simulations) in Second Life.
Today, PIOs can be created and developed, as an ongoing work-in-progress, to provide experiential enrichment, expand, improve or even help to repair relationships with others and with the world, or enable imaginative projections (the 'being in someone else's shoes' experience), thus fostering tolerance. However, PIOs can also be mis-constructed, stolen, 'abused', or lead to psychologically or morally unhealthy lives, causing a loss of engagement with the actual world and real people. The construction of PIOs affects how individuals understand themselves and the groups, societies and cultures to which they belong, both online and offline. PIOs increasingly contribute to individuals' self-esteem, influence their life-styles, and affect their values, moral behaviours and ethical expectations. It is a phenomenon with enormous practical implications, and yet, crucially, individuals as well as groups seem to lack a clear, conceptual understanding of who they are in the infosphere and what it means to be an ethically responsible informational agent online. This is unsatisfactory. Failing to understand what it means to have a PIO causes confusion and impasse. It leads to uncertainty about ethical guidelines and legal requirements. The research seeks to fill this serious gap in our philosophical understanding by addressing the following questions:
How does one go about constructing, developing and preserving a PIO?
Who am I online? How do I, as well as other people, define and re-identify myself online?
What is it like to be that particular me (instead of you, or another me with a different PIO), in a virtual environment?
Should one care about what happens to one's own PIO and how one (with his/her PIO) is perceived to behave online?
How do PIs online and offline feedback on each other? Do customisable, reproducible and disposable PIOs affect our understanding of our PI offline?
How are we to interpret cases of multiple PIOs, or cases in which someone's PIO may become more important than, or even incompatible with, his or her PI offline?
What is going to happen to our self-understanding when the online and offline realities become intertwined in an 'onlife' continuum, and online and offline PIs have to be harmonised and negotiated?
The first stage of the research will compare and evaluate the standard approaches to PI by analysing how far they may be extended to explain PIO. The hypotheses to be tested are that classic approaches to PI can contribute to our philosophical understanding of PIO; that, however, none of them will turn out to be fully satisfactory by itself, when exported from offline to online environments; and that this shortcoming can help us both to refine our understanding of PI and to develop a new approach to PIO.
The second stage of the research will address the questions raised by PIO, in order to complement the already available approaches to PI. The hypotheses to be tested are that the construction of PIO provides evidence in favour of a dynamic, interactive and distributed (that is, socially- or network-dependent) interpretation of PI, as a relational rather than a substantive property; that this new, interactive approach will be system- rather than single, agent-oriented; and that this approach can successfully compete with the others in explaining PI while overcoming their limitations when it comes to PIO.
The research will be partly descriptive, in order to analyse what a PIO consists in, and partly prescriptive, in order to establish what a PIO ought to be. It will use a new and unconventional methodology, by replacing thought experiments with experiements in silico (simulations) in Second Life.
Organisations
People |
ORCID iD |
| Luciano Floridi (Principal Investigator) |
Publications
Floridi L
(2011)
The Construction of Personal Identities Online
in Minds and Machines
Floridi L
(2011)
The Informational Nature of Personal Identity
in Minds and Machines
| Description | The rapid and unprecedented growth of Information Communication Technologies (ICTs) has had a profound effect not only on the way in which we live our lives but also on the way we perceive ourselves. Our personal identity (PI), namely what it means to be, and remain, the person that one is, is now constructed, developed and maintained in an online and virtual environment as well as in the more familiar offline scenarios. This shift from viewing ourselves as single and unique agents operating in the here and now of a material world as users of technology to agents that are embedded in digitally mediated virtual worlds raises many problems. Moreover, as the distinction between our online and offline lives becomes ever more blurred until it finally disappears, the more pressing the problems become. This project, the first systematic philosophical exploration of the constraints and affordances raised by this new online habitat (the infosphere), has concluded that although the classic approaches to the problem of PI may go some way towards explaining and understanding both PI and PIO (personal identity online) they are insufficient to meet the challenges posed by PI in the digital age, where we interact not only with other human agents but artificial ones too. However, the shortcomings in the classic approach have provided a basis for the refinement and elaboration of our approach to PIO. The project's main conclusion is that the construction of PIO favours a dynamic, interactive and distributed (that is, socially- or network dependent) interpretation in a move away from a single, agent-oriented approach towards a new interactive approach that resembles the capacity approach. That is to say, it is a self-tracking capacity where we re-brand and re-invent ourselves in order to avoid becoming just one more anonymous identity among many other anonymous identities. PIO becomes a work-in-progress as our lives are enriched, expanded and flourish through online interaction with other agents, both human and artificial. Yet there also exists the potential for harm and unhealthy, even immoral lives, as PIOs may be mis-contructed, abused or stolen. Clearly both impact on the individuals' self-esteem, life-styles, values and ethical behaviour as people try to make sense of their place in an information-filled world. Online construction of a PI involves the dissemination of personal data and information, usually supplied via virtual social networks. Witness the rise of Facebook and Second Life, for example. By shifting the emphasis from a single agent-oriented approach to one that is dynamic, interactive and socially and network dependent, the project has been able to provide a robust conceptual framework which is necessary to recognize and evaluate the qualitative features that characterize the "good life" of the self online, together with the right approach to develop and maintain it. This, in turn, provides the reliable and stable platform upon which other conceptual, technological, scientific and social developments can be based. The ground has been cleared of confusion and inconsistencies to be replaced with a framework for the generation sound ethical guidelines. |
| Exploitation Route | The potential for use in a non-academic context is huge. The profound influence of ICTs on all aspects of people's lives - as individuals and as members of society, from small companies to the largest multi-national and global conglomerates, from local and national governments to international, political bodies - all can only benefit from clear, well-founded ethical guidelines and procedures that arise from a robust conceptual framework of who we are online. |
| Sectors | Communities and Social Services/Policy,Construction,Creative Economy,Digital/Communication/Information Technologies (including Software),Education,Electronics,Environment,Healthcare,Pharmaceuticals and Medical Biotechnology,Retail,Security and Diplomacy,Transport |
| Description | 8. 'Stakeholders Roundtable on the Value of Heath Data', at European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations (EFPIA) |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A formal working group, expert panel or dialogue |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | The European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations (EFPIA) represents the pharmaceutical industry operating in Europe. Through its direct membership of 33 national associations and 40 leading pharmaceutical companies, EFPIA is the voice on the EU scene of 1,900 companies committed to researching, developing and bringing to patients new medicines that will improve health and the quality of life around the world. The roundtable was a key occasion to discsus key ethical issues on the use of health data collected via IoT devices for biomedical research. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2017 |