Digital anthropologist Giles Crouch: “We use verifiable identities in the real world, it should be the same in the digital one.”

Identity vs. digital identity

What is this thing we call identity? And how has our perception of it changed throughout history?

Regarding the first question, I’m sorry, but asking an anthropologist you won’t get a definitive answer. We have personal identities – what we call personality. But in general, the perception of identity is shaped by the social groups we live in: we can call it community identity. And of course, it has changed throughout history.

I can see three major shifts.

In what we would call prehistory – the hunter-gatherer era – people lived in very small groups, they roamed within a particular region or area: identity was shaped by the community they grew up in. As we moved into the agricultural phase and feudalism, identity was shaped by larger areas, but still very much community-based. That started to change as we entered capitalism: the printing press allowed us to transfer knowledge more quickly and advances in transport technology made our journeys much faster. Here we began to identify not just as a small community but in terms of nation-states.

We created national borders and then bigger borders: suddenly identities were no longer shaped just by small, localised communities. We started telling stories about our nations. And stories play a really important role in how we form identity.

“In the digital age, we’ve collapsed time and space. This means that we can share our cultural values, norms and traditions in ways that we never could before, and this informs and changes our sense of identity.”

This suggests that technology has also played a role in transforming identity. What happened to the idea of identity when the first digital computers came out, and now that we are so globally connected?

Our identities began to take on a different meaning. Before the digital revolution, we had time and space between cultural groups; cultural shifts in identity happened over time. 

In the digital age, we’ve collapsed time and space. This means that we can share our cultural values, norms and traditions in ways that we never could before, and this informs and changes our sense of identity. We no longer identify purely within the confines of the community we grow up with.

Do you see a difference between identity per se and a digital identity?

We can have one identity in the real world and a completely different identity in the digital world. In fact, our sense of identity changes over time throughout our lives, and it changes in the digital world too. How we see ourselves in a digital world today will change over time based on the activities we participate in within digital communities. 

Play, for example, is an important part of how we find our identity over time, and that happens a lot in the digital world: I might be leading a clan in World of Warcraft or interacting with my neighbours in The Sims Online. Sometimes we create a sense of who we are online as if we’re cyborgs, but that doesn’t necessarily mean we do the same thing in real life. 

But in the digital world, there’s also a different kind of identity – in the sense of what computer algorithms define as our identity.

Tell us a little more about this last type of digital identity, defined by algorithms. Does it have to do with social media platforms and the digital footprints we leave behind us?

Social media companies and data analytics companies create a consumer identity: they build a profile based on our digital footprint, i.e. the activities we engage in online. It’s an identity that we don’t even understand or relate to, because we don’t know exactly what they’re recording about us and we don’t fully understand the mechanism that forms our identity there.

In digital identities defined by algorithms, everything is based on the user’s behaviour. But these behaviours are still usually based on our real-world cultural places of being. For example, if I was raised Canadian and I have all these Canadian values, I’m going to translate that into what I do online and how I present myself online.

That is why I think we are now living in what I call a phygital world: physical and digital coming together.

What happens if something goes wrong in the digital world and our identity there is compromised?

A fear for many today is identity theft, even if it’s only a “partial” identity theft such as the hacking or spoofing of a social media account. This can make people feel as if a part of their overall identity and their digital persona is taken from them, and the result is often less digital interaction than before.

Those who have suffered from being hacked may also start to not use online services at all. E.g. if someone is a prolific social media user and is active across platforms like Reddit, Discord or Facebook and they’re hacked, they may retreat socially for a period of time and alter the digital persona they had previously used when engaged in digital communities.

Also, there is another layer to this type of mistrust in the digital world, and that is when using services. For example, with sharing economy platforms like Airbnb or Uber, it can make it harder for those providing (and using) the services to trust who they are dealing with. The same goes for basically every other peer-to-peer platform too.

You have mentioned how culture shapes our identities in the real and digital worlds. Do you think that it also shapes the way we use different services? Talking about Uber and Airbnb, I am curious if the way our different identities are shaped has an effect on how we use these peer-to-peer platforms that rely purely on trust. E.g. will a user in Southeast Asia use a sharing economy service differently than a Canadian user?

Very much so! Type 1 cultures that are more individualistic will tend to make decisions based on their primary interests, and consider friends and family secondarily. Whereas a Type 2 culture that is more communal in nature (Asian, Nordic, and some European cultures like Spanish and Italian) will consider family and friends first in their decision-making processes.

While all of our identities are shaped primarily by the culture we are born and raised in, these may change if we, for example, move from our country of origin to another that has different cultural norms, customs and traditions. Our identity also changes as we age and move through different life phases. Changing our in-situ culture later in life changes our identity as well.

So this will impact how they use and think about sharing economy services: Type 1 will see them for personal benefit and Type 2 for communal benefits.

And this diversity in the real world also shapes our digital identity, right?

It’s important to remember that culture is mutable. We’re always changing our traditions, our customs, our norms. We try to cling to them as much as we can, but our cultural identity changes over time as societies change. We constantly incorporate new styles of music, fashion, architecture, etc.

These identities generally hold true to geographical areas where the cultures are, but when we’re online, they start to blend together. One example: There is a Scottish bagpipes and Indian music mashup that is beautiful to listen to. That would have been really hard to do in the pre-internet era, right?

In contrast, we do two things digitally. We are trying to experience other cultures, but we are also trying to protect our sense of identity based on the culture that we grew up in, that we live in, and that we have accepted.