On identity – between datafication and finding oneself

It was probably in 2015, when a friend took me along to a workshop of professionals involved in social entrepeneurship. Located in a hip place in Berlin Kreuzberg, it was a gathering of well-educated people, mostly in their early thirties, brimming with ideas of social change. Something of an outsider myself, I quickly noticed another outsider in the room: not a philosopher, but a grey-haired social worker, hailing from a village in Brandenburg and evidently pondering on the question that seemed strikingly concrete: how to stop people joining the far-right party AfD. At that time, the AfD still wasn’t generally perceived as a major threat but more as a refuge for Eurosceptics, national conservatives, and right-wing protest voters. During the introductions, the social worker explained that he knew many people in his village who were on the verge of joining the party. Yet the other participants seemed less interested in the problem he described than in what his concern revealed about him. Rather than hearing someone worried about political radicalisation, they appeared to classify him as someone who was, in one way or another, close to the people he was talking about. His proximity to the subject became a reason to suspect his own political identity. I may, of course, have misread the situation. But my impression was reinforced by what happened afterwards: once the introductions were over, no one spoke to him again for the rest of the workshop.

A great deal of contemporary political discourse constists not so much in advocating one’s beliefs as in convicting others of (moral) failure. The social worker mentioned above may well have come with best intentions. Yet the other participants weren’t interested in what he said explicitly, but in what the social cues could be taken to reveal about his identity. For the person under scrutiny, this may well result in conflicts between self-ascriptions and ascriptions by others. Faving someone’s tweet might have earned you all sorts of reputations (when favs were still traceable), even if you might just be wishing to lend support to a friend in need, whatever the cause. You may protest as much as you like, at least in online spaces the verdict about your (political) identity will be strengthened quickly by the data unfailingly betraying your true colours. Of course, the conflicts between self-ascriptions and social ascriptions have a long history. What seems distinctive about contemporary digital culture, however, is the epistemic authority increasingly granted to data. Digital traces appear to promise objective evidence of who someone really is. What interests me is the question of whether datafication, as practised in digital contexts, leads to a new understanding of (political) identity, namely as an identity that is not discovered by self-searching within conventional human interactions, but that can be objectively inferred by referring to digital traces or behavioural data.

A notion of identity that I personally cherish is the idea that identity is initially built by keeping something secret from others. The novelist Deniz Ohde makes this point as follows:

“Every child, at some point, begins to keep certain things secret from others – especially from their parents or other primary caregivers. … At first, it may hide experiences from kindergarten, the rules of games invented with other children, daydreams in which flying is possible … Then, these games slowly become something serious. Suddenly, the child begins to regard them as a private shere that is none of the parents’ business. Then it keeps its first crush secret, keeps also dreams at night to itself, locks the bathroom door, … begins to maintain an inner dialogue … This is the foundation of the self. The secret is crucial aspect of individuation.” (This is my rough translation from German.)

While this understanding of identity is also rooted in interactions with others, it is so qua silence or secrecy, qua withholding what would otherwise be traceable by others. What’s more, it’s fluid, experimental, entangled and tentative. On such an account, it’s open and perhaps subject to change what one thinks about things. It’s driven as much by curiosity as by love, shame, and suffering. When we enter (political) discourse with others, this kind of identity might be challenged, changed, or confirmed by others. What is crucial, though, is that in this understanding, our identity is developed in a dialectic of privacy and public exchange, of self-ascription and social ascription. Not something objectively discovered, but continuosly negotiated.

If this is an apt sketch of how identity might come about, then it’s very much at odds with the objectivity suggested by datafication. While we might increasingly integrate datafied aspects through the digital measures, we should not be tricked into seeing them as a welcome objective replacement for our fluid forms of becoming ourselves. The fact that we can track data about our health doesn’t necessarily improve our relation to our bodies. Likewise, the fact that we can collect ever more data about what someone reads, likes, follows, or endorses does not necessarily improve our understanding of that person or our capacity to engage with them. Data may reveal patterns of behaviour, but it cannot settle the question of who someone is. We should bear this tension in the disparate notions of identity in mind – especially when assessing public figures and their political identities, or indeed ourselves and our interlocutors, by such measures.