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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
Digital Identities in Tension deals with the ambivalence of universal digitalization. While this transformation opens up new possibilities, it also redistributes the interplay of constraints and incentives, and tends insidiously to create a greater malleability of individuals. Today, companies and states are increasingly engaged in the surveillance and management of our digital identities. In response, we must study the effects that the new industrial, economic and political logics have on ethical issues and our ability to act. This book examines the effects of digitalization on new modes of existence and subjectivation in many spheres: digital identity management systems, Big Data and machine learning, the Internet of Things, smart cities, etc. The study of these transformations is one of the major conditions for more responsible modes of data governance to emerge.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
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Table of Contents
Cover
Foreword
1 Identity as an Issue of Constraint and Recognition: a Question of Fundamental Ethics
1.1. Introduction
1.2. Digital ethics in context
1.3. Identification, corporality and recognition issues
1.4. Digital metamorphosis, subjectivation and liquid societies
1.5. Narrative identities and self-expressions
1.6. Identity as an ethical issue
1.7. Traceability and fetishism of form
2 Digital Regimes of Identity Management: from the Exercise of Privacy to Modulation of the Self
2.1. Introduction
2.2. From identity to digital identity: historical and conceptual elements
2.3. The digital and the appropriation of meaning
2.4. Transformations of existential territories
2.5. From autonomy to modulated identity
2.6. Conclusion: privacy in question in the digital transformation
3 Individuals, Normativity and Urban Spaces: Critical Perspectives on Digital Governance
3.1. Introduction
3.2. Identity-identification as a social fact: the systemic construction of digital identity
3.3. e-Identity under construction in the smart city space
3.4. Conclusion: identified citizen participation
4
Wait a minute, dystopia has not arrived yet?
– Digital Identities and the Ability to Act Collectively, an Interview with Andrew Feenberg
References
List of Authors
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Tables
Chapter 2
Table 2.1. The Big Data hypothesis as the fourth paradigm (Kitchin 2014)
List of Illustrations
Chapter 2
Figure 2.1. Entifiers, identifiers, nyms. Adapted from Clarke (2001, 2009)6
Figure 2.2. Digital identities, between production and data control. For a color...
Chapter 3
Figure 3.1. The principle of input–output architecture (Haro 2015, p. 13)
Figure 3.2. Dynamic reaction model of a political system (Lagroye 1991, p. 141)
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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Innovation and Responsibility Set
coordinated by
Robert Gianni and Bernard Reber
Volume 5
Digital Identities in Tension
Between Autonomy and Control
Armen Khatchatourov
with the collaboration of
Pierre-Antoine Chardel
Andrew Feenberg
Gabriel Périès
First published 2019 in Great Britain and the United States by ISTE Ltd and John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms and licenses issued by the CLA. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside these terms should be sent to the publishers at the undermentioned address:
ISTE Ltd
27-37 St George’s Road
London SW19 4EU
UK
www.iste.co.uk
John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
111 River Street
Hoboken, NJ 07030
USA
www.wiley.com
Armen Khatchatourov, Pierre-Antoine Chardel and Gabriel Périès are members of the Chair of Values and Policies of Personal Information (Chaire Valeurs et Politiques des Informations Personnelles).
This book has benefited from the support of the Chair of Values and Policies of Personal Information, part of the Institut Mines-Télécom and supported by Mécènes: https://cvpip.wp.imt.fr/acceuil/. The partners of the Chair hold no responsibility for the content of this book, which is the sole work of the authors.
© ISTE Ltd 2019
The rights of Armen Khatchatourov, Pierre-Antoine Chardel, Andrew Feenberg and Gabriel Périès to be identified as the authors of this work have been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2019936456
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978-1-78630-411-7
Foreword
This book is a timely addition to the Innovation and Responsibility set1, as it is published shortly after the implementation of the European Union General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)2. It can be said that this regulation, which places Europe at the highest level of data protection, illustrates and contributes to the broader notion of “innovation and responsibility”, which almost all the books in the two sets mentioned explain in different ways. The book that follows deals very carefully with the problem of identities in the light of certain digital developments, particularly those of massive data processing (Big Data). It therefore goes far beyond the protection of personal data, which until now has been collected and, in particular, exploited without clearly informing the users. Similarly, it shifts our focus from discourses about technologies, as in Armin Grunwald’s case3, to the technologies themselves, even though they are discreet and difficult to grasp for users.
The approach here is also original, since the central chapter, Chapter 2, is by a researcher with a double competence in engineering sciences and human and social sciences (Armen Khatchatourov). This central part is supplemented by three contributions – by two socio-philosophers (Pierre-Antoine Chardel and Andrew Feenberg) and by a political scientist (Gabriel Périès) – which constitute theoretical reactions to the theses advanced therein. Three of the authors are professor-researchers at the Institut Mines-Télécom Business School and members of the Chair of Values and Policies of Personal Information4. They are therefore familiar with the technologies and debates relevant to these issues. Andrew Feenberg is famous in the United States, France and Canada for his analyses of the evolution of technological societies and his ambition to develop a critical theory of technology.
In the context of the growing importance that companies and governments grant to our digital identities, their monitoring or their management, it is important to consider the effects that these changes have on processes of subjectivation, on the becoming subject, and on the free will that we can exercise in digital environments.
In the central part of the book, Chapter 2, Armen Khatchatourov deals with the ambivalence that digital technology brings in this respect: if in some respects it constitutes an opening and an “encapacitation”, in others, by redistributing differently the play between constraints and resistances, it leads to greater malleability of subjects. This chapter therefore examines the concrete ways in which new regimes of subjectivity are constituted, examining the question of identity both in its historical record and in the most recent forms of digital technologies (Electronic Identity Management Systems, Big Data and the Internet of Things, “the Quantified Self”). Armen Khatchatourov returns to the notion of the person, at the heart of the protection of data that is precisely qualified as “personal”, as well as to the identity as a repetition of the same (idem) and authentic transformation of the self (ipse), according to Paul Ricœur’s5 formulation. The author does not just show how these perspectives may allow us to understand from afar what is at stake in digital technology. Knowing the technologies in question, he shows almost in situ, and in any case in context, the processes according to which this “identification”, with all the ambiguity that accompanies it, is constructed.
In addition, Khatchatourov strongly resituates the debate on privacy in theoretical relationship with Altman and Mead’s interactionist approaches. The individual and his or her private life are negotiated in social interactions. This private life does not simply involve a personal choice to escape surveillance. He therefore vigorously revisits the terms of the debate on privacy and the injunction to defend it as individual or simply economic values, these values being the theoretical underpinning of the consent-based approach.
Borrowing from Foucault and even more from Deleuze, Armen Khatchatourov shows the ambiguities of the consent paradigm at a time when our society seems to correspond to what the two philosophers saw as control societies. They would undoubtedly be amazed to see how far the means of control have extended today, especially with the complicity, implicit or explicit, of those who claim to be liberal. Beyond a hidden technological power, another novelty is undoubtedly the coexistence of the injunction of data protection and the social imperative of visibility.
Armen Khatchatourov also questions current legislative approaches, such as the GDPR regulation, which are ambiguous, for example because of their desire to guarantee data portability throughout Europe. Certainly, it is practical; it is even said that it will give more control to the user by means of interoperable formats. However, at the same time, the door is opened to the exchange of this same data by many other actors, thereby reducing the real autonomy of individuals.
He then convincingly invites us to move from the concept of autonomy – the counterpart of traditional modes of governance that now seem to be giving way to “algorithmic” governance – to what he calls “modulated autonomy”. Indeed, the “overdetermination of the private domain” (to use the author’s expression) – and therefore the scope of the subject’s autonomy – depends on legislative or commercial variations and fluctuations, and therefore can lead to the strengthening of surveillance and control over the individual. Once again, there is the risk of the expropriation of individuations, in the strong sense given to the term of individuation by the philosopher of technology Gilbert Simondon.
Pierre-Antoine Chardel’s chapter, Chapter 1, places the issue of identity in the context of broader ethical questions. He questions the digital as an experience that makes its effects indistinguishable from a phenomenological point of view, since complex technological environments are beyond the immediate understanding of users. Moreover, digital technology creates contradictory injunctions6, because what emancipates the users is at the same time what can constrain them. In these new conditions, ethical questions relating to autonomy and free will are posed with strength and necessity.
Pierre-Antoine Chardel connects these questions to discourses on transhumanism, connected objects, what is often carelessly referred to as “artificial intelligence”, biometric control or facial recognition. He warns against reducing identity to a sum of objective and partial digital traces, and calls for its permanent reconstruction. If a body can be recognized by its biological characteristics, this is not the case for a subject in constant evolution. Identity includes “gaps”, does not retain everything in memory and is constantly being rebuilt; hence the importance of a certain right to opacity. This is all the more necessary as a trend towards that which Armen Khatchatourov calls “memorial exhaustiveness” is made possible by the ease of data collection; even more so if the data were reused for both economic and political purposes. In this chapter, authors who have not been covered much so far in this set are examined: Henri Bergson’s principle of change, Gilles Deleuze’s definition of ethics and Zygmunt Bauman’s description of contemporary society, known as “liquid”.
Drawing on other resources, such as that of Wiener, Gabriel Périès’ chapter (Chapter 3) continues the reflection in a more political and sociological way, opening up a broader spectrum, in order to grasp systemic aspects of the construction of individual identities in the new management of cities called “intelligent” or “interactive” (smart cities). It provides a political perspective on the management of digital identities by public and private authorities, exploring the new forms of normativity that are at stake. It discusses new concepts such as “electronic” citizens or citizenship, which are emerging in the territorial and urban management of digital identities.
In Chapter 4, Andrew Feenberg offers a complementary and different point of view. This chapter re-examines the question of “control societies” as analyzed by Foucault and Deleuze and contrasts them with an examination of the social processes of recent decades and the emancipation that may be at work there. Andrew Feenberg considers, contrary to the predominant view, that the control society is merely a continuation, by new means, of the unidimensionality that the Frankfurt School denounced through Marcuse, whose work he knows particularly well. The problematic questions that Armen Khatchatourov and Pierre-Antoine Chardel ask him during this interview put to the test the resources of critical theory in the context of our new digital environments.
This book completes the Innovation and Responsibility set by going into the depths of the digital infrastructures of information exchange which, because they are difficult to grasp, require knowledge that has not previously been mobilized to ask ethical and epistemological questions. We must be able to decipher our information machines and especially the normative systems that organize them, without falling into blind technophobia.
Between autonomy and control, the title of the book takes up the important themes of responsibility, which appears in several different ways in debates in moral philosophy. Autonomy and freedom can be the conditions for responsibility, as Robert Gianni has defended7.
Mastery of one’s actions may be a condition of responsibility for many moral philosophers. However, the problem arises all the more acutely when we are dealing with processes over which we have only very partial mastery. It is then that we must re-discuss, in the new digital conditions, the various conceptions of responsibility, both individual (as capacity to act or virtue) and organizational (as transparency, auditability and accountability). We have a strong feeling that crucial issues for ethics of the future lie in the renewal of these questions.
Bernard REBER
Center of political researches of Sciences Po (CEVIPOF)
1
Which follows up on the books published in the Responsible Research and Innovation set.
2
Regulation (EU) 2016/679 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 27 April 2016 on the protection of natural persons with regard to the processing of personal data and on the free movement of such data, and repealing Directive 95/46/EC (General Data Protection Regulation). Available at:
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2016/679/oj
.
3
Grunwald, A. (2016).
The Hermeneutic Side of Responsible Research and Innovation
. ISTE Ltd, London, and John Wiley & Sons, New York.
4
This research chair involves researchers from three engineering and management graduate schools of Institut Mines-Télécom (IMT), namely Télécom ParisTech, Télécom SudParis and Institut Mines-Télécom Business School. Available at:
https://cvpip.wp.imt.fr/
.
5
These reflections are an echo of the fields opened by Virgil Cristian Lenoir (2019) in the same set:
Ethically Structured Processes
. ISTE Ltd, London, and John Wiley & Sons, New York.
6
We can refer to Jérôme Béranger’s book (2016),
Big Data and Ethics: The Medical Datasphere
. ISTE Press, London and Elsevier, Oxford.
7
Gianni, R. (2016).
Responsibility and Freedom: The Ethical Realm of RRI
. ISTE Ltd, London, and John Wiley & Sons, New York.
1Identity as an Issue of Constraint and Recognition: a Question of Fundamental Ethics
1.1. Introduction
We have a strong feeling that technological innovations that are spreading throughout our individual and collective lives, in our most basic everyday lives, raise ethical questions about who we are and what we want to become. This is the case, for example, with the expansion of connected objects that create significant risks of the dissemination and exploitation of personal data. On another level, if we think about the progress made in the field of biotechnology, we know that humanity can be the subject of increasingly bold interventions. Such possibilities of intervening in biological reality are likely to transform our ideas of the human, amplifying their capacities exponentially, thus renewing the modern dream of self-mastery. In this respect, we recall that, for René Descartes, the desired mastery of nature (of which it was a question of “making oneself master and possessor”) had to follow the movement of an ego becoming ever more self-confident. The destiny of modernity was deeply marked by the idea that the mathematization of nature and the coronation of the subject would be mutually reinforcing (Waldenfels 2005, p. 329).
Resonating with such an ideal, the advent of transhumanism would allow humanity, according to some ideologues, to free itself from its limits by increasing its potentialities, almost to infinity. A major challenge for the representatives of this current – which has attracted considerable scientific, industrial and financial investment – would be, no more and no less, to free humans from changes in their bodies, their organs, aging and even death itself (Besnier 2009; Benasayag 2016). If we seem to be referring in this way to the great modern utopias that have advocated the principles of controlling and controlling the hazards of the human condition and nature, these are now overwhelmed by fantasies – even extrapolations – that call into question the ideal borne by the spirit of the Enlightenment. Because this ideal had as its horizon the harnessing of technology to the service of a project of emancipation and societal realization. Technoscientific advances were indeed supposed to serve political and social progress. In the alliance between scientists and industrialists, freedom of research was supposed to “satisfy a principle of social utility” (Taguieff 2001, p. 92).
However, there is a current tendency to favor technological progress that is devoid of any extrinsic purpose. It tends to act outside any regulatory norm that would be able to intervene to promote the common good or living together1. Transhumanism generates an outdated conception of humanity, its identity being itself susceptible to being reduced to a set of digital traces and information. While the clearly ideological dimensions of these extrapolations are beginning to be well identified and analyzed, the fact remains that the development of digital technologies as a whole sometimes gives rise to this kind of fetishism of progress.
1.2. Digital ethics in context
In view of the multitude of questions raised by our hypermodern environments, a whole set of social representations, visions of man and discursive logics must be interpreted. This is in relation to the moral values that are supposed to guide our actions, on the assumption that not everything that is technologically possible is always humanly or socially desirable.
Such an exercise requires, on the one hand, questioning the societal, political and industrial contexts in which these representations emerge. On the other hand, it requires identifying criteria for evaluating new technologies – along with the ideals that support them – without making any unambiguous reference to what the “authentic” human being or “human nature” should be. This is because the impasse of essentialism or any kind of moral panic must be avoided. It is therefore up to us to ask ourselves what values we intend to preserve at a time when the term “intelligence” is flourishing in many spheres of industrial innovation. Our homes, cars or cities are referred to as “intelligent”. A city that is designated as such, for example, ideally makes it possible to have better control over information at the same time as a more fluid and predictive flow of urban traffic. As Fabio La Rocca has pointed out, the image of the hypermodern metropolis is therefore analogous to the world of the Web. Metropolitan territoriality is no longer experienced by creating a separation between physical space and Web space:
“On the contrary, this vision becomes a single feature, a co-fusion, a constellation of lines of flight that intertwine and erase the barriers, the borders erected between the Real and the so-called Virtual”. (La Rocca 2013, p. 271)
The benefits of digital deployment across cities are important from an informational and ecological point of view.
However, it is necessary to make it possible to question these trends in terms of ways of life, as well as their existential meanings, which come into play through these dynamics of innovation which are never without a backlash. New constraints are always likely to emerge. As Mark Hunyadi has said in this regard, we are, for example, accustomed in our daily lives to having to respond to machines in most areas of life, follow their instructions and acquire the multiple cognitive and practical skills that enable us to interact with them:
“There is in this development an inextricable combination of systemic factors – economic, technical, industrial, commercial – all of which result from individual initiatives without any agreed plan in advance”. (Hunyadi 2014, p. 42)
In this way, we are collectively engaged in ways of life that we do not choose, nor do we comprehend the technical constraints that these entail. These constraints are all the more insidious because they do not say their names and are often even perfectly undetectable.
In addition, we are dealing with modes of technological development that are most often accompanied by discourses of valorization (“techno-discourses”) that most often act to extinguish our critical vigilance. We are told about intelligent environments, “open data”, the “Cloud”, search engines in “natural language”, etc., all terms that suggest that we would now have access to absolutely fluid, flexible and open universes, capable of offering us ever more comfort, well-being and security. We are thus confronted with systems of representation and discursive logics that do not encourage the development of critical thinking, that is, thinking that would have the task of questioning the symbolic, social and existential challenges of our technological environments.
Several analyses of the social consequences of modern technology have highlighted how individual freedoms, in the context of hyperindustrial societies, can be reduced to symbolically controlled lifestyles, helping to create a form of habituation, such that we do not experience our progressive loss of freedom as the work of a “hostile” or “foreign” force (Marcuse 2008). By following such an angle of analysis, we can admit that if, for example, the so-called “intelligent” city poses (among other things) important problems in terms of transparency, traceability and respect for privacy, an instrumental rationality tends to prevail in the acceptance of such a model of urban development. The dominant order, once instituted, blurs our perception of technological innovations and their consequences, by making any criticism inappropriate: “Nothing nowadays discredits someone more quickly than to be suspected of criticizing machines” (Anders 2002, p. 17). Above all, there is a current tendency to equate criticism with reaction. However, by presenting from the outset any such criticism as “reactionary” or “reactive”, we limit the scope of analysis of the ways of life entailed by our hypermodern environments.
Another factor restricting the development of a “techno-critique” is the fact that in our daily lives we increasingly deal with devices that would probably seem unacceptable to us in their material forms. Critical analysis of a dematerialized device, such as a biometric technology, is by no means obvious and immediate. The digital age accentuates an experience of undetectability while at the same time producing completely paradoxical dynamics:
“Digital technology creates contradictory injunctions on all sides, which consequently have specific ethical implications for information and communication technologies”. (Béranger 2016, p. 25)
What emancipates us is at the same time what constrains us, especially in complex technological environments that are beyond our immediate understanding. We thus often see ourselves returned to the Promethean shame once described by Günther Anders to emphasize the powerlessness that we often feel in the face of the “omnipotence” of machines, which causes us to be subjugated by them, without giving us the means to question them:
“No expression more clearly expresses what shame is than ‘I can do nothing about it’. For what ‘I can do nothing about’ is what I cannot do, that is, what escapes my freedom, the dimension of fatum, that of things that are ‘fatal’ in every respect, that of ‘powerlessness’ in the broadest sense of the word. Shame arises from the contradiction between the claims of freedom and what is ‘fatal’, from the contradiction between power and lack of power. It is the shame of not being able”. (Anders 2002, p. 88)
Even though, to return to this example, the functions of anthropometry and those of biometrics are not the same, the impression of reification of the human being is much more likely to be induced by the sight of an anthropometric identification measure, by consulting archival photos of judicial anthropometry for example. On the contrary, a critical approach to a less visible device (such as a biometric identification technology of which only the interface is perceptible) is not self-evident. We are dealing with a device that is difficult to understand from a phenomenological point of view. In addition, biometrics is also helping to make everyday life more comfortable. At the very least, this is what the doxa (common opinion) most often reveals when we talk to users about it. For example, biometrics provides more instantaneous – and supposedly more secure – access to certain features or sectors (e.g. on a company’s premises). However, the more comfort becomes a pre-eminent criterion in guiding our technological choices, the more vigilance must be increased as to the effects of such an imperative on the exercise of our reflexive judgment. Indeed, the reflexive judgment tends to diminish as the criterion of comfort is emphasized.
1.3. Identification, corporality and recognition issues
In the current context of the development of identification technologies, it is the body that often expresses itself for the subject. The latter is no longer considered only as a speaking being, but is identified in the disclosure of their social and political behavior (Chardel and Périès 2009, p. 37). Remote facial recognition systems make permanent identification possible, which puts us at risk of freezing identity in its very essence. All the devices that allow an ever-tighter profiling of our activities have the characteristic of integrating the act of signifying in a very specific way: they “signify” for us, at a distance, without us having to manifest ourselves through speech, as beings endowed with language.
Between RFID chips and the data collected by connected objects, many industrial developments are currently moving in this direction on a massive scale. We can also easily mention the fascination generated by technological progress, which leaves us overall without any control. It goes without saying that deciphering our information machines and the normative systems that organize them is particularly difficult to grasp. This is particularly what justifies, among other things, a detour through the history of the devices themselves to contribute to developing a sufficiently adequate and creative critical apparatus, by committing ourselves to questioning the worldviews and conceptions of identity at stake through digital technologies. In this respect, the desire to introduce a single identifier to simplify certain administrative procedures is far from being insignificant from an existential point of view. Armen Khatchatourov will return to this point in Chapter 2.
Ethical questioning of our digital age is generally made difficult by the very fact that these technologies bring us ease in our activities, bring us speed, and bring us immediacy. As we have been able to point out, a new formal landscape, in the hypermodern era, seems to be promised to us, that of the disappearance of technological materiality, where everything would become a vector of the digital environment and where our smallest actions would be digitized (Avenati et al. 2016, p. 13). Thus, in the futuristic film Her (2014), Spike Jonze imagines that each person is able to develop an intimate and privileged relationship with the digital environment:
“In the film, everyone enters into a verbal dialogue with a global computer entity that manifests itself in the form of a voice (in this case, in the film, Scarlett Johansson’s voice), an intelligence, which is bought as a product and personified according to one’s desires, with the feeling of having the other always at hand, as close as possible to oneself. This intelligence, in this scenario, then observes each individual, becomes attentive like a mother, available like a friend, devoted like an assistant, loving like an ideal companion”. (Avenati et al. 2016)
In this situation described by Spike Jonze, humanity in a digital environment can no longer clearly distinguish the boundaries between our thoughts, the self, the other, the imaginations we produce and the digital operations by which we are stimulated. Humanity seems to have merged with the digital space to which we are subjected without being fully aware of it, at least in the first part of the film (Avenati et al. 2016). From a more global perspective, the uncertainties that thrive at different levels of our social, moral, economic and political lives mean that the devices with which we interact, and which identify us, provide us with a certain sense of recognition. We feel that these devices are integrated into a large system, which is all the more reassuring in times of crisis of the reference points of meaning as we know them (Agamben 2012, p. 79).
Forms of recognition and integration into the social norm are clearly at stake. A simple way to illustrate this is that we cannot do without our smartphones, even though we know, to varying degrees, how they “never shut up”. We no longer think about abandoning our personal tools in order to restore some autonomy and protection from the supervisory authorities. The fascination of individuals in “democracy” for technology, our blind trust, the fetishization of our prostheses, the approval of the submission of our very body to the machine realize and embody the “docile body” that Michel Foucault used to describe radical forms of social control (Chardel et al. 2016). However, this possible control is the “unspoken” part of our digital societies, which justifies engaging in a process of revealing the structural effects that intervene in the functioning of technologies: there are standards and architectures at work in any technology, which are not without impact on the process of subjectivation.
A major problem with identification technology such as biometrics (to take just one example) is that identity is reduced to something objective. What emerges in the case of a biometric identification device is that it is the constancy of the body that is in play. On an anthropological level, as Antoine Garapon and Michaël Fœssel have clearly shown, the inertia of the body is required as a defense against strategies of dissimulation. However, what is questionable in the generalization of control procedures to all movements “is the temptation to construct dynamic parameters (the identity of an acting subject) from stable data (that of its objective body) as if the future were always deduced from the past” (Garapon and Fœssel 2006, p. 172). And this, despite the very nature of the human which is to become, to be oneself as another. Because an individual’s history does not stop at their objective and objectified traces: because if a body refers to stable biological characteristics, a subject cannot be reduced to unalterable data, but essentially refers to the fact that one is always likely to change, to advance in time, having the feeling that our history does not stop at our objective traces. Jean-Luc Nancy proposes in this respect to consider identity as an inscription from which leads a trail that can open up the most distant, the most bypassed, tangled and blurred paths, even though it is always traced beginning from a point:
“A point and a labyrinth: this is the secret of an identity. From one to the other, permanent contact and permanent dehiscence. We are therefore doomed either to lose one or to lose ourselves in the other. Undoubtedly, there is no shortage of landmarks that mark out a continuity, that make it possible to speak of an ‘identity’ – but it is understood a priori that we will never reduce the infinitesimal character of the point or the rigorously figurative character of the trail”. (Nancy 2010, p. 43)
Identity can be said to have holes in it; it is constantly being built and deconstructed by the very fact of not keeping everything in memory, thus assuming a right to be forgotten. In this respect, it is possible to identify an ambiguity of the hypermodern era based on the fact that the digitization and development of databases could quite quickly prevent us from forgetting, by forcing us to remember, by forcing us to confess by the traces we leave behind as we carry out our activities. However, from a fundamental ethics point of view, we can formulate the following questions: what kind of memory does our digital identity cover? Basically, from what memory is our identity digitized in all but name?
1.4. Digital metamorphosis, subjectivation and liquid societies
The processes of the construction of subjectivity are subject to major changes in the digital age. This is a metamorphosis stemming from the very fact that digital technologies produce new ways of being with oneself and others, new worldviews and new social norms. What the term metamorphosis strongly expresses, particularly in its biological sense, is the idea of a process: metamorphosis is a change in shape that an animal undergoes before reaching an adult stage (it is the story of the larva that becomes a caterpillar, then becomes a chrysalis). That which resonates in the idea of metamorphosis is a process. In regard to our object of reflection, we are talking about a process of subjectivation, that is, the production of a way of life that “cannot be confused with a subject, without depriving it of any interiority and even of any identity. Subjectivity has nothing even to do with the ‘person’: it is an individuation […]. This is a specific dimension without which we could neither go beyond knowledge nor resist power” (Deleuze 1990a, p. 135). With online social networks, we tend to develop our subjectivity (which refers to the character of what is personal, what is unique to a person), not only according to stable criteria, established once and for all, but also according to the possibilities offered by digitization that multiply our ways of being in the world (Khatchatourov and Chardel 2016, pp. 3–10). If we think, for example, of the various identities that we are likely to maintain through online social networks, we do see this trend at work:
“From the personal Web pages mobilized during the 1990s up to the most recent blogs and social networking sites, the development of the Internet has been accompanied by the emergence of devices more specifically dedicated to the production of the self and whose ordinary uses have provided fertile ground for the study of what is commonly called digital identity”. (Denouël 2011, p. 75)
We are thus living in an era of fragmented and multiple identities, a time of multitudes.
From a sociological point of view, we note that digitization means that we are increasingly exposed simultaneously to a multitude of communities of ideas and principles: “A coherent, unified and stable identity would be a burden, a constraint, a restriction on freedom of choice” (Bauman 2010, p. 75). It is this fact that motivates Zygmunt Bauman to interpret our modernity as “liquid”, as opposed to previous modes of social organization that were more defined by permanent anchors. Nowadays, an entire economy of affect is organized around the valuation of what does not last, individuals being constantly encouraged to prefer change to constancy, evanescence to sustainability: “In the liquid state, nothing has a fixed form, everything can change” (Bauman 2010, p. 78). In describing this trend, Zygmunt Bauman intends to encourage us to question the evolution of a world where our positions, decisions and responsibilities are perpetually susceptible to devaluation, in favor of change and innovation. These trends would be accentuated over time by undermining the frameworks of modernity known as “solid”. This was because modernity referred – for better or for worse – to a world of principles and firmly anchored objects:
“All identities, as well as differences, contradictions and antagonisms, were glebae adscripti. They all displayed, either as a sign of honour or as a shameful mark, fixed and registered addresses, themselves inventions of the emerging modern idea of administration”. (Bauman 2005, p. 311)
However, our time is dominated by a valorization of the passage from one place to another, from one mode of being or appearing (of presenting oneself) to another.
1.5. Narrative identities and self-expressions
For many researchers, the devices of production of the self, of content and of publics have fully contributed to the “expressivist movement of the Web”, by promoting the emergence of a plural and fragmented self (Allard and Vandenberghe 2003).
We also see the development of what Serge Tisseron calls the “desire for extimity”2, defining it as the process by which each person is encouraged to present to others certain facets of themselves, hitherto kept secret, in order to make themselves “validated” by those around them, and to re-appropriate these facets in a way that strengthens their self-esteem. Thus, if the right to privacy is essential to lay the foundations of self-esteem, it is constantly nourished by the desire for extimity:
“The desire for extimity has always existed, but the Internet has considerably broadened its scope and challenges. It has opened up spaces for expression and exchange on subjects previously reserved for conversations in quiet corners, or even totally taboo. On the Internet, subjects that circulated very poorly in the traditional public space find spaces of expression in which it is possible to share and discuss”. (Weaver 2017)
What emerges from the construction of online public spheres is an openness to a more horizontal way of being, which tends to thwart territorial and symbolic boundaries. The intersubjective links that develop there even create modes of socialization for populations that may have been marginalized before the rise of digital technology. This is the case, for example, for people with eating disorders (EDs)3 who find in social networks a way to create bonds of solidarity and thus maintain a bond with themselves. Networks have something in common with the culture of the self, insofar as they act as modes of subjectivation in which virtuality participates in a certain construction of the self. The radicality that characterizes the practices of the communities studied should not prevent us from discerning the fact that with technological mediations, we are dealing with elements of the virtual that intertwine in real life, and thus recompose it. Beyond the “pro-ana” and “pro-mia” communities, we realize that the Internet does not impoverish or deteriorate social relations, but it does, as Antonio Casilli points out, offer them new modalities, and it also makes them more complex. In general, people who are granted access
