One, None and One Hundred Thousand Profiles: Re-imagining the Pirandellian Identity Dilemma in the Era of Online Social Networks
aa r X i v : . [ c s . S I] S e p One, None and One Hundred Thousand Profiles
Re-imagining the Pirandellian Identity Dilemma in the Era of Online Social Networks
Alberto Pepe, Spencer Wolff & Karen Van Godtsenhoven
A.P. is at Harvard University. S.W. isat Yale University. K.V.G. is at GhentUniversity
Abstract
Note: This is a preprint. An abridgedversion of this paper will be pre-sented/performed under the title“Identity dilemmas on Facebook” atthe Symposium on the Dynamics ofthe Internet and Society “A Decade inInternet Time” to be held Wednesday - Saturday September at theOxford Internet Institute, University ofOxford, UK.
Uno, Nessuno, Centomila (“One, No One and One Hundred Thou-sand”) is a classic novel by Italian playwright Luigi Pirandello. Pub-lished in , it recounts the tragedy of Vitangelo Moscarda, a manwho struggles to reclaim a coherent and unitary identity for himselfin the face of an inherently social and multi-faceted world. Whatwould Moscarda identity tragedy look like today? In this article wetransplant Moscarda’s identity play from its offline setting to the con-temporary arena of social media and online social networks. Withreference to established theories on identity construction, perfor-mance, and self-presentation, we re-imagine how Moscarda wouldgo about defending the integrity of his selfhood in the face of thediscountenancing influences of the online world.
You have one identity. [...] The days of you having a different image for yourco-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an endpretty quickly. [...] Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lackof integrity.
Mark Zuckerberg
Introduction
With the growing permeation of online social networks in our ev-eryday life, scholars have become interested in the study of novelforms of identity construction, performance, spectatorship and self-presentation onto the networked medium. This body of researchbuilds upon a rich theoretical tradition on identity constructivism,performance and (re)presentation of self. With this article we attempto integrate the work of Italian playwright Luigi Pirandello into thistradition.Pirandello’s classic novel
Uno, Nessuno, Centomila (“One, NoOne and One Hundred Thousand") recounts the tragedy of a manwho struggles to reclaim a coherent identity for himself in the face ofan inherently social and multi-faceted world. Via an innocuous obser-vation of his wife, the protagonist of the novel, Vitangelo Moscarda,discovers that his friends’ perceptions of his character are not at allwhat he imagined and stand in glaring contrast to his private self-understanding. In order to upset their assumptions, and to salvagesome sort of stable identity, he embarks upon a series of carefullycrafted social experiments.Though the novel’s story transpires in a pre-digital age, the volatileplay of identity that ultimately destabilizes Moscarda has only in-creased since the advent of online social networks. The constant fluxof communication in the online world frustrates almost any effortat constructing and defending unitary identity projections. Popularsocial networking sites, such as Facebook and MySpace, offer freelyaccessible and often jarring forums in which widely heterogeneousaspects of one’s life—that in Moscarda’s era could have been scrupu-lously kept apart—precariously intermingle. Disturbances to oursense of a unified identity have become a matter of everyday life.Pirandello’s prescient novel offered readers in its day the contoursof an identity melee that would unfurl on the online arena some years later. Reading Uno, Nessuno e Centomila in light of establishedand emerging theories on identity construction, we re-imagine howMoscarda would go about defending the integrity of his selfhoodin the face of the discountenancing influences of the online world.In other words, we address the following question: How wouldMoscarda’s tragedy play out in the inherently networked world oftoday? This article hopes to shed light on contemporary dilemmasof identity constructivism and self-representation while simultane-ously re-evaluating one of the most celebrated works of one of Italy’sprofoundest thinkers on identity and personhood.This article begins with a synopsis of Pirandello’s novel, presentedin the next section. The remainder of the article analyses in detailfour crucial episodes of the novel that we attempt to reframe fromtheir original offline, place-based setting, to the contemporary onlinestage, in which offline, physical interactions necessarily intersect withthe networked digital medium. he drama of Vitangelo Moscarda Uno, Nessuno e Centomila is Pirandello’s last and possibly most com-plete novel. Published in in eight chapters (books), it is theresult of nearly years of intense, yet oft-interrupted, work. De-spite this long and difficult period of preparation, the novel is a lucidcompendium of the central themes in Pirandello’s thought. In thissection, we present a synopsis of the novel and its central themes,focusing on the four episodes that are further discussed in the follow-ing sections . All excerpts (and relative page num-bers) of One, No One and One Hun-dred Thousand in this and followingsections refer to the edition and transla-tion of the book listed in the references(Pirandello, ). One, No one and One Hundred Thousand tells the tragedy ofVitangelo Moscarda, “a man whose great aim was to see clearly andbe truly himself" (p. xiii). In the narrative style of the bildungsroman ,Moscarda recounts his troubled experience of identity as a first-person narrator. The opening lines of the novel (p. ) set the stage forthe entire novel: «What are you doing?», my wife asked, seeing me linger, unusually infront of the mirror.«Nothing», I replied. «Just looking at myself, at my nose, here, insidethis nostril. When I press it, I feel a little pain».My wife smiled and said: «I thought you were looking to see whichway it tilts».I wheeled around like a dog whose tail has been stepped on.«Tilts? My nose?» With this sudden, unexpected, and accidental realization - thathis nose tilts - Moscarda begins his dramatic journey to discoverhis own self. The tilted nose is the “first germ of the sickness" (p. )through which Moscarda begins to question his own public image ashe apprehends that his acquaintances have constructed, in their ownimagination, a Moscarda persona that is likely to be different fromhis own: “I believed everyone saw me as a Moscarda with a straightnose, whereas everyone saw a Moscarda with a bent nose" (p. ) and“I was obsessed by the thought that for others I was not what tillnow, privately, I had imagined myself to be" (p. ). This realizationsoon becomes an identity dilemma - “if for the others I was not theone I had always believed I was for myself, who was I?" (p. ) - thatculminates in a number of experiments with his own identity.As a first experiment, Moscarda tries to experience his own per-sona from the point of view of an outsider: “I wanted to be alone ina quite unusual, new way, [...] namely, without myself and, in fact,with an outsider present" (p. ). He sets himself before a mirrorwith the intent to watch himself “live" from the outside; to catchhimself in the most natural actions and expressions. This initial ex-periment is the first in a number of “necessary follies" that Moscardaerforms to explore the public perception of his own persona andidentity. It is discussed more in detail and reframed in the arena ofonline social networks in the next section, “The mirror experiment".So-who is Moscarda? He is the director of a bank in the smalltown of Richieri-a bank he inherited from his father but that heknows very little about: “I had two faithful friends, Sebastiano Quan-torzo and Stefano Firbo, to handle my affairs after the death of my fa-ther, who, though he tried in every way, had never succeeded in mak-ing me accomplish anything; except taking a wife" (p. ). Moscarda’sfirst experiment helps him throw some light on his past and on thepublic’s perception of his business persona. At work, he comes torealize, for example, that most people regard him (and his father)as a “usurer", rather than a “banker". In the family, he begins to un-derstand the undertones of the nickname (“Gengè") given to himby his wife Dida. “Ah, yes- for the others a usurer; [...] for my wife,Dida, a fool." (p. ). A surprising mosaic of identities slowly unveilsitself before Moscarda, and his aim becomes the deconstruction ofthis mosaic and every connotation associated with it: “I decided todiscover who I was at least for those closest to me, my so-called ac-quaintances, and to amuse myself by dismantling spitefully the methat I was for them" (p. ). He chooses Marco Di Dio as the “victim"for his next experiment.Marco Di Dio is a local inventor in the town of Richieri. He as-pired to great wealth and fame and received financial favors fromboth Moscarda and his father to keep his projects going. In addition,Moscarda’s family allowed him to lodge in a rundown building onthe edge of their property for many years, free of charge. In order toprove himself “differently from one of the hundred thousand in which[he] lived" (p. ), Moscarda sets in motion a detailed plan to evictDi Dio and his wife from the building. The eviction turns out to be abureaucratic nightmare but eventually Moscarda manages to toss DiDio and his wife out into the street on a rainy winter day. A crowdof bystanders witness the eviction and sharply criticize Moscarda:“More disgusting than his father!", “In the rain, if you please! Hewouldn’t even wait till tomorrow!", “Usurer! Usurer!". But then,to everyone’s astonishment, Moscarda’s lawyer announces that theevicted tenant will be donated one of Moscarda’s more comfortableproperties. With this unexplainable gesture, Moscarda earns the labelof “madman" but successfully executes his experiment, proving toothers that he could be “someone different from the man [he] wasbelieved to be" (p. ). This experiment is discussed at greater lengthand in terms of identity construction theory below, in the sectiontitled “The Marco Di Dio experiment".After the eviction of Marco Di Dio, Moscarda’s closest familynd acquaintances-Dida, Firbo and Quantorzo-fear that Moscardawill commit new follies. Returning home from a walk with his dog,Moscarda finds his wife Dida conversing with the bank managerQuantorzo in the living room. Fresh from a meditation about identityand the “sight of the others" (p. ), Moscarda realizes that there arenot simply three people in the room (himself, Dida and Quantorzo).Rather, he recognizes eight different characters (p. ): . Dida, as she was for herself; . Dida, as she was for me; . Dida, as she was for Quantorzo; . Quantorzo, as he was for himself; . Quantorzo, as he was for Dida; . Quantorzo, as he was for me; . Dida’s dear Gengè; . Quantorzo’s dear Vitangelo.Moscarda does not include the missing ninth character-himselfas he was for himself- having realized during his meditation that hewas no one for himself. In the eccentric discussion that follows (be-tween these eight characters), Dida and Quantorzo try to persuadeMoscarda to stay calm and respect the managerial decisions of Firboand Quantorzo. But it is too late, as Moscarda, who had never in-volved himself with bank affairs in the past, has already decided toforce the bank into liquidation-a gesture aimed at extinguishing theimage that others had constructed of him: “no longer usurer (thatbank was done with!) and no longer Gengè (that marionette wasdone with, too!)" (p. ). This discussion between Moscarda, Dida,and Quantorzo is revisited below in the section “Conversing withDida and Quantorzo".The last two chapters of the novel (Books Seven and Eight) rep-resent a narrative and stylistic departure from the rest of the story.Moscarda is invited to visit Anna Rosa, a friend of his wife that hehardly knows. While Moscarda is conversing with her, she inadver-tently drops her handbag, setting off a revolver inside and woundingher foot. During her recovery, Moscarda visits Anna Rosa regularlyand becomes very attached to her. He comes to realize that she toois uncertain of her “authentic" identity and he introduces her to histragedy and to his meditations on identity. Anna Rosa grows fasci-nated with Moscarda and his ideas to that point that, in a state ofmental confusion, shoots him from her bed using the same revolverthat had caused her injury (p. ): From that bed, a moment later, I rolled down blind, mortally woundedin the chest by the little revolver she kept under her pillow. The rea-sons she gave later in her defense must be true: namely, that she wasriven to kill me by the instinctive, sudden horror of the act into whichshe felt she was drawn by the strange fascination of everything I hadsaid to her during those days.
Moscarda is taken to a hospital and upon recovering decidesto “set an exemplary and solemn example of repentance and self-sacrifice" (p. ) by donating all his possessions and joining a homefor the destitute. When called upon to testify against Anna Rosa,Moscarda successfully absolves her of the crime. Once in the home,Moscarda is a transformed man. He has lost interest in public per-ceptions of his name and persona. He lives life moment by moment,leaving memories and names behind (p. ): And the air is new. And everything, instant by instant, is as it is,preparing to appear. [...] This is the only way I can live now. To bereborn moment by moment. [...] I die at every instant, and I am reborn,new and without memories: live and whole, no longer inside myself,but in every thing outside.
These final events of the novel are revisited in the section titled“Epilogue".
The mirror experiment
We begin our revisitation of Uno, Nessuno, Centomila with Moscarda’sfirst identity experiment in which he attempts to watch himself “live"in front of a mirror. This experiment is driven by Moscarda’s desireto experience the image of himself from the gazing perspective ofan outsider. There is a long tradition of linking identity troubles tomirrors and other reflective surfaces. Over a century ago, Cooleycreated the concept of the looking-glass self. He proposed that anindividual constructs an understanding of her “self" via others’ per-ceptions in society, i.e., by imagining how she is perceived by othersand developing an emotional response based on their judgments(Cooley, ). Mead ( ) further extended Cooley’s theory, posit-ing that the construction of the self happens entirely through socialinteraction. Reflexivity - experiencing oneself (as an object) from thestandpoint of others - is still a core concept in Mead’s theories, butthe focus shifts to the interaction with the social world. Under thesame rubric, and particularly relevant to the present discussion, isthe dramaturgic work of Goffman ( ). In
The Presentation of Self inEveryday Life , Goffman posits the self as a malleable and elastic entitythat is entirely shaped by the expectations formed by its interactionwith the social world, the audience, and the stage. Again, the processof anticipating, interpreting, and assimilating the perception of others- similar to Moscarda’s attempts to experience the outsider gaze - is aey notion in Goffman’s work and is echoed in the work of contem-porary theorists writing about online identity (Boyd, ; Pearson, ; Robinson, ; Van Kokswijk, ). We attempt to reframethis notion in a contemporary context, by posing the question: howwould Moscarda perform the mirror experiment were he alive today?At the time at which Pirandello’s story unfolds - the early twen-tieth century - cinematography was in its infancy and a mirror wasthe most readily available and convenient tool to experience the out-sider gaze. A contemporary Moscarda could make use of much moresophisticated technological devices. For the present discussion, wewill leave high-tech stratagems aside - such as closed-circuit tele-vision, and illusory out-of-body experiences (Ehrsson, ) - andfocus on what the outsider gaze experiment would entail regardingthe present-day permeation of online social networks in our lives.Because modern identity issues necessarily extend beyond physical,offline fori, we speculate that a present-day Moscarda would be asconcerned about the public perception of his physical persona as thatof his virtual one. In other words, a Moscarda of the day would becurious to explore how he is portrayed and perceived both offline, inthe real world, and online, on social media.It has been noted that the most common mechanism for present-ing one’s identity online on social networking sites is the personalprofile (Boyd and Herr, ). A personal profile, is a web page con-sisting of personal information, such as name, occupation, location,relationship status, a diary, photographs, videos and other sorts ofpersonal media. Despite the variety of services and options offeredby different social networking sites the basic function of a profile isto present one’s identity. A personal profile is thus the componentof one’s online identity that best approximates one’s physical, publicappearance.We can then imagine that a present-day Moscarda would be curi-ous to explore the ways in which he appears to others online. Howcould Moscarda achieve this? The simplest way would be by scru-tinizing his own personal profile, attempting to imagine how oth-ers would perceive it. In other words, Moscarda would perform amodern version of the mirror experiment by logging into his socialnetworking sites of choice, displaying, and perusing his personal pro-file page. An experiment that consists of merely scrutinizing one’sown profile might appear trivial at first, but the highly malleable,dynamic, and real-time nature of social networking sites makes thisexperiment worth exploring more in detail.User profiles consist of variegated types of information. First andforemost, they contain personal information entered by their owners,such as name, a profile picture, relationship status, a biography,nd photos. For example, Moscarda might have created a profilewith information about his occupation (“banker"), his relationshipstatus (“married to Dida"), and a profile picture. Moreover, he maychoose to use the popular microblogging feature included in manysocial networks to share real-time news about himself as a brief textupdate (e.g., “Moscarda is going to the bank"). A second categoryof information generally present on social network profiles relates toactivities in the user social timeline. This includes information aboutrecently established friendships (e.g., “Moscarda is now friend with***"), relationships (“Moscarda is now in a relationship with ***"),and social events (e.g., “Moscarda attended the event ***"). Manyof these updates are triggered by users’ interactions, e.g., acceptinga friend request triggers an automated update. A third category ofinformation found on user profiles is public content posted by thirdparties-friends, acquaintances, strangers, applications-in the formof text comments, “wall posts" (profile annotations), tagged imagesand similar media content. For example, Dida might post a photo ofMoscarda on his profile, making it publicly available and viewable toanyone visiting his profile (“Moscarda was tagged in a photo").It is important to differentiate between these categories becausethey constitute three different levels of authorship and three differentmechanisms by which aspects of one’s identity are revealed. The firstcategory of information discussed above is under the direct controlof the users, i.e., the owners of online profiles. The user carefullyselects certain pieces of information to exhibit to the online worldin order to fashion a desired image. As such, these exhibits may besubject to constant manipulation or curatorial effort. However, thisform of identity construction is not exclusive to the online realm. AsMoscarda (Pirandello, : ) puts it: Do you believe you can know yourselves if you don’t somehow con-struct yourselves? Or that I can know you if I don’t construct you inmy way? And can you know me if I don’t construct you in my way?We can know only what we succeed in giving form to.
Similar to the ways by which people construct their personae andplay with their own physical appearance in the offline world-by act-ing differently, by the application of make-up, by alternating attire,and even by undergoing plastic surgery-online appearance is alsohighly malleable: every morsel of information shared on a personalprofile can be edited, replaced, modified, or concealed by its own-ers. This constant digital embellishment of one’s profile points tothe role of the social network as a performance stage, or a “spacefor performing the self" (Chan, : ). Users of online social net-works “perform" and construct an online identity via a constantlyupdated stream of text (microblogging messages, biographical notes,hoto comments), videos, and images. Photographic images, in par-ticular, are the most direct and powerful means to stage one’s onlineperformance. In Pirandello’s days, photographic cameras were nei-ther portable nor personal commodities. A present-day Moscarda,however, would certainly experiment with photographic devices tocome to an understanding of his own self and appearance. Reflect-ing on the importance of the photographic medium in everyday life,Susan Sontag notes: “We learn to see ourselves photographically.To regard oneself as attractive is, precisely, to judge that one wouldlook good in a photograph" (Sontag, : ). Although Sontag waswriting about analog photography, her words reverberate even morenowadays, for cameras are cheap, portable, and embedded in prac-tically any electronic device. Cameras have become instrumental todigital aestheticization. With regard to this, it is interesting to notethat a common practice among users of social networks, especiallyteenagers, is to take self-portraits using portable digital cameras infront of a mirror (Walker, ). Thus, the instrument employed byMoscarda to experience the outsider gaze becomes a tool of onlineidentity construction and presentation.While this first category of information consists of content that isdirectly under the control and management of users of social net-works (name, biographical sketch, profile photos, status updates), theother two categories introduced above pertain to the social activitiesof users and are generated by third parties. These include contentthat is generated automatically by social networking sites (such asinformation about new friendship, the results of an online quiz, etc.)and other users (such as a new wall post from a friend, a new taggedphoto, etc.). Although privacy measures exist (to different extents) onmost social networking sites, by and large, information of this kindends up on a user profile and is thus visible to anyone visiting it.In the pre-digital era, Moscarda could have kept this kind of in-formation confidential. Of course, he could have shared it with arestricted circle of family and friends of his choice, but the bulk of hissocial activity would have gone largely undocumented, or confinedto informal discourse and gossip. The systematic documentation ofMoscarda’s social whereabouts and activities (e.g., “Moscarda is nowfriend with ***") together with the traces left on his profile by thirdparties (e.g., a wall post from a friend reading: “hello Moscarda, itwas great to see you yesterday at ***!") represents a crucial departurefrom the traditional ways in which one’s identity is presented to theworld. It follows that a Moscarda that operates both offline and on-line needs to control many more aspects of his identity to preserve acoherent rendering of his persona, many of which are outside of hisdirect control.ome preliminary conclusions emerge from the revisitation ofthis episode of Uno, Nessuno, Centomila. The offline Moscarda ofthe s was concerned with the public perception of his personaand performed a mirror experiment to experience and analyze theoutsider gaze. A contemporary Moscarda would find himself in amore complex landscape, for he would have to concern himself withpublic perceptions of both his offline and his online personae. Wehave imagined a modern Moscarda with an online profile on a socialnetworking site and discussed the various kinds of identity-relatedinformation that would concern him in different ways. There wouldbe information that he personally posts to his profile and informationabout his social whereabouts, activities and interaction with otherusers, posted by third parties. In this context, a modern version ofthe mirror experiment would force a present-day Moscarda to ac-tively engage with his profile, manipulating it and curating it to hisown desire. The ability to continuously and dynamically rework hisprofile would furthermore amplify Moscarda’s anxiety about thepresentation of his persona. With the aim of presenting a coherentversion of himself to the world, Moscarda would find himself engag-ing in a dynamic process of identity construction through interaction.Thus, a modern version of the mirror experiment is a dynamic, real-time venture set in motion by our incessant preoccupation with theappearance and integrity of our ever-changing online profiles . We are increasingly becoming con-cerned with and alert to the status ofour online identity. For example, it isnot uncommon or unacceptable to rushto a computer to remove an embarrass-ing photo in which we were just tagged.Along these lines, we have heard ofcases in which former couples meet(in person) to negotiate their “breakup on Facebook", i.e., to tweak theprivacy settings on their profiles so tosilence or attenuate the public, onlineannouncement of their break up.
The Marco Di Dio experiment
While Moscarda’s first experiment is merely a self-observation fromthe perspective of an outsider, in his second experiment, Moscardaintends to deconstruct every connotation associated with his persona.He delves into the ways he is perceived by others and finds that heabhors the identities that live within him (the dear Gengè, the “son",the usurer). The intention to break with these identities (“I warnyou, my friend, that I am not my father", p. ) is translated into acarefully crafted experiment in which he first intensifies his role ofusurer, by publicly evicting Marco di Dio and his wife from theirhouse, and then smashes it to pieces by moving them into a muchmore comfortable home, to the astonishment of everyone.Moscarda’s second experiment is a social exercise of identity con-struction and deconstruction. Yet, how do we go about constructingidentity in the first place? Let us turn to Jean-Paul Sartre and hisspeculation that a French cafè waiter is ’playing a waiter’, not merely’being a waiter’: “But what is he playing? We need not watch longbefore we can explain it: he is playing at being a waiter in a cafe."(Sartre, ). As beings birthed into pre-existing societal constella-ions, we are outfitted with ready-made scripts and roles which wecan choose to adopt, perform and even improvise on. J. L. Austin( ) refers to these pre-scripted identities as “performatives." In itsoriginal sense, the rubric “performative" was intended to apply tocertain “illocutionary" speech acts that were neither true nor false,but “performative." For instance, the illocutionary act: “I pronounceyou husband and wife," performs what it says provided that certainfelicity conditions are met, e.g., the declarant has legal or religiouscapacity to do so, the partners are willingly present, and they fulfillcertain legal and social prerequisites. Judith Butler ( ) expandedupon Austin’s work to show that the term “performative" can be ex-tended to cover a sizeable host of habitually uninterrogated socialroles and affectations. Though Butler concentrates her insights ongender (certain conditions must be met for one to be able to enact acertain gender), the same logical apparatus could just as well holdtrue for the performative script associated with police officers, mas-cots, the Sartrian waiter, as well as Moscarda. For example, in Uno,Nessuno e Centomila, the town of Richieri perceives Moscarda as a“usurer" for he fulfils all the felicity conditions: ( ) he is the owner ofa bank that charges exorbitant interest rates ( ) he lives by no othermeans and ( ) he loafs about town in utter disoccupation. With hissecond experiment, Moscarda first evicts Marco Di Dio, and thenrewards him with a more comfortable house, leaving the people ofRichieri flummoxed. Public astonishment is what he had hoped forby breaking away from the “usurer performative", by refusing toperform its script. How would Moscarda go about enact a similarperformative construction and deconstruction in today’s networkedreality?It is easy to imagine that a modern Moscarda would attempt todismantle the public perception of his persona by tweaking hisonline performatives in unorthodox ways. There are innumerablestratagems by which he could catalyze an identity crisis, proving toothers that he does not in fact embody certain pre-scripted identities:he could post embarrassing photos of himself or his friends, publishunusual, rude or politically incorrect comments, drastically changehis profile information, publicly reveal personal secrets, or removesome of his crucial contacts. The list is potentially endless and notlimited to a single social network. Modern social networking sitescater to different communities with different needs and different per-formatives. For example, LinkedIn caters to professionals looking forwork, Match.com and similar dating sites cater to singles looking forpartners, the elitist network asmallworld, with its coteries of yacht-ing aficionados, organizes exclusive get-togethers and connectionbuilding for its members. MySpace, once the largest social network,as recently reinvented itself as a music and media industry stage.A Moscarda with profiles on these sites could play with his differentperformatives catalyzing site-specific identity crises. The availabil-ity and popularity of these many fori for identity construction andmanipulation inflate the possibilities for specialized performativedestabilization with ramifications both in the online and in the offlinerealm . In fact, one would think that the online social realm allows Destabilizations of online performa-tives have created episodes of real lifedistress and hysteria. Examples onFacebook include losing a job overeccentric remarks on a status update( ,and http://bit.ly/aJFL2n ) anda man stabbing his wife todeath after she changed herrelationship status to “single"( http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7676285.stm ). for more games and experiments of identity performance than itsoffline counterpart, for its immediate and dynamically constructednature.But this is not always the case. The popular social networkingsite Facebook is interesting to analyze in this context. With its sheerpopulation size (over half billion users at the time of writing) and anunprecedented monopoly over users’ personal data, Facebook is aforum in which multiple communities and societal roles necessarilymeet: these days, your parents, your children, your colleagues, andyour friends are all on Facebook. In such a diverse and highly popu-lated environment, constructing, tweaking, and curating one’s onlinerepresentation is of crucial importance. Facebook, however, allowsits users a very limited range of identity maneuver. By encoding pre-scriptive or formulaic alternatives within its system (gender: male orfemale; religious views: Christian, Jewish etc.; Political views: liberal,conservative, etc.), by slotting its users in preset geographical or asso-ciational networks, by enforcing the authenticity of user profiles, andby cloning everyone within the same spectrum of light blues and un-adorned walls, Facebook regulates and limits its users’ possibilities ofrepresentation. By contrast, Myspace gives its users full control overthe HTML of their profile pages and allows them to fully re-imaginetheir profiles by redesigning backgrounds, colors, images, addingmusic, video streaming, and often clunky and discordant graphics.When the two sites are juxtaposed, Facebook’s drastic restrictions onidentity construction appear rather salient . Some have rebelled against the ap-paratuses of control and regulationposited by social media sites. For exam-ple, a Fakester Manifesto was writtenby people who crafted fake identitieson the Friendster social network, “indefense of our right to exist in the formwe choose or assume", negating thepossibility of authentic or ’real’ profiles,and trying to extricate themselves fromthe webs of symbolic violence spunout on these sites. We note, however,that by fashioning aspirational profiles,the Fakesters for the most part merelyendorse pre-scripted performativeidentities which, for a lack of felicityconditions, they are unable to carry offin the real world (a sort of Second Lifefantasia). Moreover, by embracing a sortof consumer choice identity-matrix, astruggle in which only the most “inter-esting" identities survive, the Fakesterswould appear to actually reinforcethose social cages which, like Moscarda,they hope to escape.
Thus, even though the networked medium potentially enablesmyriad experiments of performative destabilization, identity gamesare limited by the techno-political boundaries designated by the ad-ministrators and owners of these social networking sites. In this light,one of the most fascinating phenomena on Facebook are its hortatory“Take a Quiz" applications which permit individuals to engage incarefully delimited role playing and identity experimentation, whilemitigating the risk that such performances would entail in the realworld (as Moscarda’s tragic fate demonstrates). The quizzes are man-ifold in subject matter, running from
Which Desperate Housewife areyou? to Which German Philosopher are you? and
If you were a famousserial killer, who would you be?
The results are always quirky, ludic andormative, and they legitimize identity experimentation at the sametime that they quell Pirandellian fears by providing authoritativescripts. Also, their exclusions become less obvious over time. If forButler, mimicry and masquerade form the essence of identity, thenFacebook offers a padded playpen in which to explore the polyglotnature of the self, while at the same time homogenizing its adher-ents by excluding the radical and the troubling . No matter how This takes on a sinister air when onedelves a little into the political andsocial stances of Facebook’s originalbackers. Tom Hodkinson in his searingarticle in The Guardian, “With FriendsLike These” ( http://gu.com/p/xx49p ),singles out Peter Thiel, Zuckerberg’soriginal underwriter, and one of Face-book’s three board members. He notes:“The real face behind Facebook is the -year-old Silicon Valley venture cap-italist and futurist philosopher PeterThiel, [...] more than just a clever andavaricious capitalist, he is a futuristphilosopher and neocon activist. Aphilosophy graduate from Stanford, in he co-wrote a book called The Di-versity Myth, which is a detailed attackon liberalism and the multiculturalistideology that dominated Stanford. Heclaimed that the "multiculture" led toa lessening of individual freedoms."Hodkinson warns that Thiel’s philoso-phy and business agendas seek to scouraway social and cultural difference andgive rise to a homogenized and fungibleglobal populace. wildly Moscarda responded to the quiz questions, he would unavoid-ably find that his personality matched up with some eccentric butpalatable German philosopher, vivacious Desperate Housewife orlaughable serial killer.More worringly perhaps, as Facebook gradually monopolizes thesocial networking world market, its identity reductionism rubricslowly fades from view. As Butler ( : ) writes, “juridical subjectsare invariably produced through certain exclusionary practices thatdo not ”show" once the juridical structure of politics has been es-tablished." In an Orwellian fashion, taxonomies that are no longeravailable become unthinkable, and users learn to desire only whatconditions make possible for them. Without the presence of alter-native social networks to differentiate from Facebook, it becomesdifficult to even imagine those possibilities that have been excluded. Conversing with Dida and Quantorzo
After the public debacle with Marco di Dio, Moscarda goes throughanother phase of self-unravelment, through which he comes to real-ize that he inhabits countless identities - as many as are the peoplethat know him or know of him. The climax of this realization comeswith the eccentric discussion between Dida and Quantorzo in whichMoscarda recognizes not only the three people conversing at the ta-ble (Dida, Quantorzo, and himself), but an additional five characterspredicated upon the reciprocal perception of their identities (Dida asshe was for Quantorzo, Dida as she was for him, etc.)Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of “habitus", or embodieddisposition (Bourdieu, ), is helpful to analyze the confrontationbetween Moscarda, Dida, and Quantorzo and its resulting discom-forts. Bourdieu posits that individuals enter and subsequently existin different fields of activity, each of which bears its own complexstructure of social relations. Depending on their position in a givensocial field (dominant or dominated, outsider or insider, etc.) theydevelop a certain habitus typical of their position: not merely an as-semblage of dispositions, opinions, taste, and aesthetic sensibility,but also certain mannerisms, gestures, and tones of voice. Since eachsocial field places requirements on its participants for membershipithin the field (certain dress, posture, and speech), actors vying formembership tend to construct their habitus according the given socialorganization of the field. In some respects, Bourdieu’s postulates areconsonant with Erving Goffman’s ideas on symbolic interactional-ism: personal identity comes into being via social interaction, andaccording to the different roles we play in different contexts.In a multi-field world, actors routinely adopt and shed habitusesdepending on their different standings in each field. Trouble anddiscomfort arise when two different fields overlap synchronically,and a particular actor is unsure what habitus to adopt. This clash ofhabituses is emblematically portrayed in Uno, Nessuno, Centomilain Moscarda’s confrontation with Dida and Quantorzo. In the midstof his identity crisis, Moscarda finds himself anxiously caught ina room with his wife, with whom he wear one habitus (“Gengè",the submissive and almost nebbish husband), and his friend andemployee Quantorzo, with whom he wears a different one (that ofVitangelo, authoritative bank owner and son of the renowned townusurer).The opportunities for a clashing of habituses - which in Moscarda’soffline world amount to a discrete if discombobulating confrontation- are manifold in the online realm. Social media sites offer open,public, and constantly accessible forums for confrontations of thiskind - imagine a respected colleague, a childhood friend, and a closerelative posting wildly incongruent comments in response to an up-date on your Facebook wall. These days, the discussion betweenMoscarda, Dida, and Quantorzo could unfold on a public onlineforum, in a private message exchange, or as a distributed gameof photo tagging and item commenting. Moreover, social networkspaces act as powerful vehicles for the display and transmission ofsocial preconceptions and assumptions similar to the ways that onepresents one’s habitus offline. Would Moscarda present the sameprofile picture of himself on LinkedIn, Myspace, and Match.com?Probably not. By corollary, his entire field of activity - the status of It is easy to argue with this view.The notion of habitus is not merelyabout socialization. A critical featureof habitus is also its embodiment.Habituses are embodied in one’s bodilygestures, mannerisms, and verbalattitude. Thus, one could argue thatembodied verbal and visual cluesare probably not transmitted onlineas well as they are offline, so thatthe emergence of online habituses issomehow limited by the narrow rangeof bodily practices attainable on thenetworked medium. However, recentresearch shows that when online venuespreserve the dynamics of interactionalcuing, embodied offline cuing systemsare transmitted and redefined online:“In creating online selves, users do notseek to transcend the most fundamentalaspects of their offline selves. Rather,users bring into being bodies, personas,and personalities framed according tothe same categories that exist in theoffline world." (Robinson, : ) his habitus within a particular online universe - would be different ineach of these sites. Not only do social networking sites offer a forumfor habitus confrontation but they also provide the structural andsocial conditions for the emergence of novel ad hoc habituses.With these notions in mind, we can then imagine that a present-time conversation between Moscarda, Dida, and Quantorzo is ani-mated by many more characters than the eight posited by Pirandelloin a purely offline world. Let us suppose, for example, that Dida hasan online profile on the social networking site Facebook and thatboth Moscarda and Quantorzo are familiar and keep up to date withit. If this were the case, by entering the conversation, Dida woulde bringing to the table not only her two offline habituses (Dida, asshe is with/for Moscarda, and Dida, as she is with/for Quantorzo),but also an additional character predicated upon her online “field ofactivity" (Dida as she is on Facebook). With the presence and avail-ability of several social networking sites, each giving the opportunityto develop ad hoc habituses, it is easy to realize that the number ofcharacters at play is potentially very large (Dida as she is on Mys-pace, Dida as she is on asmallworld, etc.). As noted by Van Kokswijk( ), this identity proliferation does not necessarily undermine theintegrity of one’s “real" identity. Rather, he contends that by havingdifferent profiles and wearing different habituses, Dida (or anyone)does not decentralize or diminish her identity; rather, she multipliesit infinitely.To add complexity to an already complex scenario, we should notforget that social networking sites allow users to customize their pri-vacy settings so that their online profiles appear differently to specificpeople. Users are able to customize every aspect of their personalprofile, e.g. restricting certain portions of their profiles to certain con-tacts and making other parts publicly available. This means that, atany time, a person’s profile might appear different to two differentprofile visitors that have been granted distinct access privileges. Thishas immediate repercussions for the clash of habituses discussedabove. Dida’s field of activity on Facebook will not result anymore ina unitary habitus (Dida as she is on Facebook), but of many differentones (Dida as she is on Facebook to Moscarda, and Dida as she is onFacebook to Quantorzo).In this rich ecology of online personae, navigating through aplethora of privacy settings and access privileges is not a trivialtask. Interestingly, to aid management of such complex and dis-tributed identity configurations, Facebook allows you to “see how afriend sees your profile", i.e., to display your profile exactly the wayit is seen by a given friend based on the selected privacy restrictions(e.g., Moscarda could “see how Dida sees his profile"). Playing withthis functionality corresponds, in many respects, to performing acustomized version of the mirror experiment discussed earlier: expe-riencing not a generic outsider gaze, but that of a specific outsider. Epilogue
The final chapters of Uno, Nessuno, Centomila narrate the com-plete breakdown and unraveling of Moscarda’s personality. Via hiscarefully crafted experiments, Moscarda manages to dismantle themultiple identities he was associated with: “no longer usurer (thatbank was done with!) and no longer Gengè (that marionette wasone with, too!)" (p. ). But the search for his veritable self doesnot turn out to be what he expected. The deconstruction of the mo-saic of personae that lived within him ultimately leaves him with avoid: “But what other did I have inside me, except this torment thatrevealed me as no one and one hundred thousand?" (p. ).The chain of unruly and tragic events that follows - with AnnaRosa shooting her foot and then nearly murdering Moscarda - is ametaphor for the latent but always potential violence that swims be-neath the glassy surface of social relations, i.e. the violence that meetsthose who seek to disrupt social conventions. The story culminateswith Moscarda surrendering to his own tragedy. He chooses to en-tirely extricate himself from his social fabric and to live contentedlyby himself in a house for the destitute. There is no real catharsis tothis tragedy. Moscarda does not find his true self and abandons anyattempt to do so: “I no longer look at myself in the mirror, and itnever even occurs to me to want to know what has happened to myface and to my whole appearance" (p. ). By completely becomingan outsider, he no longer has to pursue being an outsider to himselfin order to probe his identity. The analogy with today’s world is ob-vious: the disintegration of Moscarda and his renunciation of a sociallife is analogous to permanently logging off a social network.However, logging off, quitting, or even temporarily abandoningsocial networks is not easy. Sharing different aspects of one’s lifeon social networks has become routine for many. In many respects,social networks have become modern platforms for autobiographicalexpression. When he inaugurated the modern autobiography withhis work
Confessions , Jean-Jacques Rousseau ( ) claimed that tocommunicate one’s true identity, one must “tell all." “Such as I was,"he writes, “I have declared myself; sometimes vile and despicable, atothers, virtuous, generous and sublime; even as thou hast read myinmost soul." Rousseau’s stance can be profitably contrasted with thecircumspect revelations of identity one encounters in online socialnetworks. As discussed above, social network users endeavor only toshow “part": to slice and repackage their identities so as to manifestonly their most attractive aspects. This online cropping often reflectssimilar stratagems in the analog world: “putting on one’s best face atwork," or attentively trying to make a “good first impression."Yet, these efforts are counteracted by the thoroughly dynamic,immediate and interactive nature of social networking sites that tac-itly or often explicitly coerce their users to constantly act upon theirsocial circles: “Unlike everyday embodiment, there is no digital cor-poreality without articulation. One cannot simply ’be’ online; onemust make one’s presence visible through explicit and structuredactions." (Boyd, : ). In this vein, most Facebook users are in-essantly prompted to contact friends who they have not been intouch with lately (“Write on ***’s wall! Send her a message!"), and tobrowse through endless lists of suggested friends (“Here are somepeople you may know"). By incessantly reminding its users to sendmessages or friend requests, to write on walls, to “like" or “not like,"to “poke," to “give gifts," to choose role models via Take a Quiz and toengage in a whole other range of formulaic activities, Facebook spursusers to act upon their profiles and their online social environment.In many respects, these are the ways by which Facebook reculturesand educates its users via its very own forms of “symbolic violence",to use Bourdieu’s terminology. Thus, in the long run, despite anyuser’s most resourceful exertions, the social network machine itselfsoon begins to “tell all." The Facebook panopticon is such, with itsceaseless feeds, updates, tags, pokes, gifts, city locators, and quiz re-sults, that the flux and hydra-headed polyphony of the self leachesonto the screen with a speed and nimbleness that overwhelms anypossible human counter-stratagems.How could a modern Moscarda extricate himself from such a tan-gled and resilient social fabric? Even committing a “digital hara-kiri"- by deleting his account on every social networks he belongs to -would not guarantee his escape from the online social world: pro-files on some social networking sites (including Facebook) cannot beerased. At the most, they can be deactivated. As such, our imagineddigital Moscarda, by signing up on Facebook, unwittingly subscribedto a multimedia biography, written by hundreds of thousands ofauthors, that will outlast himself.
No conclusion
We pay homage to the work of Piran-dello by titling the concluding sectionof this article “No conclusion", as thelast section of the book. Accordingly,we offer no definite and fixed conclu-sion to our article. Rather, we wouldlike to leave this forum open for dis-cussion as we urge other scholars toembrace Pirandello’s ideas in theirwork on online identity and perfor-mance. eferences . Austin, J. L. ( ) How to do Things with Words: The William James Lecturesdelivered at Harvard University in . Oxford: Clarendon. . Bourdieu, P ( ) Outline of a Theory of Practice , Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press. . Boyd, D. and Heer, J. ( ) ’Profiles as Conversation: Networked IdentityPerformance on Friendster’ paper presented at the Hawai’i InternationalConference on System Sciences (HICSS- ), Kauai, HI. . Boyd, D. ( ) ’None of this is Real’, in J. Karaganis (ed.) Structures ofParticipation in Digital Culture , pp. - . New York: Social ScienceResearch Council. . Butler, J. ( ) Gender trouble: feminism and the subversion of identity . Rout-ledge. . Chan, S. ( ) ’Wired_Selves: From artifact to performance’ CyberPsychol-ogy and Behavior , ( ): - . . Cooley, C.H. ( ) Human Nature and the Social Order . New Brunswick,NJ:Transaction. . Ehrsson, H. ( ) ’The Experimental Induction of Out-of-Body Experi-ences’, Science , ( ): . . Goffman, E. ( ) The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life . New York:Anchor Books. . Mead, G.H. ( ) Mind, Self, and Society . Chicago, IL: University ofChicago Press. . Pearson, E. ( ) ’All the World Wide Web’s a stage: The performance ofidentity in online social networks’, First Monday , ( ). . Pirandello, L. ( ) One, No one and One Hundred Thousand (Translated byWilliam Weaver). Boston, MA: Eridanos Press, Inc. . Robinson, L. ( ) ’The Cyberself: the Self-ing Project goes Online, Sym-bolic Interaction in the Digital Age’ New Media and Society . ( ): - . . Rousseau, J. ( ) Confessions . . Sartre, J. ( ) Being and Nothingness. A Phenomenological Essay On Ontol-ogy . Gallimard. . Sontag, S. ( ) On photography , London: Penguin Books. . Van Kokswijk, J. ( ) ’Granting personality to a virtual identity’, Interna-tional Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences ( ). . Walker, J. (2007