The First Look

So with Identity being such a broad subject I started off with the basics - Just googling Identity and seeing what came up. Definitions, a movie called identity, teaching templates and workbooks etc. A really wide range! Wikipedia took me to ‘social sciences’ and gave me a few options - cultural identity, identity politics, national identity and racial and ethnocultural identity.

Cultural identity really interests me. It’s basically a collection of your life and experiences along with the people you look up to, relate to & the people you are friends with or who in your life (e.g work colleagues, hobby groups etc).

“Cultural identity is the identity of belonging to a group. It is part of a person's self-conception and self-perception and is related to nationality, ethnicity, religion, social class, generation, locality or any kind of social group that has its own distinct culture. In this way, cultural identity is both characteristic of the individual but also of the culturally identical group of members sharing the same cultural identity or upbringing.” - I found this paragraph interesting because it basically is saying people fall into certain categories whether they like it or not. “These cultural identifiers may be the result of various conditions including: location, gender, race, history, nationality, language, sexuality, religious beliefs, ethnicity, aesthetics, and even food”. It is also believed that language and where you live (not necessarily where you were born) plays a part in it. At the bottom of the article it begins to talk about the role of the internet and the internet is beginning to shape our identities along with what is mentioned above.

It begins with talking about virtual culture & youth culture. I’m 22, so I fall on the older side of Generation Z but you can definitely see the difference on how we all navigate and use the internet compared to how our parents do. I have multiple social media accounts - facebook, instagram, twitter, tiktok, twitch, pinterest, youtube etc. whereas my older family tend to just use facebook or occasionally instagram or youtube. There is a weird kind of duality for my generation as we blend our virtual and real life worlds. We’ve grown up where information is at our fingertips, our friends are a simple message away or we meet them on the internet, we can post our thoughts, we can make whole online personas if we don’t feel like being ourselves, learn new languages, arts, culture & entertainment through the internet. In short, it’s become an extension of ourselves. We can talk through our concerns and thoughts, reach out for help when we need it, make content that available to everyone at any point, and watch other people's lives and content.

Unfortunately all this does come with a downside. Some people become a little too dependent on likes and shares, feeling that unless they hit a certain amount the content was a ‘flop’ or not good enough, in turn giving them a low self esteem. It also feeds into influencer culture - people selling lives and products they don’t even use to people who look up to them. There’s a big problem with skinny, white influencers who use plastic surgery or other means to get them how they look, and they sell ‘detox’ tea on their platforms so that these people can ‘look’ like them when they’re basically laxatives and there’s no evidence that ‘detox’ you. Cancel Culture, the obvious racism in a lot of the newer industries, impressionable teenagers all feed into this darker side of things.

“Youth ask themselves about what they think of themselves, how they see themselves personally and, especially, how others see them. On the basis of these questions, youth make decisions which, through a long process of trial and error, shape their identity. This experimentation is also a form through which they can think about their insertion, membership and sociability in the ‘real’ world.”

An idea I do want to explore in this project is about collective identity. One theory is that pre existing social structures and conditions shape who someone is, while also making a new society when they interact with others.

There is also a theory that people gain a positive self esteem, a sense of community and belonging from the groups they identify with. This in turn becomes part of someone's individual identity.

I think I’d like to explore what groups people feel they fit into, and to see who and what groups I have available to explore. I also might explore where people fit into the cultural identities mentioned above as everyone fits into it, one way or another.