Is there an authentic me?

For this week's reading response as part of my Digital Culture course at the Australian National University we are asked:

Is there an 'authentic' you? And if so, where? Does your online identity have anything to do with your 'real' identity, or do you make a distinction, if not, why? 

And here's my reply.

How can one know? 

Jacques Derrida.
Source: The Guardian 

I shall attempt an answer to your question(s) and mine but bear with me. There’s a risk I may be circuitous, even appear evasive, in my attempt to provide what ought to be an easy answer to a straightforward question.  Of course, there’s an authentic me, I instinctively assert (with scanter evidence than I’m entirely certain about). And yet, if I’m honest, those dead, white, 20th Century, French philosophers in Wednesday’s lecture (especially Derrida, I have to say, with his viral matrix, its two threads of disordered communication and undecidability) require me to pause, reflect, question my own assertion, hedge my bets in a way. Not quite answer.

Here’s where my problems start. 

First, there’s postmodernism. It’s not really an ‘-ism’ at all. No one really takes it seriously in the 21st Century. And yet … Second, there’s Derrida who just will not leave any thinking person alone with the comfortable, old world certainties (which I mean rhetorically or ironically) of Modernity’s Cartesian duality and the 18th Century Enlightenment, particularly (for me) the dimension one was raised to regard as its muscular, ‘ass-kicking’, let’s get the rational, empiricist show on the road variant, known as the Scottish Enlightenment (Hume, Smith, Carlyle, Watt to name but a few). And third, there is the slippery but essential method / tool / process / technique / concept (I’m never quite sure what signifier to use, which is the kind of postmodern, Derridan circularity that makes one scream at times) of deconstruction. Those threads leave an ageing Marxist floundering at times. The result is I respond to your question(s) not with answers but more questions. They may circle what looks like answer.

#1, What do we mean by authentic?

Source: The New Inquiry

Rob Horning thinks he knows. He writes (in his article 'Google Alert for the Soul') that we can no longer think of authenticity as,

fidelity to an inner truth about the self but fidelity to the self posited by the synthesis of data captured in social media - what I here call the data self. This sort of decentered authenticity posits a self entirely enmeshed in algorithmic controls, but it may also be the first step toward post-authenticity, 

I’m not so sure. So I start by turning to a dictionary to consider the different, perhaps overlapping or contradictory, readings of the signifier “authentic”. Thus:

1) “of undisputed origin or authorship; genuine”

• I possess a 59-year old document that confirms Douglas Dougan Herd was born at 4:40 p.m. on the date of his birth at 1301 Govan Road, Glasgow.
• On its reverse is written in fading ink that this Douglas Dougan Herd was “Baptised in the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost” on 19th May 1957.
• I also have a certificate of Australian citizenship dated 16th November 2006.
• All genuine with verifiable authorship and of undisputed origin. Am I authentically Australian or Scottish? Can I be both simultaneously? 
• I know I have no religious Faith of any sort but I was Baptised in a Christian church and raised through my formative years in the same traditions of Scottish Presbyterianism that drove the 18th Century Enlightenment. Baptised? Baptism no longer in operation? Didn’t he mention Marxist earlier? Who is this Douglas Dougan Herd? Does he know? Do we believe him?

2) “accurate in representation of the facts; trustworthy; reliable.”

• How authentic can one’s identity be if an accurate representation of the facts suggests this Douglas Dougan Herd may not be trustworthy or reliable. For example, is this definition of authentic reconciled or destabilised by even a few facts (selected from a longer list from life)?
• Twice divorced: accurate but ... trustworthy, reliable?
• Arrested at the age of 17 by two Scottish police officers, jailed for a night, appeared in a Scottish court to answer charges of drunkenness and breach of the peace. Accurate, trustworthy and reliable. 
• (I was found to be not guilty. Does that mean 2 authentic police officers lied? Yes. Most 17-year olds plead guilty, cop the fine and move on ‘cos, you know, who is a judge going to believe?)
• Arrested, age 22, after being chased by six Scottish police officers, jailed for a night, fined £50 for breach of peace & disorderly conduct. 
• (Organiser of student civil disobedience action against Apartheid rugby team tour. Pitch ‘invasion’.)
• Subject of an MI5 counter-intelligence file along with many other political activists of the 1980s. 
• (You would think MI5 had more important people to keep files on but apparently not.)

#2, Does your online identity have anything to do with your 'real' identity, or do you make a distinction, if not, why?

Douglas Rushkoff's polemic
Source: Wired

The first part of the question suggests a false dichotomy that cannot be sustained and is not helpful in the digital age. In as much as any person’s identity can be said to be real it must, in the contemporary world, encompass an online dimension as well as others that are no less constructed (see final part below).  This is one of the (several) areas in which I take issue with Douglas Rushkoff’s essay ‘Digiphrenia’, not least his rather disingenuous assertion that “people are still analog”. 

Well, yes but also no Mr. Rushkoff. Here’s how I think I know.

• Paraphrasing William Shakespeare’s Shylock, ‘If you do prick me, do I not bleed’ (real, analogue Dougie)
• Access Internet Banking (real, digital Dougie)
• Buy online (book purchases, flights to Scotland, etc.) real, digital transactions to facilitate, expand and enrich the experience of real, analogue Dougie.
• Post to social media daily (more or less) real, analogue Dougie’s construction of real, digital Dougie’s online presence, e.g.
• Tweet on issues of political engagement (disability advocacy, anti-Trump, etc)
• Facebook posts ranging from anti-Trump memes, disability advocacy, photos of tomatoes in the garden or our cat, Prince videos for obvious reasons. (digital traces and signs of the real analogue Dougie, his online networks and personal biases and preferences)
• Blog, essentially a private journal because no one else reads it.

I contend that all of the above and more are constituent parts of the currently authentic me. But that idea of me is not the same as the idea of me twenty years ago and it won’t be me in ten years’ time (if I live that long).  As Irving Howe observed over 20 years ago,

Let us say that the self is a construct of mind, an hypothesis of being, socially formed even as it can be quickly turned against the very social formations that have brought it into birth 

Or almost. I think we construct, deconstruct and reconstruct our self continuously; in real time, in relationships with real people as well as online in networks, communities and virtual worlds. It’s called life. Sometimes it’s messy and hard to pin down. That’s not a bad thing.