What is identity?

Identity is an essential part of communication studies. Why? Because everything we investigate in this discipline relates to us, to you, to our selves. As we saw in the previous chapter, we can represent and be represented by others; similarly, we have our own identities but we can also be identified by others. When we communicate, we often engage in a practice of shaping meaning about ourselves; we also, always, communicate from our own position, our standpoint, within social worlds.

In academia, we talk about our own positionality and how it informs our research – we ask, how does my identity inform the way I design research projects, the types of research questions I ask, the types of methods I use and the findings I uncover? Rather than try to erase our identities or remove them from our work as researchers, we develop awareness of where we are coming from when we approach a particular idea, theory, or research problem.

Meanwhile, industry is looking for people who can think critically and reflexively about their own identities and their own media practices. Why? Because people with these skills can lead innovation and help communicators reach new audiences.

Identities matter, and identities are communicated. Your identity will also shape and inform your audience practices and your reception of media messages, from your favourite character in the latest Netflix drama to your interpretation of an ad campaign to who you follow on social media (and how, or whether, you use social media in the first place).

Your identity might encompass your habits as a viewer or listener, as well as what you pay attention to and how you design the media mix of your own engagement with culture and knowledge. As we’ll see in the sections ahead, your identity may involve fan practices – you may be a fan of a person, a story, or a brand. Fandom is not just a feeling, it’s a form of expression, often defined by active and creative responses to texts. Often, too, fandom is a collective as well as an individual identity: it involves membership of a community, a relationship not just with a cultural object but with other fans.

In other words, communication, media, and popular culture play a role in the formation of our identities. The choices we make about what to pay attention to and how we make and use “meaning” are a crucial part of this process. At the same time, we use media tools to communicate, curate, and transform aspects of our identities – often in very public-facing ways.

So what is “identity”?

There are different ways of responding to that question, and different theoretical lenses we can apply when we do so.

We may think of identity in terms of our authentic sense of self. When defining authenticity, the philosopher Charles Taylor referred to our unique “way of being human” (1992: 15). We might think of identity in these terms – our unique way of being ourselves; our inner sense of who we are.

Your identity may refer to the core components or “ingredients” of who you are. Academic and author Maha Bali used this food-related metaphor when she shared the image below in a blog post titled “ingredients of me”.

Image by Maha Bali, CC BY-NC 4.0, https://blog.mahabali.me/just-for-fun/ingredients-of-me/

Your identity is indeed made up of key components, or “ingredients”, such as your age, your gender, your race and ethnicity, your religious affiliation, your political beliefs and alignments, your occupation, your interests, and your cultural tastes. These demographic factors would be of interest to communicators who are trying to “identify” and reach you as part of a target audience. But these different aspects or components of your identity also intersect. Later in this chapter you’ll hear more about intersectionality, a term that refers to the way overlapping aspects of identity can contribute to marginalisation and even persecution. So your identity also relates to how you are treated within society and how you fit within interlocking systems of power.

Identity is a construction – we learn about and build our identities through interactions with other people, with institutions and cultural groups, and with media and popular culture. And identity is a performance – your identity may change (or be performed differently) depending on who you are with.

In a book called The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, published in 1956, the American sociologist Erving Goffman used the analogy of a theatre stage to describe the performance of identity in face-to-face communication. His thoughts on the “back stage” and “front stage” regions of identity expression have become frequently cited, including in studies of digital and virtual lives. Goffman argued that when we are socially interacting with someone, or when we know someone is watching, we occupy the “front stage” region and engage in front stage behaviour; when we prepare for these interactions, or when we are privately just being ourselves, we are “back stage”. From this perspective, we are the roles we play – our front and back stage performances constitute our selves.

In this chapter, we’ll consider how identity relates to communication. We’ll take these different ways of looking at identity and apply them as we explore branding, digital identities, and a range of student-led case studies.