Potato Chipping

Carrying Your Culture

Last night, with eyes sagging and sinuses hanging out of my nose, I nevertheless spent hours customizing a new iPhone.

Tools like that fascinate me, and not just because I can play Katamari on them. It’s clear that our society’s most beloved toys are progressing toward holding more and more data, as quickly as hardware capacity and organizational software will allow. The course of this progression reveals much about how we define ourselves as social beings.

We would expect personal data and modes of interpersonal communication to figure prominently in these devices. What surprises me is how much of what we consider personal data is actually our cultural consumptive preferences. Besides demographics, nearly every social network profile asks for your favorite books, music, TV shows, movies. Computers, the iPod/iPhone, TiVo (“It’s your life, simplified!”), Amazon Kindle: all of these devices are valued for their ability to store our cultural products.

To put cultural consumption on par with other identifying features, like demographic traits or social roles or friends and family, is pretty ambitious. Clearly, many of us see something significant in the cultural products we choose to consume. We announce these choices (or lie about them) in social network profiles, our public face to the digital world, and relentlessly snatch up any device that stores these choices in greater quantities with greater efficiency. We use them to create a cultural constellation that broadcasts a requisite conformity coupled with a minimal and nonthreatening amount of individuality, a harmonious image of “me” through products that are functionally complementary yet symbolically similar.

And these taste preferences, in turn, illuminate the demographic traits and social roles also revealed in our profiles, and which are usually the first things that most people learn about us. Many of those traits and roles are ascribed or privy to inaccurate or demeaning stereotypes, but we can counter them by presenting our cultural constellation to demonstrate our complexity. Conversely, if we’re proud of one or more of our traits or roles, we can reinforce them by presenting cultural products resonant with those characteristics.

These cultural choices are not “us” per se, but they are the most conspicuous things that are “ours.” Unlike other information contained in profiles, we have complete control over them at all times. They are the subjective elements that interact with the objective traits and roles to create a more accurate (or inaccurate) picture of “us” to others. We prize these preferences because even if they are not as revelatory as something more central to our identity–such as our deepest fears or dreams–the juxtaposition of just a few of them generates a diverse, easily understood metaphor for the norms and values most important to us. Thanks to the ubiquity of data storage and the social network template, the makeup of our cultural consumption is a simple language with considerable flexibility that we all speak.

It’ll be interesting to see what kind of identity gadgets are created in the near future. Moore’s Law will keep chugging for at least another 10-20 years, and the software to manage all of that hardware will surely follow, so the connectivity of a Facebook or cell phone will continue to converge with the storage of a TiVo or Kindle. With a few more orders of magnitude, we’ll be able to carry our entire library of cultural consumption in our pockets (whether the RIAA likes it or not). I wonder how simplified we’ll feel our lives are then?

[Edit: From a discussion about generational identities on Grant McCracken's blog: "For my peer group, identity is constructed around personal taste (art+music+film/use of recreational time), professional (or non-professional) employment, kinds of education, and what each of us wants to accomplish in our short time here. "

Original post here and discussion here.]

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