The German sociologist Zygmunt Bauman says, "The day the traditional community was upended by modernity was the day talk of identity began." For most of human history, there was little to no conversation about identity. You were given a closed answer to the question, Who am I? Your community, tribe or village answered this question for you, and you as an individual had little to no power to change the answer. There was very little individual self-reflection such as journals and love letters. Few people had the time or freedom to think about who they were; their given definition was enough. Once modernity opens up the future, things change. It becomes up to you to figure out who you are.

Who Am I?

Identity, as we said, is formed around work and love. After figuring out what one does well, an individual pursues training and becomes a doer of that function. For example, if in adolescence you figured out you were good at math, you would study math and then become an accountant. If someone asked you, "Who are you?" you might say, "I'm Bill; I'm an accountant." You knew yourself by what you did.

However, identity is more than this; because at some point in adolescence, or shortly thereafter, you would find a love, get married, have three children and start volunteering at the PTA. You not only were an accountant but also a spouse. With these two answers to who you are (what you do and who you love) it was imagined that you had an identity, that you had a single self-definition. After all, you probably would be an accountant at the same corporation for the next four or five decades; and you would be married to this person for the next 50 or 60 years.

As technology has sped up time and space in advancing modernity, as time and space can be manipulated by Michelle and Madison, the foundations of identity have melted. Work and love have not held up well in the blur of time and space. It is very unlikely that anyone stays in one career (let alone one job) for 40 years. Americans change careers on average of every 20 months. It rarely is assumed that high school is the time young people find their life's work. Work is no longer a viable foundation on which to build an identity, but of course love isn't either.

Love, as a constant and continued commitment, has not held up well in the frantic transitions of late modernity. With high divorce rates and later marriage, it's very unlikely that anyone will have one love for the rest of his or her life and almost absurd to assume that most young people will find this person in high school. Identity becomes liquefied when work and love melt in the speed of our digital age.

In place of work and love, new elements of identity have come to the fore, elements made powerful by the radical transformation of time and space. Work has been transformed into consumption. What matters for my identity is not what I do, but what I can buy and what the things I buy say about who I am. I need the constant information of the Internet not only to inform me about what to buy but also to tell me what the things I buy mean and how others are perceiving them (commenting online).