The article by Orsatti and Riemer strongly resonated with my experiences in a field of education that is very concerned with identity formation. Indeed, religious educators have largely shifted in their language to embrace the word formation (a word the authors use repeatedly) rather than education, in response to some of the same concerns Orsatti and Riemer name.
I was particularly taken by two aspects of the non-essentialist framework they develop, and I believe they both will resonate with my colleagues as we continue to study religious expression and formation in online spaces.
First, I am grateful for the emphasis on a narrative modality of identity-making (and elsewhere "active[] co-creat[ion]" [9] of identities). Two of the philosophers Orsatti and Riemer cite, Charles Taylor and Paul Ricoeur, are very important to contemporary religious thought. Their non-essentialist process in which individuals narrate their lives "against the canvass of the social world and ... shared stories" (6)—and along the way "selectively appropriate" the themes of shared stories for personal meaning—this is at the core of what so many of my colleagues do each week.
We convene spaces for telling the stories of the faith community (in the neighborhood as much as in history) not just to preserve those stories but to encourage members of the community to claim them as their own, to incorporate them as one among many identities shaping their daily lives.
Speaking of daily lives, I also appreciated the authors' deployment of a "practical theoretical lens" (8) to conceive an active modality of identity-making. I agree that our identities are being made not just in our conscious decisions of how we present ourselves* but by the unconscious ways we go about the practicalities of our daily lives. What we do each day—and not just when we confront some big life-changing crisis—really matters.
In religious education as in so many other fields, I believe the literature on social communication will improve when we get over the dualistic model of real selves authentically expressed or inauthentically disguised (see Table 2 in the article) and realize that identity is a much more fluid, experimental, and experiential thing. We do our thing and realize later on what it means, how it's making us who we are. I believe Orsatti and Riemer are correct in their assessment that identity is formed, and an increasingly coherent self is experienced, "in the trenches" of the active mode.
There's an old Latin expression that is important to many members of my faith tradition: lex orandi, lex credendi. Literally it means "the rule of prayer is the rule of belief," but what it's getting at is that what a person prays will shape what they come to believe. Many of us have extended this notion to the world of action. We believe that what we do—day in and day out—shapes who we become.
That more general insight seems quite consistent with how Orsatti and Riemer conceive identity. I look forward to spending more time with their multimodal framework.
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* Incidentally, the focus on self-presentation as the primary example of reflective identity-making, while understandable in light of what the literature tends to fixate on, was a little frustrating to me. Surely we have other good models. In professional development, for example, it's common to engage in "forward-looking ... goal setting" (9) as a result of reflection upon a particular blind spot or felt need. We often see identity being made online in this way, and the "strategic" nature is about much more than people wanting to be seen in a certain way.
Think of all those #whole30 posts. Do those folks want to be seen as healthy, attractive go-getters shaping their own fitness destiny? Sure. But they're also posting as a means of holding themselves accountable. In fact, I think that's primarily what they're doing, and those of us who haven't eaten a vegetable in days tend to project onto them our suspicions of their inauthenticity ("they're only showing the good parts of their lives," etc.).
As helpful as this article was to me, I definitely plan to follow Orsatti and Riemer as they follow through more broadly on their promise to investigate these phenomena in IS social media research. I think we desperately need other examples of the reflective mode at work—and especially more generous ways of interpreting this identity-making process.
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