“Identity is complicated everybody thinks they’ve got one" How far do you agree with this statement

“Identity is complicated everybody thinks they’ve got one” – David Gaunlett. David focuses on the fact that identity today is never constructed but rather formed into a collective identity depending on his/her influences therefore determines whom they are and how we should therefore view them or even categorize them among other so called individuals with similar identity. He goes on further to mention that “A focus on identity requires us to pay closer attention to the way in which the media and technologies are used in everyday and their consequences for social groups”, Hence what David is trying to say that an identity can be complicated due to the fact that the media and the technology around help us to form a collective identity for social youths today depending on their lifestyle, interest, way of clothing etc. This therefore forms stereotypes in a postmodernist view, that we simply make a social order for specific identities; hence identity today can be complicated!

However the theorist Merleau Ponty brings out a slightly different opinion in which a collective identity can actually be formed, he goes on to state “we have an embodied experience and anything in which we use our bodies to create new things builds our identity”. Do we allow our embodied experience or interest shape our identity today? Well through today’s mass media many do, through the use of social websites such as twitter and facebook. Merleau states “when we use our bodies to create things” this suggest that when we make a facebook profile, and then begin to socialise with other and then put perhaps our favourite music online or movie etc, we have begun to build our identity. However let us remember that once we have created either a facebook or twitter page we have thus joined an online community and within this online community we have thus allowed people of the same interest or even the same dislikes to associate themselves with us, the ‘individual’ , thus forming a group and primarily a collective identity.

Collective identity can be seen as stereotyping an individual and placing them in a group, ‘An individual sense of belonging to a group’. Though we have to know that due to the advancement in technology and the in actual influence in the media it has therefore allowed the public to form these groups without necessarily realizing. Lets take a look at one case study for example, the UK riots. From when the riots had begun and when it had come to an end the media, had created a moral panic – Moral panic is in fact the intensity of feeling expressed in a population of an issue that appears to threaten a social order. In these instances the media saw this has an opportunity to class together youths and technology to be the cause of a violent outtake on society, and that the majority of youths had similar interest into the reason why they were indeed in fact involved in these riots, due to EMA being cut off etc.

This had therefore allowed the public to form a collective identity of all youths, as being careless, lawless individuals whom have or share the same interest in one way or another, either through race, clothing or even the way they speak.

Although the theorist Foucault believes that “we are born with a basic identity but we develop our collective identity when with others.” He has therefore given us the sense that we mediate our identity with which we are with, therefore our language, mannerism all change depending on whom we finding ourselves to associate with. This is of course true as in society youths do mediate their identity depending on whom they are with, this in retrospective then limits the idea of actually constructing an identity as those whom we are with will no doubt act the same, then therefore forming a stereotype group.

Hence the statement “Identity is complicated everybody thinks they’ve got one” is true, because no matter what we will always be engulfed by those with similar interest and in affect form a collective identity.