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POST Identity and equality

While I was thinking about this, I happened on an article in The New Yorker that really made me think about the importance of virtual identities, the practical impact of personae. The article concerned X Anderson, the Chair of the University of Michigan’s department of philosophy and a "champion of the view that equality and freedom are mutually dependent”. Her thinking encapsulates and enlightens some of my long-held view on the need for transactional interaction via multiple virtual identities. She says that “people now have the freedom to have crosscutting identities in different domains". What she refers to her as domains are the different contexts in which transactions occur. As she goes on to day, "At church, I’m one thing. At work, I’m something else. I’m something else at home, or with my friends".

The ability to manage these separate identities and partition their use across domains is, she argues, utterly vital. The ability "to be able to slip in and adopt whatever values and norms are appropriate while retaining one’s identities in other domains” she says, “is what it is to be free”.

xxx

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