by: Saso Ordanoski
[dropcap font=”arial” fontsize=”45″]T[/dropcap]oday’s generations are increasingly adopting two types of identities. One is the real identity, with which they recognize themselves, and it is quite fragmented, in their everyday life when they are socially awake, and in direct contact. However, they also live in a virtual identity, at the same time. That virtual identity becomes even more important for them, the one they foster for themselves and start to believe in, even more than in the real identities. It is all about how they look like on Facebook, Instagram, what they tweet, what their favorite Facebook pages are, what they post about themselves, for others to consider them as such, as they wish to be.
It is difficult to talk, in the old way, about what collective and personal identities mean and how they are formed nowadays. The old definitions that implied a much more static situation in the forming of these identities are obsolete. There is a new way in which these, ever more dynamic, categories are formed and developed; their mutual influence is exceptionally great, but also independent of some national stereotypes, regardless of some national frameworks in which attempts are made for developing some identities.
The definitions that the sovereignty of states, the established and only unique state systems, such as the ones on education and culture, can have an influence on the community and on the formation of common identities, thus the individual identities, are quite outdated concepts these days. Today’s modern human is exposed to countless fragmentations of smaller and larger issues that are connected not only to people’s life on a certain territory, and in a certain community, but they are in a permanent contact with practically limitless community that they communicate with daily, from where the modern human draws information on daily basis. This communication does not end on what is defined as someone’s language, as one’s official religion, as some official history from which someone originates, or the set of traditions from where one’s value system originate, determinations, basic presumptions in the building of characters…
Today’s generations are increasingly adopting two types of identities. One is the real identity, with which they recognize themselves, and it is quite fragmented, in their everyday life when they are socially awake, and in direct contact. However, they also live in a virtual identity, at the same time. That virtual identity becomes even more important for them, the one they foster for themselves and start to believe in, even more than in the real identities. It is all about how they look like on Facebook, Instagram, what they tweet, what their favorite Facebook pages are, what they post about themselves, for others to consider them as such, as they wish to be.
The topic about modern identities, about acquiring, about their loss…, is increasingly surpassing the debates about what a state as an organized system can offer, in the sense of some formal education, because today, the forming of identities depends less on the formal education, and more on the quality, diversity, the communicativeness of that education, in order to make people part of the world, and not just part of the national community to which they belong. At the same time, the influences that are informal and that cannot be controlled by some official systematic control, are very large and are practically out of the control of an official system. And they have an influence on the possibility in this globalized culture, in the infinite possibility to be able to communicate with the world. You cannot control the urges of building someone’s identity.
The boundaries of privacy have also shifted, and privacy is an area in which a person is preoccupied with one’s own identity, with the identity of the children, family, etc. In that invasion of privacy, it’s not only the states that enter with their attempts to take up more space, to squeeze the space that should be considered as privacy, but also the readiness of people and individuals, to offer as much as possible information about themselves, sometimes unaware of the boundaries of what should be only their privacy…
Thus, there is sharing of contents that have always been considered as something that is someone’s private life. Today, something that gets life on its own, is thrown on some public scene, and which later returns to the individual characteristics of one’s identity, in a way in which it cannot be controlled. In other words, to talk about losing and acquiring identity in these modern times, is to actually talk about an increasingly better education of people, which includes involvement in what is understood as a globalized world, to talk about awareness of where the limits of privacy are in what can and cannot be used and abused in that area. To be aware that there are no longer physical, geographical limitations, the small cultures such as the Macedonian culture and other cultures that exist here, such as the Albanian cultural model, are cultures that are exposed to such great influences that you cannot defend their identity components in a traditional way anymore. Today, practically, if someone does not speak English, it’s no use if he knows Macedonian perfectly, because his placement in modern times increasingly depends on the possibility of communicating with the world that does not end in Tabanovce [border crossing], but extends on the entire globe.
Today’s identities are identities of confusion, identities that are frequently in a state of crisis management, in an everyday challenge to take on disputes that are not conducted on a controlling, necessary national-ethnic base, but are conducted in the sense – are you capable or not, to enter higher tertiary structures in the life of both the individuals and the community, and that means, to be sufficiently equipped with all the qualities for communicating with the entire world… In that sense, the state has its own role, because still, it is an organized system in society that controls certain flows that are important for the forming of the identities. Primarily, what I mean is that the formal structures of education, the contents that are studied there, the treatment of the family, search for a better status, social conditions in which families develop, but also the social community, which not only in its political, but also social dimensions, has an influence on the forming and changing of one’s identity. Hence, the state has those opportunities, because it has resources that can influence all that, but to a certain extent only, because even the formal interventions of the state systems are no longer in a situation, nor have the possibility, to determine the dynamics of the development of identities…
It is a fact that the new generations are already in a situation when they have a considerable need to overcome their ethnic, national, religious identities. A certain kickback is that, nevertheless, even in such openness of the world’s global culture, people enter with prejudices, with stereotypes and with a certain search for confirmation of what they already have as a stereotype themselves, despite the fact that the information offered globally is so great that it is practically endless. Still, they enter into more narrow demands of what will confirm their character, their identity, their scope of values, their prejudices, which they carry. Despite the limitless possibilities to choose, they are often inclined to become static, to become conservative in their choices, even to radicalize, especially in the political sense… This, of course, comes back with an increased level of insecurity, fear for both the individuals and the communities, which leads to a contraction in the political sense, which makes them ever more conservative in the levels of tolerance towards others, in the levels of accepting others’ experiences…
This competition that is currently taking place between the pressure of a globalized cultural scene, globalized political-social scene and the need for some kind of personal identity’s security, leads to a high dose of friction within the individuals themselves. These dozes of frictions reflect with a series of, not only social, but also other types of pathologies, mental, personal…There is an increasing prevalence of depression and phobias, which are the result of certain social circumstances in which we live in, which on the other hand, contributes to a social contraction in which, instead of offering and using the best we carry in us, we frequently are inclined to what is an unproductive way of looking at the reality of our own perspectives, of the perspectives of the community…
Hence, building, preserving, changing of modernity is something that opposes the traditional way; of how once the identity characterizes and processes of formation were defined, that this type of conflict dynamics are increasingly depending on factors that are out of the control of the formal structures of the society and of the state.
We are facing a great influx of influences for which, in order to be able to process them in a constructive way, it is necessary, as early as at the beginning of one’s adolescence and post adolescence years, to have personalities who will be able – because of their education, because of their social statuses and the roles they have in society – to be stable and to be resistant to the distortion and to any social – malignant destructive directions. It is a difficult challenge for any modern society, we see that individuals, personalities in much larger cultural, state communities than Macedonia, are going through huge challenges. However, I think that, at the end, there is no other choice, no other way, but to create generations that will be resistant, to oppose the challenges they will be faced with in the short and medium-term perspective.
In this sense, in order to be politically up to date, when I look at today’s arguments about how the changing of the Macedonian constitution, or about how the consequences of the Prespa Agreement will eventually influence the identity issues of the Macedonians, I have to say that an irony prevails within me. Modern identities, regardless of how they are defined in constitutions, which are the main documents of some official cultural, state-social communities, have an influence on how identities actually develop in reality. Based on what will be written in the Constitution and whether the Macedonian language will be protected with some constitutional assumptions, such as, whether the license plates of the automobiles will have this or that mark, and whether certain codes will encode your existence, the reality that is as dynamic as I am describing it, certainly has less importance than – whether we will succeed to make a good education system! Whether we will succeed to treat culture as a process, and not just as a product that will be treated only at festivals! Whether we will succeed to make sufficiently creative and capable and well-educated young generations, which will be able to cross the Macedonian border and succeed in the world, so that they can come back here as such, with new experiences they will acquire. This means that after three-four days from the adoption of certain constitutional changes, it will be a forgotten content. What will be important is whether the reforms in society will succeed, with which we will create citizens who will be able to respond to the modern offers and demands of the world, since we are part of the world. We are not living in our own, some kind of national-claustrophobic boundaries, in which we argue about some trivial topics from history, about the figures from it, turned backwards, instead of forward…
In other words, it is necessary to enter that matter boldly, because the perspective does not imply to like something and to stop and statically treat that something, but you have to be prepared for everything that means a dynamic international structure in which you develop competition with everyone else, with your own and others’ identities.
The article is part of the project “Identity Loss or …?” implemented by CIVIL in cooperation with the Heirich Böll Foundation.
