Madison and Michelle live under the same roof but inhabit two different worlds. Though only 30 feet separates their physical bodies, their digital identities are worlds apart.
Madison, a suburban Minnesota teen, always has lived digitally. She is Skyping with her neighbor and a foreign exchange student, updating her Flickr account and checking her photo ratings. Michelle, her mother, gradually has adapted to the digital revolution. She is updating her Facebook profile while exchanging instant messages with an old high school friend on the other coast.
Mother and daughter are in the same house but aren’t connected to each other. Instead, they inhabit two distinct virtual spaces as they instantly connect with people across the country or around the world.
The barriers of time and space aren’t what they used to be, as vast distances collapse under the impact of our digital connections. As with Michelle and Madison, we move effortlessly across vast spaces, bouncing in and out of diverse worlds. Meanwhile, underneath the surface of this technological transformation, we radically are changing our very identities—or at least the way we construct an identity.
Work and Love
Identity long has been a central focus of youth ministry because the teen years are seen as the time when young people form distinct identities.
The pioneering developmental psychologist Erik Erikson argued that in Western cultures, adolescence provides a period of moratorium (a kind of societal timeout) that gives youth the time and space needed to figure out three crucial things: who they are, what they can do well and who they can love. Those who fail to emerge from adolescence with this inner sense of identity may later experience an identity crisis.
Erikson, who died in 1994, is still hotly debated. For example, he believed identity formation somehow was tied to an inner biological clock. Critics point out that Erikson was blind to the fact that his theories were imbedded in a specific, modernistic historical epoch that radically transformed traditional notions of time and space.
For most of human history, identity formation has involved assimilating the stories, traditions and wisdom of the past. To live in the now, you would need the wisdom (and maybe the spirit) of your forefathers.
Modernity breaks this backward-looking inclination and instead turns our gaze toward the future. Modernity says, “Forget the past! The past is old (and old is bad, or at least not as good as what’s new). The future is before you. Go and make a life for yourself!”
The German sociologist Zygmunt Bauman says, “The day the traditional community was upended by modernity was the day talk of identity began.” He’s right. For most of human history, there was little to no need for 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; as an individual, you 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.
Shifting Foundations in Work and Love
Identity, as Erikson 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 possibly become an accountant. If someone asked you, “Who are you?” you might say, “I’m Bill; I’m an accountant.” You identified yourself by what you did.
However, identity is more than this, because at some point in adolescence or shortly thereafter, you would be expected to find a love, get married, have three children and start volunteering for the local PTA. You were not only an accountant but also a spouse and a parent.
Having addressed these two issues of work and love, it was assumed that you had an identity, a ruling self-definition. After all, you would probably work as an accountant at the same corporation for the next four or five decades; and you would be married to your spouse for the next 50 or 60 years or longer.
At least that’s the way it was in Erikson’s day; but as Madison and Michelle have shown us, technology has changed everything, altering time and space while transforming the way we engage the world.
The traditional foundations of identity have evaporated. In particular, work and love have not held up well in our mash-up of time and space. Today it’s unlikely that anyone will stay in one career (let alone one job) for 40 years. The average American changes careers every 20 months. Few people today expect new high school graduates to know what their life work will be. Work is no longer a viable foundation on which to build an identity.
Old assumptions about love have not fared too well in our digital age. Love, expressed through a constant and continued commitment to another person, has not held up well in the frantic transitions of late modernity. With high divorce rates and later marriage, it’s unlikely that anyone will have one love throughout life, and it’s almost absurd to assume most young people will find this lifelong partner 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. As one young person said in an online post: “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.”
Love has been replaced by intimacy. Someone will say, “I still love him, but there isn’t anything there (no intimacy); we just want different things.”
As time and space have sped up, they have transformed the core building blocks of identity from work to consumption, from love to intimacy.
If there is one constant, it is that I use my body as the place to work on my many fleeting identities. The body becomes the place from where I broadcast who I am by hanging my consumptions on it and receiving intimacy through it. The Internet is not a tool that disembodies me, but a tool that allows my body to be broadcast across time and space. Michelle spends hours choosing her profile picture, and Madison’s YouTube videos show off her waistline and new jeans.
What Can Youth Workers Do?
What’s to be done with the Madisons in your group? Many youth workers preach that young people should base their identities on Christ, but just saying that is of little help. We must be able to see the Madisons we know are constantly wrestling with the question, “Who am I?” We must help them as they struggle to answer that question.
We must have something to say that is more than religious phrases. We must be able to articulate that the Jesus we serve is the Jesus who is found in yearning and questioning. There is no reason to tell them to stop searching for an identity in the blur of time and space. Rather, we must together seek God in our questions and longing.
It is the youth worker’s job to help young people form an identity, and an identity that reflects their Christian commitment is central. That commitment must be as solid as a rock; if it isn’t, then their faith isn’t either. The problem is that identity already has been liquefied, and few adolescents find it necessary to have one single self-definition. Therefore, in a real way their (often) partial self-definition as Christian is always open. They see themselves as Christians for now; but in the future, who knows?
This is not the way it was in Erikson’s day, but instead of mourning the passing of the traditional identity model, we can seize the opportunities post-modernity has brought us. The opportunity is to perceive Christian conversion not as a final destination but as a constant process of reflecting deeply on one’s identity and seeking God’s answers to our deepest questions.
There is no deeper question for this generation than, “Who am I?” That’s why it is essential for youth workers to engage young people in a continuing process of personal, constructive theological reflection about identity.
In many ways the question, “Who am I?” should be on our minds and in our hearts with every talk we give, every retreat we plan and every Bible study we lead. It’s a question that never will be fully answered, but is constantly nipping at young people’s heels. “Who am I?” can be the starting point for deep contemplation about God, self and world.
Accept no Substitutes
While consumption and intimacy may promise young people energizing experiences, they don’t provide the solid foundation needed for developing a healthy identity. Consumption and intimacy have short half-lives and demand constant motion, often hurting the process of identity formation rather than helping it.
So where do we look if we are seeking opportunities to walk with the young people we serve as they journey toward healthy identities? I believe we need to focus on suffering.
Suffering is always close to the search for identity. Youth ministry must seek for a theology that places God near those who suffer, near those who question and search for God in the questions of who they are.
Perhaps in Erickson’s day the objective of youth ministry was to provide religious foundations for one’s single self-definition. In our time, the objective of youth ministry is to accompany young people as they figure out who they are in a world where tradition is absent and time and space are blurred. God still seeks them in and through their deepest yearnings and questions.
Root is the author of many books, including the new Zondervan series, The Theological Journey Through Youth Ministry, which includes Taking Theology to Youth Ministry and Taking the Cross to Youth Ministry. He also has written The Promise of Despair (Abingdon), which addresses the themes of this article (AndrewRoot.org).
