Why Name a Website, "Shifting Identities?"

Shifting Identities is the name of my website. It was chosen for a reason. Here is why.

In 2005 I went back to school to expand my knowledge base around subjects like bullying, abuse, and aggression in schools. I had learned as much as I could from what was accessible outside of the academic world and it just didn’t cut it. I was in the business of providing professional development for educators and the requirements for folks doing that work were getting more stringent. A master’s degree wasn’t enough so I went back to school so that I could find first-line research on these topics, understand what the research meant, and translate it into practical information for educators. I ended up studying about human development with a focus on learning and aggression in youth.

My own research in the degree program centered on trying to find out how high school students and their educators understood bullying. What I ended up learning about and publishing on was “adolescent social drama.” I defined it as a series of interactions between youth or groups of youth characterized by overreaction, excessive emotionality about something trivial, inconsequential, or of inflated relevance, that sucks in bystanders, often gets prolonged, and is full of posturing and performing for the masses—enhanced, of course, by social media usage. Through stacks of focus group and interview transcripts, and quantified survey data, I concluded that adolescent social drama was often an effort to build an identity, an understanding of who a teen is or wants to be. It is a trial run with behaviors that fit or don’t fit the developing person. It is usually a learning experience, and it is part of normal human development for many youth.

Most people don’t read academic journals, so I decided that I should do what I had done for years in my work with educators—translate research findings into information understandable to the average “Joe” or “Joann.” I decided that I would write a book explaining what adolescent social drama was and offering suggestions for parents and educators on how to manage youth and their tendency to engage in “drama.”

About two-thirds through the project I hit a wall and decided to shelve the manuscript until I could clear my head. It wasn’t going anywhere. I was stuck. After a spell of teeth gnashing and brain fog I realized that the book needed to be about something quite different. I had concluded that putting kids under the microscope for doing social drama wasn’t fair when adults were behaving far worse. I needed to take a deep look at our adult behavior which had been seriously deteriorating over the recent past. The book needed to be about adult social drama… what it was, where it had come from, and what it was doing to us. I concluded that if adolescents did drama as a way to sort out their identities, then perhaps adults in our society were doing the same thing. So I called this blog “Shifting Identities,” because we are not acting like adults are supposed to act. We are wallowing in social drama, and we didn’t always behave this way, at least not as many of us as now. How we behave tells everyone who we are. Essentially, we enact or perform our identities.

My book digs deeply into bad adult behavior, how social media and screens encourage and amplify these tendencies, and the negative ways it is affecting us, our children, and our society. A blog posting is too short to get into this, but I offer some conclusions that I came to as I researched for the book.

We need to look up from our screens. We need to look at each other face-to-face, both people we know and love, and the strangers we encounter in grocery lines and waiting rooms. We need to speak to each other, not in short, sarcastic quips, but in polite turn taking. Conversation is a skill and if we don’t practice it, it gets rusty and atrophies.

Our relationships are dying because we spend too much time in our screens. Our learning is suffering. Our development as humans is suffering. We are becoming coarser, more selfish, less empathic, and dare I say it out loud, stupider.

Social media doesn’t connect us; it separates us, because it takes us away from the people who are right in front of our faces. It saps our ability to be empathic and encourages desensitization and disinhibition that results in rude, hateful, and dehumanizing behaviors online, and sadly, those behaviors have spilled into our offline lives. We are becoming angrier and meaner. We are losing the ability to see ourselves in each other. Our identity is shifting because too many adults are doing social drama ad nauseum.

The time has come for us to reflect on who we are and how critical it is for us to act like adults. Let’s have a conversation about it, and let's try to make it a civil one.