Extended Self in a Digital Age

Abstract

In the first edition of this handbook, I observed ( Belk 2013 ) how much the digital world had changed since first I wrote about the extended self ( Belk 1987 , 1988 ). There were “no cellular phones, MP3 players, [nor] the Internet….” Today, I might add that there were no digital currencies, no livestreaming, no streaming of music and films, and no metaverse; no generative artificial intelligence (AI) for writing and drawing; no Internet of Things (IoT); no non-fungible tokens (NFTs); and no augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), or mixed reality (MR). The list and acronyms go on. The point is that as digital affordances expand, so do our possibilities for self-extension. When writing about technology it is inevitable that by the time something is in print, chances are good that it is already out of date. By the time Kelly Tian and looked at extended self in the workplace (Tian and Belk 2005 ), it was already clear that thanks especially to digital technologies consumers have multiple selves, that the work self and family self are no longer tethered to specific and distinct times and places, that we have begun to outsource portions of our memories to digital devices like computers, and that we sometimes use personal digital devices to not only connect with other people but also to carve out areas of privacy within ostensibly public spaces. Merely wearing earbuds or headphones signals that we are in another world. But a more comprehensive treatment of the extended self in a digital world is still missing. This chapter outlines some of the changing avenues for digitally enabled self-extension at the current point in time and some of the changes taking place in consumer identity management.