Cats and Dogs: Electronic Identity and the Animal Other

Abstract

Cats and Dogs: Electronic Identity and the Animal-Other "On the Internet nobody knows you're a dog" says one dog to another in Peter Steiner's now well known cartoon from The New Yorker, 5th July 1993. This cartoon is the most reproduced New Yorker cartoon ever and also the most popular graphic representation of the impact of the Internet on identity and subjectivity. Unfortunately for dogs it seems that their identity is no longer protected by the supposed anonymity of the Internet. In 2007 one British pedigree poodle named Blue, found this out the hard way when his identity, including his name, age, pedigree history were stolen by somebody trying to sell inferior puppies for a higher price. These two events represent two very different eras in the short history of the Internet, and two very different perceptions of identity as it relates to the Internet. In the early nineties the Internet was perceived as an alternative "virtual" space that had very little to do with offline "real" life in terms of both the events that occurred there and the identities that inhabited it. Today the opposite is true as the boundaries between real and virtual space no longer exist and online threats such as identity theft have very real implications offline. In Steiner's cartoon the dog presents as the antithesis of being human to imply that on the Internet, there is no guarantee that you are communicating with who you think you are communicating with so therefore you could theoretically be communicating with anybody or anything. In "The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow)" Jacques Derrida (2007, p. 380) describes the construction of this antithesis as "the wholly other, more other than any other that they call an animal." Derrida's discussion in this essay, of the experience of appearing naked in front of a cat and the shame derived from seeing one's self be seen through the eyes of the cat (the wholly other) explains human subjectivity as a differential construction based an interplay of perceived responses and the perceived perception of responses. Online identities are often formed in the same way, in that they are almost solely the product of this same interplay. While online identity today may not be the complete disembodiment apparent in Steiner's cartoon, the construction of the animal-other may yet, through Derrida, be a useful trope in gaining some understanding of the complexity of human identity and subjectivity in a networked world.