A fundamentally American idea, born of the Modernist movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, is that the self can contain more than one different identity. The idea was picked up in literature most notably by Walt Whitman, who wrote in "Song of Myself":

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

Scandalous! thought the reading public. A coherent sense of self that incorporates and accepts contradictions? How can it be?

A century or so later, this idea has been so widely accepted in America that we no longer even really question its truth or validity. Of course we take on different identities depending on context. And of course our goal is to integrate these identities into one fundamental and complete sense of who we are.

I'll use myself as an example. When I started working for ProjectNML, I struggled to figure out what it meant to work within an economy of ideas--a highly academic, highly intellectual environment. I was trying to get, as Pierre Bourdieu puts it, a "feel for the game." This was a new identity, one with which I was unfamiliar. As I learned the rules and got a feel for this game, my sense of who I was shifted to include this new identity: "Curriculum Specialist with Project New Media Literacies."

But this idea that there is, deep down, a "true self" that is shaped by identity play--that's a social construct, and one that contemporary thinkers have questioned again and again. We can think of "self" as heavily, heavily situated--the "Jenna McWilliams" who writes and talks about identity play in her role as NML's Curriculum Specialist is not the same as the "Jenna McWilliams" who always shows up to meetings 10 minutes early, carrying a yellow legal pad and a blue pen. There's the "Jenna McWilliams" who is known to her family as the firstborn of a set of identical twins. There's the "Jenna McWilliams" who is viciously cutthroat when playing Scrabulous on Facebook. And then there's the "Jenna McWilliams" who will take almost any opportunity, in almost any social setting, to tell the joke that starts out, "A guy walks into a talent agent's office and says, 'Have I got an act for you!'" And so on and so on and so on.

I like to think that all of these different identities come together to make the "me" that walks the sidewalks and streets of Cambridge, Mass. But the fact is that none of these identities are closer to or farther away from the "true" me--I'm no more the person who likes blue humor than I am the person on Facebook or the person who blogs about identity. It's all housed, it's true, inside the shell that other people recognize as Jenna McWilliams, but calling myself a single, integrated whole is only arbitrary and useful--not necessarily accurate. (In fact, if I want to go all cross-eyed, I can think about the identity of "Jenna McWilliams" who thinks of herself as a coherent whole, who contains the multitudes to which Whitman refers.)

One of the perils of identity play articulated by the GoodPlay Project is the risk of a fragmented sense of self. When adolescents take on a wide range of widely varying identities, the danger is that they may not have the opportunity to learn who they "really" are. But this peril also seems to hold a great deal of promise, as GoodPlay also highlights. By trying out contradictory identities in a variety of low stakes environments, adolescents learn a flexibility and adaptability about how they define themselves. They learn how to figure out the unspoken rules of what Jim Gee has labeled "affinity spaces"--sites, physical or virtual, where conduct is contextual, governed by tacit norms, and learned through immersion in these environments. If guided well, these kids may grow up to be flexible, adaptable adults whose sense of self is less coherent than that of any previous generation--but who may use this fragmentation to adapt to an unfixed, constantly shifting set of sociocultural norms.