The enactment of personal identity

The issue of personal identity and its management is a major problematic area for action, communication and representation within the information society. Surprisingly, whereas theorisation of personal identity as an individual and social construct is well-established, theorisation of identity as a technological construct is less well-formulated. This means that whereas technological developments in the area of so-called personal identity management move forward at pace, much of this research and development lacks firm theoretical underpinnings. This paper builds upon previous work and attempts a tentative theorisation of the issue of personal identity in terms of a framework we refer to as the enactment of significance. We argue that this conception better enables us to understand more clearly the way in which personal identity is enacted through the complex entanglement of action, communication and representation and the bearing such entanglement has on contemporary considerations of information, systems and technology.