Terence Blacker: Identity is a matter of choice, not birth

As anyone who has been "phished" will know, it can be a disconcerting experience. My encounter with phishers - fraudsters who specialise in identity theft - led to a brief career on-line as the frontman in a viagra scam, made all the more the complicated by the fact that I had no idea what was going on. I switched on my computer one day to discover that I had hundreds of emails from people who had not been pleased to receive an advertisement sent from my address. Some were bemused - "But I'm a woman!" said one of my correspondents - but most were simply annoyed.

These events happened at a time when I was an innocent cyber-hick. I had no idea that nasty people pretend to be your internet server, anxious to tighten up your security rating, and then use the details you have given them. Hundreds of thousands of viagra ads had been sent from my address for reasons I had difficulty in establishing.

During the difficult few days while I tried to convince the server that I was not part on the international sex trade, I began to understand some of the concerns about identity. It was not just a few key numbers that had been hijacked; my character and reputation was involved. The more I protested my innocence, the sleazier I felt. In the end, before my in-box was cleaned and re-opened, I was warned that, should anything similar happen in the future, I would be banned from holding an account.

It is presumably the prevention of this kind of identity theft that is one of the reasons why the government is so keen for us all to have ID cards. If a central state computer has on record the key numbers and biometric details of your identity, it is thought (perhaps rather oddly) that you will rest more easily in your bed. In words much favoured by ministers and policemen with an affection for control-freak authoritarianism, those who have nothing to hide will have nothing to fear.

It is a revealing phrase, "identity theft". It suggests that our essential selves can be captured on card, stored or stolen. The more complicated truth is that, as fast as the government tries to reduce its citizens to ciphers on a computer, the more we resist by blurring the idea of identity itself.

The person behind this column, for example, is not the one presented to you in words. Most people who write are involved in a self-fictionalising process, sharpening up the profile, brightening the colours, generally trying to tidy up and improve on the greyer reality behind it. Such is the public hunger for contemporary myth that authors have become bolder in the games that they have played with identity.

As recent events in America have shown, identity can be bent and distorted out of all recognition when a writer is desperate enough. Literary frauds like James Frey, whose memoir A Million Little Pieces was found to be largely fictional, or JT Roy, the rent-boy drug addict who turned out to be a middle-aged woman, get away with their scams largely because the media and readers are bored with the normal. They want the weird to be true. Freakish identity, memoirs of tragedy and redemption, is what is now expected, and as a result reality itself has become an elastic concept.

Before realising that she risked looking silly, Oprah Winfrey defended Frey's book on the grounds that its underlying message still resonated, while the author himself has argued that his largely invented life story told "an essential truth". Those defending the fake rent-boy suggested that he, or rather she, simply had "a highly developed pen-name".

Personal re-invention is fashionable. We now have enough media savvy to know that each public figure contains at least two identities; at one level he or she is the sober-suited politician/giggling reality TV star/self-destructive footballer but, at home, they are something entirely different. The existence of the internet has allowed ordinary, unfamous civilians to play the same game at home, taking on another name and a different background once they enter into the world of the magic little screen.

Perhaps playing the identity game is simply part of human nature. Researching a biography, I have been surprised, not only by how many versions of himself a man can present to people, but also at how they too can sometimes read and interpret his life in a way which reflects their own hopes and regrets.

It is no longer even necessary to be alive to take on identity. Wikipedia, the on-line reference service, has 17 references to a communist hero called "Henryk Batuta", who fought in the Russian Revolution and a friend of Hemingway in Spain - all invented by hoaxers, it turns out.

Meanwhile, on the news pages, a fierce bidding war is developing over exclusive photography rights to a human yet to be born. The celebrity foetus, the future child of Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt, is valued at over a million dollars. One over-excited broadsheet even commissioned a faked-up photograph of what the baby would look like if it had been born and they had picture rights.

Does that count as identity theft? Will million-dollar babies require a different kind of ID card to the rest of us - perhaps a personal version of a gold or a platinum credit card? These are deep waters and the government would be wise not to become too involved in the intimate, ever-changing business of the way we see ourselves.

terblacker@aol.com