I was reading Chapter 11 of the book, specifically the section from Sam Gosling which was all about identity and how you can tell a lot about a person but the stuff that they own. He gave a few examples of him being able to determine things about a particular person such as their age, sex, political affiliation, and like and dislikes. He claimed that you just needed to look at certain details to be able to determine who someone was. Sometimes, the smallest object can make all the difference in how you see someone. Other times, you can only put the pieces together after someone tells you the answer. This got me thinking about identity in writing and if you could determine certain things about the author just by reading their works. I do think that this is possible, just not for everything. When you read a book, you will subconsciously pick up on things like writing style and word usage, which makes identifying plagiarized assignments easier than you may think. Every person writes a certain way, and while they might write similar to someone else, they will also add a bit of personal flair to what they make.
I do think, however, that you can’t tell everything about a person through what they own, or how they write. We are constantly being influenced by outside factors which play a big role in forming our interpretations of people. To illustrate this point, I’d like to talk about a video I recently saw about Trump’s State of the Union address in which a man goes around and reads quotes from the address to different people and ask what their opinion of Trump is. The thing is, he isn’t reading Trump’s address. He’s reading quotes from Obama’s addresses. Initially the people who hear the quotes are very critical of what he says and claims that it fits in with his Trump persona. After the guy reading the quotes tells them that this is not from Trump’s address, most of the people feel embarrassed and say that they their own biases factored into how they responded to the quotes. I think people can put the pieces together and figure out who someone is based on the things that they own, or write about, or even say, but we have to first understand that we all have biases and things may be the way that they appear.
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