A Multiphrenic Chorus: Migration, Belonging, and Digital Echoes
The digital world keeps our past alive, making identity a constant conversation between who we were and who we are becoming.
By Featured Writer, Belinda Bennetts.
Contemporary life is undeniably fast-paced. On any given day, we are bombarded by information, much of it digital, that presses in and demands attention. Amid this external ‘noise,’ our sense of self can fragment, and we can find ourselves in an internal space comprised of many voices, both real and imagined. Consequently, it can be difficult to remain connected to our identity, and we may notice an internal question: ‘Who am I?’
Social psychologist Kenneth Gergen termed this state of fragmentation the multiphrenic self, being a self which is experienced simultaneously across past, present, and imagined realities (Gergen, 1991). Whilst the concept arose in response to his observation of what he called the saturation of self in post-modern times, this article applies it to migration in the context of what cultural theorist Alan Kirby terms the age of ‘digimodernism’ (Kirby, 2009). In such an age, the multiphrenic self is amplified, as identity is continually reshaped by online interactions and constant digital reminders of the past. Through collapsing time and distance, social media enables old selves, memories, and familiar faces to coexist with the life unfolding in the present. In this way, migration and the digital world converge, shaping identity into a chorus of selves that can be both comforting and disorienting. Whilst this is experienced differently for everyone who has relocated, in this article, I describe it from my perspective.
Living across borders
Gergen’s description of fragmentation might sound abstract, but in the context of my life, it has been visceral. I have lived inside a multiphrenic reality for most of my adult life. In moving from Zimbabwe to New Zealand, and later to Northern Ireland, each journey has been shaped by culture, politics, and history.
Beginning with Zimbabwe, I didn’t want to leave. But political violence and economic collapse made daily life precarious, and as such, leaving was necessary. I think migration under duress carries a special weight, as there is no gentle period of planning. No slow goodbye. Instead, there is sudden dislocation and loss. I remember the ache of stepping off the plane in New Zealand, where the air smelt different and the sky was a paler shade of blue. I was safe, yes, but the cost was a quiet tearing away from everything that defined me.
Once there, I learned to speak with a different accent and read the unspoken codes of a new culture. I was grateful for welcome and safety, but I often felt like an echo of myself, someone who looked and sounded familiar, but never entirely belonged. Friends would share stories of primary schools they had attended together and the many memories that make up a life. I would listen, aware of the absence of shared history.
When I immigrated to Northern Ireland years later, the journey held a twist as my mother’s family came from this land. My great-grandparents’ names are etched into old parish records, and the home they lived in is not far from where I live now. In theory, the move should have felt like a homecoming, and in some ways it did. However, ancestry and lived experience are not the same. Though family roots gave a thread of connection, shared childhoods and the slow intimacy of growing up there were absent. There was no history of experiences across the lifespan, which knit communities together. As such, a sense of being an outsider lingers.
Constant digital reminders of the past
In earlier generations, distance might have allowed past identities to fade. Letters arrived slowly, photographs yellowed in drawers. But in today’s world, social media collapses the gap. Every day, I encounter images of Zimbabwe: old school friends braaiing under the same wide skies, a neighbour’s child now grown, or the familiar curve of a dirt road. These fragments stir something deep inside, and for a moment, I am back. Childhood memories flood my mind, and I can almost smell the African earth. I become the child who played beneath Jacaranda trees and the teenager who knew she belonged. Then the screen goes dark, and I am pulled back into the present, thousands of miles away.
In moments like these, the external noise Gergen wrote about is not just an intrusion from the present world but a haunting from the past as voices and images compete for attention inside me. Belonging becomes less about place and more about negotiating this inner dialogue.
I think in many ways this is what Gergen meant by the multiphrenic self. We live amid overlapping invitations to be many things at once. Past and present, local and global, intimate and performative. The real and imagined people we encounter online become part of the inner conversation. They remind us of who we were, or who we might have been, even as we forge a new identity in a new place.
Continuity in a digital world
How does one find continuity amid the loss, displacement, and need to adapt that migration brings, when the past is kept so vibrantly alive by the ever-present hum of social media? I believe the key is to find a thread of self that feels authentic despite constant change. This thread is less a single line than a weaving together of fragments, a way of letting the multiphrenic self become textured rather than torn.
I keep a pair of silver geckos on my bathroom wall, ornaments that have travelled with me since my first move. I write stories of childhood, offering snippets of history for future generations and a counterbalance to the endless scroll of images from Zimbabwe that flash across my phone. These small rituals serve as anchors when a sudden photograph pulls me back in time. They remind me that integration does not require erasure.
Some days, I still feel the pull of competing identities, and the digital presence of people from my past can reopen questions I thought were settled. Am I the girl they remember, the woman I have become, or someone in between? Perhaps all of these. I’ve come to see this not as a problem to solve but as a human reality to embrace.
In this context, I believe that rather than the multiphrenic self being a fractured self, it can be a self in motion, capable of honouring memory while engaging the present. Social media may collapse time and distance, but through deliberate practices and inner dialogue, I can let the many voices within me converse without one silencing the others.
Belonging in Motion
Whilst my journey is personal, it is far from unique. Millions are displaced each year by conflict, climate change, and economic necessity. Many will scroll through their social feeds tonight, catching glimpses of a homeland they can no longer touch. They, too, are assembling identities from fragments, learning to root themselves in continuity whilst remaining open to change. Understanding the multiphrenic nature of self helps name this experience. It reminds us that identity is not a fixed possession but an evolving conversation between past and present, between memory and possibility. For migrants, the challenge and the gift lie in finding continuity amid multiplicity. It is about carrying forward the stories and values of home, whilst stepping fully into the life that is unfolding in the present.
Migration scatters us, but it also teaches us that we are more spacious than we think. In the shifting chorus of selves lies an invitation to experience a deeper, more generous understanding of what it means to belong. Perhaps this is the paradox of migration in a digital age: the very tools that amplify dissonance can also widen our sense of humanity. They remind us that identity need not be narrowed to one fixed note but can expand into a song that links the places and people who have shaped us.
References:
Gergen, K. J. (1991) The Saturated Self: Dilemmas of identity in contemporary life. New York: Basic Books.
Kirby, A. (2009) Digimodernism: How new technologies dismantle the postmodern and reconfigure our culture. London: Continuum.