I was hoping that my search for an article to critique would help me solidify some of the things I've been thinking these last couple of weeks. In some ways it did, though no flashes of brilliance and cries of "Eureka!" really took place.
I'm thinking about this whole offline-online identity question. I keep saying that there is no dichotomy and the two are more of a continuum rather than two sides of a coin. One of the articles I found was on Blogging and it gave me an idea that it might be a good way to explore this idea. What do people blog about? Do they assume different personalities under anonymous names? Don't most people blog about what's real to them in their offline lives? Then why the anonymity? To be a better blogger, or to be safe from recrimination? Or just because it's the way things are done?
I know I need to find more blogging-related studies. So that's what i'm going to do next. But as for the actual paper, I'm not clear on what I want to do yet.
Thursday, October 18, 2007
Thursday, October 11, 2007
Piggyback post
I realized from Prof. Lohnes' mail that my last post was mostly about the readings. So I went back to my questions and was surprised to find that the issues that are bothering me now have changed from the questions I posted just a few short weeks ago. Now, i'm deeply interested in the question of separate identities online and offline. More specifically, for most functional individuals, I feel like our online and offline selves are not in fact radically different from each other. I'd really explore this hypothesis a bit deeper. Not really sure how though.
Wednesday, October 10, 2007
Identity and Place on the Internet
I missed a post last week. And in a way I'm glad because both last week's readings and the ones this week seem to be intertwined in my mind.
I picked the article on "Being Trini" to begin with right away because I was interested in reading about the experiences of other migrants away from home in relation to their nationality. While all of their experiences didn't resonate, I found myself agreeing with the fundamental conclusion they arrived at. That differences in identity, whether nationality, gender etc. and the inherent uiniqueness of a person does not melt away in this limitless virtual world. Yes we can choose to be whoever we want to be. But most of the time, most of us stay pretty close to our real selves.
The second article was the one about adoloscent sitings. I was intrigued by the idea that even as adolescents, there is a certain sense of "keeping things separate". Page 233 of the article talks about "the separation of more personal pages ... from formal, impersonal essays." I keep my work/school stuff under a separate name and use different email ids to communicate with colleagues. But does that mean I am a different person when I am engaged in that network? I don't think so. It's more a defense mechanism that causes me to organize things under different headings and save me from being swamped with all kinds of information that do not relate to each other.
The article also talked a great deal about the construction and nature of social space time. Some of that escaped me. I'm hoping the class today will make that clearer.
And finally the article on Belonging got me nodding along emphatically as I was reading it. It ties in with what I think is true for most people about identity. The study suggests that people who are well-connected to their communities and neighborhoods offline, are more likely to extend their social networks online. In other words, if you are a friendly person in the "real world", you are likely to use at least some of your time on the Internet to make new friends. Of course this doesn't explain why some people are able to be so outgoing on the Web while they are reclusive in real life. So I guess no sweeping generalizations can be made.
More and more I'm thinking about how a lot of research talks about the disconnect between real world and the virtual world. But to me, the real and virtual are only different if we want it to be. The Internet is too ubiquitous in most of our lives to consider its usage a departure from the real to another realm. Too much of our real lives are consciously intertwined in the virtual - connections with family and friends, research for work, our interests and hobbies. Are we making a mistake by viewing the two as distinct?
I picked the article on "Being Trini" to begin with right away because I was interested in reading about the experiences of other migrants away from home in relation to their nationality. While all of their experiences didn't resonate, I found myself agreeing with the fundamental conclusion they arrived at. That differences in identity, whether nationality, gender etc. and the inherent uiniqueness of a person does not melt away in this limitless virtual world. Yes we can choose to be whoever we want to be. But most of the time, most of us stay pretty close to our real selves.
The second article was the one about adoloscent sitings. I was intrigued by the idea that even as adolescents, there is a certain sense of "keeping things separate". Page 233 of the article talks about "the separation of more personal pages ... from formal, impersonal essays." I keep my work/school stuff under a separate name and use different email ids to communicate with colleagues. But does that mean I am a different person when I am engaged in that network? I don't think so. It's more a defense mechanism that causes me to organize things under different headings and save me from being swamped with all kinds of information that do not relate to each other.
The article also talked a great deal about the construction and nature of social space time. Some of that escaped me. I'm hoping the class today will make that clearer.
And finally the article on Belonging got me nodding along emphatically as I was reading it. It ties in with what I think is true for most people about identity. The study suggests that people who are well-connected to their communities and neighborhoods offline, are more likely to extend their social networks online. In other words, if you are a friendly person in the "real world", you are likely to use at least some of your time on the Internet to make new friends. Of course this doesn't explain why some people are able to be so outgoing on the Web while they are reclusive in real life. So I guess no sweeping generalizations can be made.
More and more I'm thinking about how a lot of research talks about the disconnect between real world and the virtual world. But to me, the real and virtual are only different if we want it to be. The Internet is too ubiquitous in most of our lives to consider its usage a departure from the real to another realm. Too much of our real lives are consciously intertwined in the virtual - connections with family and friends, research for work, our interests and hobbies. Are we making a mistake by viewing the two as distinct?
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