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?