Digital Queer

I have to admit i had a lot of expectations from Julie Rak's article on Weblogs and homosexual identity and not all of them were met. She begins by discussing blogs entries in termws of personal journals, drawing parallels between the self disclosures in both forms of writing. However, she breaks from this traditional view of blogs to declare blogs, particularly "queer blogs"a separate genre, with its own codes and rules. I'm wondering if the use of the word "genre" does not in itself constitute some defined boundaries and watertight compartments. There are a lot of blogs out there that are not an exploration of the writer's identity per se. Blogging technology is now being used for all sorts of purposes, some commercial, educational and yes perhaps personal. Like all writing, the words say something about the author, but I just wonder if the authors themselves would like to be classified as this genre or that.

And that brings me to my major disappointment. Rak read 40 blogs closely, a hundred more cursorily. I found myself wishing I could hear directly from some of the authors of the "queer" blogs to find out how they felt about connections between the online and offline. Do all of them define themselves as gay first and then parents, professionals or any other "definitions" later? Does the fact that they tagged their blogs with the keyword "queer" ever come into play when they are deciding what to write about on any given day. And if they look back over their posts, would they be able to identify with everything they've written?

Final paper

I've been interested in blogging and identity for some time now. However, last week's video on technology in classrooms made me think about how blogging lends itself to educational purposes. There has been a lot of talk about using blogs in the classroom because of the "personal diary" format that allows you to process your reactions to a subject and spit out a more coherent, finished form of your thought process. I am interested in the findings of studies in this area. Specifically, some of my questions are:
1. Are blogs a better way to get students to express themselves? If yes (or no), why?
2. What are the effects of the observer (in this context, the teacher) on students really being able to express themselves? Are these effects measurable and significant?
3. What are some of the lessons that past experience with using blogs in the education environment have taught us, guidelines etc.

I'm not sure if this is an appropriate topic for a final paper so I would really appreciate some feedback!

Constructing an Online Identity

I was reading the Ellison, Steinfield, and Lampe article late last night. The very last line in the abstract jumped out at me. "....Facebook usage was found to interact with measures of psychological well-being, suggesting it might provide greater benefits for users experiencing low self-esteem and low life satisfaction." I thought that if this article had appeared in a more widely read publication, that particular finding might have sparked mass outrage. I could imagine reader responses like "I'm on Facebook all the time and there's nothing wrong with my life!" the finding may be true but it's probably a good thing very few people know about it.

I'm not on Facebook all the time. In fact, I regularly feel like I'm the last human being on this planet to not have an online profile. If nothing else, I'm grateful that taking this class will at least allow me to talk the talk. But I am one of those people who is more comfortable on email than on the phone (of course in person works better for me than phone any day). And my reasons echo some of the reasons that explain why people like to present themselves online. Because it gives me a chance to polish up my communication before its too late. But does that mean I never regret any email I send. No way. Even with the opportunity to pause for thought before clicking Send, I find that I stop and think a lot less than maybe I should. In fact as i think about it, the longer I've used email, the less I've come to think of it as a different medium, with different possibilities and constraints. It's become just another way to talk to someone. With all the pitfalls that entails.

I'm wandering a little here so let me get to the point. I don't have a Facebook profile but I imagine someone creating a profile would spend a lot of time picking out a good picture, sending out friend invitations and writing pithy but profound things about themselves. As you start to use it more and more, could your time on a site like facebook become so much a part of your everyday stay-in-touch routine that you stop constructing yourself and just "be?" Would you screen your actions less as you use something like this more? Just wondering.

Living in Compartments

This weeks article on Public Displays of Connection had an interesting anecdote about a professor who has a personal profile talking about her more "wild side". She's put in a tough position when a student wants to add her to his friend list. To refuse is rude; to accept is to let him in on an aspect of herself that she would prefer to leave out of classroom.

This really resonated with some of the reading I've been doing on Blogging (the subject of my final paper). Many research participants reported that they keep blogs that significant people in their lives do not know about so that they can express their views freely without worrying about hurting anyone's feelings. And yet, again and again, we talk about the web being an open "democratic" space, where anyone can look you up at any time. Some research participants talked about how potential employers sometimes get a hold of their blogs and form impressions about them outside of the information they provide through an interview or resume. Even if no one actively goes looking for dirt about you, we know that social connections on the Web spill over, and at some time or the other, someone's going to catch sight of this "other aspect" of your personality.

At a rational level, if we know that the Web is public, why do we keep trying to live out our private lives on it?

Towrads a Research Question

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.

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.

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?