Exploring online identity - convergence of self

From Multitude to Convergence: Contemporary Trends in the Study of online Identity (Gradinaru, 2013)

This paper attempts to explore the changes in our understanding of identity, and how ‘technological domestication’ (the fact that the internet is a functional part of our everyday lives), has meant a convergence in the online/offline identity. Today our online identities are similar to our offline, as people want to be honest and direct, and because it would be incredibly difficult to manage multi-personalities now that it is easier for us to find ways of verifying people’s identities and that we have less control, sometimes, as a user. The information about us needs to fit together.

I remember reading a number of articles when I first started my Masters in Online and Distance Education about anonymity and identity and how the internet is changing behaviour. So this article, despite it being a difficult read, really spoke about the ways that technology use has changed and that for most people, honesty and ‘realistic’ portrayals of self are more important, especially in a networked age. Gradinaru takes us back to the early internet of the 1990s and how the multitude of possibilities and anonymity spoke to us of the freedom and liberty that the internet affords, and links in with postmodern ideas and multiple personalities.  ‘Self’ could be distributed and so we could have a portfolio of personalities and play different roles at the same time. Being able to explore numerous aspects of ourselves potentially led to tensions between our online and offline identities.

However the way we use the internet and technology itself has changed, especially with the advent of social media tools and platforms, meaning that the difficulty is now knowing which identity to us in which context (Rodogno, 2011). Or in fact knowing what context we are in. Rodogno introduces the idea of ‘content collapse’ in sense that the complexity of the platforms and services available to us make it difficult for us to determine which identity we are in, and so multiple audiences are suddenly in the same context.  Therefore as users it’s not surprising that we have started adopting a ‘imagined audience’ and lean towards shaping our online identity to that of our offline. Otherwise we have a great deal of work to do in ‘archiving’ and protecting our different personalities.

Online identity then, is about how we present ourselves to others, but also about how we perceive ourselves through our interaction with others. This the way we present ourselves online becomes a process of managing and constructing impressions, so that we can control how other perceives us. Therefore the internet is no longer a playground with which to construct different identities (although we still use the internet to explore different facets of identity), it becomes a way of ‘customising’ our identities, with symbolic markers that link back to the ‘real’.

How is this relevant to my project?

Many of our volunteers will be of a generation who lived through these debates in the 1990s, and may see the internet still as this ‘other’ place where people go to play and be someone or something they are not. The article reminds us that the way we use technology has changed. The more embedded it has become, the more people use it as a part of their everyday lives, and so their online identities will mirror the offline. That’s not to say that there aren’t people who create completing anonymous identities, and we know that some of the fears about safety come from the fear of not knowing who you are talking to. But it has become easier to verify identity. Because people are being ‘real’.

Thus if we want to help our volunteers with their trust issues, we can once again draw on our values. The way we behave and act offline should be the same as the way we behave online. The way we interact with strangers, should be the same. Just as we might be wary of the stranger on the bus, we should also be wary of the stranger wanting to be our friend on Facebook. Being ‘real’ about our identity makes it easier to manage our identity.

Gradinaru, C. (2013). From Multitude to Convergence: Contemporary Trends in the Study of Online Identity. Argumentum: Journal The Seminar Of Discursive Logic, Argumentation Theory & Rhetoric, 11(2), 95-108.

Rodogno, R. (2011). “Personal Identity Online”. Philosophy and Technology 25 (3): 309-328.