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Adam Bohannon's List: Online identity research

Virtual Encounters: Community or Collaboration on the Internet?

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identity research web on 2007-09-14 and saved by 6 people
- For its
  
  users, this networked social system or virtual community is, as cybertheorist
  
  Sandy Stone put it, "first and foremost a community of belief" [2].
- Certainly, the traditional
  
  notion of community is founded on assumptions about consensus, rationality
  
  and collectivity that do not translate well to virtual spaces like the internet.
  
  In a virtual environment, collaboration displaces community, teasing out,
  
  as it seems to do, the possibility of radical encounters with the 'other'.
  
  Informed by a postmodern sense of irony, fragmentation and multiciplicity,
  
  collaboration undermines normative and unitary social formations in today's
  
  virtual environments.
- 30 more annotations...
- - As Stone argues, "the distinction between inside and
    
    outside has been erased and along with it, the possibility of privacy"
    
    [4]. In this way, the internet acts as a terrain in which the
    
    public/private distinction is deconstructed and in which those who engage
    
    in online social interactions are not necessarily inscribed according to this
    
    set of oppositions.
  - Those who socialise
    
    online do so within both the public and private realms simultaneously, making
    
    such categories impossible to sustain. In creating disorder through the dissolution
    
    of public/private distinctions, the internet, as a frame for a multitude of
    
    encounters, represents a departure from the political rationality in which,
    
    according the philosopher Michel Foucault, the "integration of the individuals
    
    in a community or totality results from a constant correlation between an
    
    increasing individualisation and the reinforcement of this totality"
    
    [5].
  - While "community" describes
    
    a nebulous social form, it nevertheless alludes to an entity that is whole
    
    and often geographically contingent - homogenous - complying with ideas about
    
    metanarratives, rootedness and permanence that deny and falsify difference.
    
    Computer networks impinge on that order by providing an alternative field
    
    in which to perform connection and interactivity, to activate difference and
    
    fragmentation and to attenuate rootedness to a place.
  - Simultaneously, this shift does not necessarily disavow embodiment or location.
    
    Psychologist Sherry Turkle evokes the text-based virtual gaming sites known
    
    as MUDs [8] as a cyberperformance of community
    
    that implies "difference, multiplicity, heterogeneity and fragmentations.
    
    Such an experience of identity contradicts the Latin root of the word, idem,
    
    
    
    
    
    meaning 'the same'" [9]
  - Similarly, it contradicts notions of
    
    community insofar as they rely on commonality and sameness. For author, Howard
    
    Rheingold, permeability between the online and off-line is essential for the
    
    word "community" to be applied to virtual social worlds [10]. This contingency raises the
    
    question of whether community can be formed via virtual networks - whether
    
    it is a valuable means of describing and knowing virtual social experience
    
    - when it must be made to work via the intersection of online and off-line
    
    experience.
  - Of course, not all internet-based collaboration is inherently deceitful -
    
    even though there is an element of uncertainty - rather, it permits the performance
    
    of more fluid and mutable identities.
  - As such, these identities are direct
    
    responses to the moment, emergent from the encounter rather than framed by
    
    the mores, prohibitions and inscriptions of off-line society and subjectivity.
    
    Add Sticky Note
  - With the absence of cues such as sound and sight in a social encounter, the
    
    information that net users can obtain about other net users is only what is
    
    disclosed: no one knows who you are. Turkle points out that "virtual
    
    communities ranging from MUDs to computer bulletin boards allow people to
    
    generate experiences, relationships, identities and living spaces that arise
    
    only through interaction with technology" [12]
  - the
    
    cyborg operates via interface, connectivity and multiplicity to actively subvert
    
    traditional ideas about identity that rely on the notion of authenticity and,
    
    therefore, fixity.
  - The implication is that whatever social networks and identities emerge on
    
    the internet, they are constitutively different from their precedents, from
    
    those external to it.
  - Young proposes that a politics of difference be developed to replace "community
    
    as the normative ideal of political emancipation ... A model of the unoppressive
    
    city offers an understanding of social relations without domination in which
    
    persons live together in relations of mediation among strangers with whom
    
    they are not in community" [23].
  - It is advocated here that
    
    computer networks provide a utilitarian space for establishing this model
    
    and appraising the means by which a semblance of collaboration may be achieved
    
    therein: to encounter and exchange with the stranger is to collaborate in
    
    interactivity ad connection to achieve unknown and unspecified results.
  - Central to the technologies of the self
    
    is an attention to the passion of knowledge, a passion which does not reify
    
    knowing but rather entails a probability that one occasionally will lose
    
    oneself, only to find it in another place, caught up with other knowledge
    
    and people, in the reflection of another angle and perspective [24].
  - Such commitment to the ongoing theorising
    
    of the self operates as a political position from which to activate the technologies
    
    of social and personal formation in which difference has value and by which
    
    unitary formulations of community are destabilised. Such an equation relates
    
    to the proposition that social relations as performed online are akin to those
    
    of the unoppressive city which Young describes as "places where strangers
    
    are thrown together" [26]. In this setting, "politics
    
    must be conceived of as a relationship of strangers who do not understand
    
    one another in a subjective and immediate sense, relating across time and
    
    distance" [27].
  - According to Turkle, the internet is the site of reconstructed
    
    relationships whereby community and identity can be perceived as "cultural
    
    work in progress" rather than as a given [16]. As performed in cyberspace,
    
    encounters are measured as moments - the ethics of which are not always apparent
    
    - in which subject positions are not fixed.
  - For philosopher Alphonso Lingus, western societies have
    
    deferred to a practice of the rational community that conceals and excludes:
    
    Beneath the rational community, its common
    
    discourse of which each lucid mind is but the representative and its enterprises
    
    in which the efforts and passions of each are absorbed and depersonalised,
    
    is another community, the community that demands that the one who has his
    
    own communal identity, who produces his own nature, expose himself to the
    
    one with who he had nothing in common, the stranger [29].
  - Locating this type of accountability as community is problematic for it evokes
    
    the binarist antagonism or individual versus community in which the [male]
    
    individual with attributed rights is privileged over the [female] community,
    
    inscribed with an ethic of care. According to feminist and philosopher Iris
    
    Marion Young, "individualism and community have a common logic underlying
    
    their polarity, which makes it possible for them to define each other negatively.
    
    Each entails a denial of difference and desire to bring multiplicity and heterogeneity
    
    into unity, although in opposing ways" [18].
    
    Add Sticky Note
  - The encounter implicit in collaboration represents the site for re-inscribed
    
    cultural and identity politics in which, as Turkle describes, "we have
    
    learned to take things at interface value. We are moving toward a culture
    
    of simulation in which people are increasingly comfortable with substituting
    
    representations of reality for the real ... We join virtual communities that
    
    exist among people communicating on computer networks as well as communities
    
    in which we are physically present."[19].
  - According to Turkle, "in computer-mediated
    
    worlds, the self is multiple, fluid and constituted with machine connections;
    
    it is made and transformed by language; sexual congress is an exchange of
    
    signifiers; and understanding follows from navigation and tinkering rather
    
    than analysis" [32]. Technology becomes facilitative
    
    in the deconstruction of normative categories of interaction. The displacement
    
    of such constrictive conventions permits internet users to generate their
    
    own modes of relating, modes that define them as a network of strangers, produced
    
    and reproduced as and by collaboration.
  - Collaboration, representing both the connection and the flight, provides the
    
    context for more detailed consideration of virtual social networks as a viable
    
    means of attending to desire, diversity and difference without subscribing
    
    to the legitimising force of consensus.
  - For psychoanalyst and semiotician Julia Kristeva, radical strangeness
    
    is built into human psyches and place-bound identities. In cyberspace, and
    
    in-between space, the borders of oneself are both threatened and drawn, blurring
    
    one's identity, making currency of the decentred self. As writer Noelle McAfee
    
    put its in discussing Kristeva's work, "even though the experience is
    
    profoundly unsettling, it produces an awareness of one's being there"
    
    [33].
  - In cyberspace, anonymity renders everyone who enters a stranger and also strangers
    
    to each other.
  - In the intermediary space
    
    of the internet, one only has awareness of oneself and all others are strangers.
    
    McAfee states, "the foreigner presents an opportunity and not an abyss.
    
    By being shaken loose from the 'they', this self sees the radical strangeness
    
    of others as the continual possibility for being a subject, a split subject
    
    whose mirror is always partial. Without completion, possibility thrives."
    
    [34].
  - Consensus denies difference
    
    and partiality, imposing it own hegemony. The social encounters resulting
    
    from this shift are inherently different from the utopian "ideal of community
    
    [which] entails promoting a model of face-to-face relations at best"
    
    [21]. In the fragmented space provided
    
    by the internet, consensus is impossible and irrelevant. So framed, collaboration
    
    attends to multiplicity and partiality without subscribing to or aspiring
    
    to consensus as a manifestation of commonality and an articulation of the
    
    unitary. As an act of collaboration, social encounters can subscribe to and
    
    "develop a self-conscious politics of partiality ... which does not absorb
    
    difference with a pre-given and predefined space but leaves room for ambivalence
    
    and ambiguity" [22].
  - Community
  - Community
  - Community
  - Community
    
    Add Sticky Note
  - It is in these encounters with strangers, outside
    
    the realm of the nation-state or the rational community, that Kristeva suggest
    
    an ethics of respect for the irreconcilable. Such an assertion correlates
    
    with Haraway's formulation of cyborg politics in which the politics of encounter
    
    are neither naturalised not absolute, but in a constant state of flux, open
    
    to negotiation, sociability, perversion and regeneration.
  - Virtual environments
    
    provide for encounters with the stranger who, in most off-line contexts would
    
    be seen as an interloper requiring assimilation rather than as an opportunity
    
    for perverting unitary formations of the social and generating expanding fields
    
    of social interactivity and connectedness.
The Long Tail: Social Networking is a feature, not a destination

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socialnetworking web web2.0 on 2007-10-08 and saved by 15 people
- social networking as a feature, not a destination.
- I'm sure huge and generic social networking destinations will continue to do well, but I'm placing my bet on the biggest impact coming when social networking becomes a standard feature on all good sites, bringing community to the granular level where it always works best.
Faceted Id/entity: Managing representatiopn in a digital world, by Danah Boyd - Thesis.FacetedIdentity.pdf (application/pdf Object)

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danahboyd identity research web on 2008-02-04 and saved by 3 people
Beyond "Culture": Space, Identity, and the Politics of Difference, by Akhil Gupta; James Ferguson

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anthropology culture identity metaphors theory on 2007-10-31
Kinship Studies: Some Impressions of the Current State of Play, by J.A. Barnes

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anthropology kinship sociology on 2007-11-11
Marginal groups thrive on the Internet

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community identity internet on 2007-11-02
Fractals Reemerge in the New Math of the Internet

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internet mathematics on 2007-10-29
JSTOR: Annual Review of Sociology: Vol. 27, p. 307 Social Implications of the Internet

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internet research sociology on 2007-08-24
Place and Cyberspace, by Mark A. Lemley - JSTOR: California Law Review: Vol. 91, No. 2, p. 521

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law research web on 2007-09-09
JSTOR: Annual Review of Sociology: Vol. 26, p. 367 Social Psychology of Identities

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identity psychology research sociology on 2007-08-24
Children in the Digital Age: Influences of Electronic Media on Development - K-State Libraries - Catalog - Holdings

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development identity research technology web on 2007-09-20 and saved by 2 people
JSTOR: Contemporary Sociology: Vol. 28, No. 6, p. 648 Living Networked On and Offline

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identity networks research web on 2007-09-09
JSTOR: Annual Review of Sociology: Vol. 23, p. 385 Identity Construction

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identity psychology research sociology on 2007-09-09
Broken Metaphors: Blogging as Liminal Practice, Danah Boyd - MEABrokenMetaphors.pdf (application/pdf Object)

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blogging identity research web on 2007-08-31 and saved by 4 people
JSTOR: Contemporary Sociology: Vol. 28, No. 6, p. 643 Looking Toward Cyberspace: Beyond Grounded Sociology

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identity online research sociology web on 2007-08-30
NetLibrary - Search Results - Tools for Though: The History and Future of Mind-expaniding Technology

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future history media research on 2007-08-25
JSTOR: Wicazo Sa Review: Vol. 13, No. 2, Technology and Native American Culture, p. 19 Cyberspace Is No Place for Tribalism

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identity research tribalism web on 2007-08-24
An Organizing Framework for Collective Identity: Articulation and Significance of Multidimensionality

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identity psychology research on 2007-08-24 and saved by 2 people
JSTOR: Social Psychology Quarterly: Vol. 63, No. 4, Special Millenium Issue on the State of Sociological Social Psychology, p. 284 The Past, Present, and Future of an Identity Theory

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identity research sociology theory on 2007-08-24
K-State Libraries - Catalog - Holdings - Virtual politics : identity and community in cyberspace

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community identity research web on 2007-08-24 and saved by 2 people

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Adam Bohannon

276 items | 2313 visits

Collection of resources for my research on online identity for the fall 2007 semester

Updated on 2009-07-27
Created on 2007-08-26

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