IC115 From Text to Hypertext

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IC115 From Text to Hypertext

• Week 10 Identity in Cyberspace

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Aims of the session

• to introduce the term identity and its relevance
  to cultural, social and cybercultural studies
• to discuss identity as simultaneously a
  theoretical concern and an aspect of our daily
  experiences

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Structure of the session

• what is identity?
• why study identity? why study identity in
  multimedia/cyberspace contexts?
• aspects of identity which have been the focus in
  cybercultural studies
• themes and approaches in the study of
  cyber-identities
• some examples of virtual/digital identity
• some problems with identity and cyber-identity

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The Collins English Dictionary definition of
identity

• the state of having unique identifying
  characteristics held by no other person or thing
• the individual characteristics by which a person
  or thing is identifiable
• the state of being the same in nature, quality
  etc

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Key thinkers

• George Herbert Mead (1934) developed the notion
  of imagining ourselves to suggest that human
  subjects acquire the ability to carry within us
  images of how others might see us.
• Erving Goffman (1959) the concept of
  performance humans perform ready-made scripts
  for particular audiences at particular moments.
• identity is produced, constructed

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Why study identity?

• Paul Gilroy identity matters both as a concept,
  theoretically, and as a contested fact of
  contemporary political life (Gilroy 1997 301).
• Post-war social movements have contested
  stereotypical assumptions about identities
• traditional sources of authority have been called
  into question
• increased uncertainty
• identity matters in all of our everyday
  experiences

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Why study identity in cyberspace?

• All media work us over completely. They are so
  pervasive in their personal, political, economic,
  aesthetic, psychological, moral and ethical, and
  social consequences that they leave no part of us
  untouched, unaffected, unaltered. The medium is
  the massage (Marshall McLuhan 1967 26).
• the concept of identity has a special place in
  cybercultural studies because of the focus in
  lots of literature on experiments with virtual
  identity in anonymous, online spaces

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aspects of identity studied in cybercultural
studies

• gender (Wakeford Squires Kendall 1996 van
  Zoonen)
• race (Kolko et al eds Mitra Warschauer Sterne)
• sexuality (Wakeford)
• class (Hayward Thomas and Wyatt)

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Gender

• I wanted to see myself women of African
  descent on the Web. I think I had seen one or
  two Black women with pages when I put my page up,
  but in June 1995 it was overwhelmingly white
  male, it still is, but there are a lot more of us
  online with pages (cited Wakeford 1997 58).

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Sexuality / Class

• Sexuality Men pretend to be women to attract
  the attention of real women, who are in fact
  themselves other men pretending to be women. The
  practice of such cross-dressing does nothing to
  unsettle the assumption and practice of
  cyberspace as a process of heterosexuality
  (1996 99).
• Class Are you on the network? could become as
  big a social and economic differentiator in the
  late 1990s as Are you employed had been in the
  early 1990s indeed, the answer to either
  question might now well depend on your access to
  the other (Haywood 1998 25).

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themes in the study of cyber-identities

• coherence, fragmentation, fluidity (Turkle,
  Kendall 1999, Tetzlaff)
• a crisis of boundaries (Shields Haraway Plant)
• anonymity in virtual identity (Turkle, Kramarae,
  Bromberg, Thompson, Schmitz, Kendall 1999)

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coherence, fragmentation, fluidity

• users place a variety of data that defines their
  identity, typically including a photograph along
  with addresses, phone numbers and the like. In
  comparison to the fluid and floating identities
  that may flourish online with LISTSERV, chat
  rooms, MUDS, and other Internet forms now
  shadowed by the Webs ascendancy, the homepage
  fixes an identity, archives it, and places it for
  anyone to locate and investigate (Tetzlaff 2000
  125).

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a crisis of boundaries

• The Internet creates a crisis of boundaries
  between the real and the virtual, between time
  zones and between spaces, near and distant. Above
  all, boundaries between bodies and technologies,
  between our sense of our self and our sense of
  our changing roles the personae we may play or
  the hats we wear in different situations are
  altered (Shields 1996 7).

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anonymity in virtual identity

• At least for periods of time, the new
  technologies let us be our own representations of
  whatever animal, vegetable, sex, race,
  nationality, or tribe we wish to try to be.
  Differences, disabilities, defects, and dominance
  seem, at first reading, to be basically
  irrelevant on the Internet (Kramarae 1999 47).
• although physical appearance, dress, and other
  status cues recede, educational competencies and
  linguistic skills increase in importance.
  Computer-communication media are not neutral with
  regard to culture, education, and socio-economic
  class. And electronic persons are not more
  equal than proximate individuals, we just use
  different criteria to rate them (Schmitz 1997
  85).

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some examples of virtual/digital identity

• 1. Donald Rodney / Autoicon
• http//www.iniva.org/autoicon/
• http//www.iniva.org/autoicon/DR/index.htm
• 2. Mongrel Medias Heritage Gold
• http//www.mongrelx.org/Project/Natural/StarSites/
  starsites.html
• 3. Project _at_THENE
• http//www.uel.ac.uk/innovation/athene/course/stud
  ents/info.htm
• 4. IC213 student work

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1. Donald Rodney / Autoicon
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1. Donald Rodney / Autoicon

• Donald Rodney made considerable use of imagery
  such as x-ray photography, blood samples,
  cellculture, and so on, to draw attention not
  only to his medical condition that was slowly
  corroding his body, but more importantly as a
  metaphor to represent the 'disease' of racism
  that lay at the core of society.
• Visitors to the site will encounter a 'live'
  presence through a 'body' of data (which refers
  to the mass of medical data produced on the human
  body), be able to engage in simulated dialogue
  (derived from interviews and memories), and in
  turn affect an 'auto-generative' montage-machine
  that assembles images collected from the web
  (rather like a sketchbook of ideas in flux).
  the project draws attention to current ideas
  around human-machine assemblages.

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2. Mongrel Medias Heritage Gold
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2. Mongrel Medias Heritage Gold

• MongrelSofté? HeritageGold 2.0 is based on
  MongrelSofté? expertise in racialisation, the
  worldwide industry standard among dedicated
  diversity professionals. Many powerful ethnic
  features are yours to command through our new,
  even easier-to-use interface.
• Powerful features (such as the Clone Tool,
  MongrelSofté? Social filters, One-Click Brown
  skin Removal, and dozens of Specialy Effect
  family history clean up techniques) let you edit
  and transform you Heritage into personal works of
  art.
• The Heritage Templates really made us think
  "What would the world be like today if we in
  England had a black Monarch?" Just maybe, there
  wouldn't be so many wars... You and your family
  can ponder these questions together using
  HeritageGold.

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3. Project _at_THENE
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3. Project _at_THENE

• show no signs of wanting to hide aspects of their
  identity such as their gender and ethnicity and
  so benefit from the possibility of anonymity
  that cyberspace offers them
• there is a lot of personal detail on the _at_THENE
  students homepages

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some problems with identity / cyber-identity

• identity is the wrong place to start
• too much focus on identity in cybercultural
  studies
• too much focus on virtual identity play in
  cybercultural studies
• what do you think?