Our everyday identities are defined by a number of things for example our gender, whether we are considered masculine or feminine; by our religious beliefs, political views, where we are from, our ethnicity. It is also defined by the type of people we relate to or have common interests with and how they present their identities affects our own.
Media allows us to relate to and be part of a wider community. In everyday life we only meet a tiny proportion of the total community we claim to be part of. If we claim to be British and define our identities by that, can we really claim to know what the community as a whole and the people in it are like just because we are a part of it?
Media connects us with the people in our community. Television and newspapers help us to create the assumptions of what the community e.g. British people are like. Therefore peoples' first impressions, assumptions or views on people are based on wider stereotypes.
How a person 'looks' (i.e. a persons physical appearance) is immediately illuminating and allows people to make judgements and assumptions of a person's identity. Gender, ethnicity and how a person dresses all tell an immediate story about a person's identity before they've even spoke.
Digital Culure allows us to remove initial judgements or assumptions from the people we are communicating with. Online text can be used as a mask. People don't know what you look like or even whether you're male or female so initial stereotypical assumptions are removed. Everything anyone knows about you through online text is based on what you tell them.
This allows you to present yourself however you like, if you're male but write that you're female who knows the difference? as far as the people online are concerned you are female. This means that online you have just created yourself a new identity. Your identity online is different to your identity in the real world. Both identities are shown through self representation but due to the different natures in which you represent yourself you are able to display vastly different identities.
You are never completely anonymous online there are ways of tracking IP addresses or user accounts etc. however for the majority of the people you communicate and interact with on the internet what you present to them is all they 'know' about you.
However do we really create completely new personas for use in cyberspace? I feel that for the majority of the time we dont. On social networking sites like Myspace or Facebook we genrally present fairly accurate representations of ourselves. Often they are heavily censored and idealised to give an impression of the optimal version of ourselves. We do this by choosing only pictures that we look good in to be on our profiles, or by revealing things about ourselves which we perceive will make us appear cool or will endear us to our peers, we can do this through the information we write and through the pages we join and like.
This is a vlog or video blog about online identity
and how we create an idealised self
and how we create an idealised self
Having an online profile of ourselves, such as a Facebook page, gives us a new perspective of our identities. Being able to look at a screen and see ourselves looking back gives us a third person perspective of who we are and what we represent it affords us the opportunity to reflect on what our identity is and what we want it to be as well as how we are perceived by others. Having this new perspective leads to us comparing our online identities to our old self image. This can create a blurring of the lines between identity in cyberspace and the real world, social networking is integrated into our everyday lives rather than being set apart from it and therefore our online profiles are generally much more accurate than they have ever been before.
