Virtual Identities-Development
'Identity is the total conception that people have of who they are. It includes all the beliefs that make up the individual's conception of self. It also includes the beliefs that people have about their worth as human beings-beliefs that determine self confidence and self esteem.'(Yorburg 1974:1)
The lack of borders and geographical restrictions that are specific to the Internet have allowed virtual identities to grow and develop at an incredibly swift rate. 'Identity is always a moving category, always a shape shifter. As soon as we think we have it pinned down and classified, it re-emerges as something else.' (Carlson 2001:299) This is a feature of identity online that has become apparent in the years since the development of the World Wide Web 'Even when we think it has disappeared, that we have moved beyond the need for identity, it re-emerges in a new guise.'(Carlson 2001: 299) It is this re-emerging and consistency of change that has revealed itself as a defining characteristic in the development of online identity.
The World Wide Web has provided opportunities for affinity groups to develop based on politics and changing identities. Online Activism Accepted identity characteristics have been deconstructed into an everchanging new hybrid within the hypertextual environment. The distinguishing marker is the 'limited freedom and border crossings' (Carlson 2001) and the range of identities that can exist.
The development of online identity could be perceived as being a struggle for freedom through the use of text. Historically, there has been a lack of struggle over power through definitions of class, race, gender and sexual identity that occur in the physical environment. However, 'struggles with freedom are always waged with language, and people are empowered when they become more self-reflexive about the way language represents the world and participates in organising social reality and subjectivity.'(Carlson 2001) Significantly, barriers of class, race, gender and sexuality disappear in the online environment.Identity in the online environment fragments and shifts. In terms of its future development 'it is a possibility that ideals of masculinity and femininity will some day disappear...'(Yorburg 1974:2001) [{Sexual_Identity_Online | Sexual Identity]]
Online identity is distinctive by its drawing together of people based on common interest and lifestyle and the dissolution of communication once it is no longer useful. (Carlson, D 2001) It is also marked by what is absent. French phsychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan believed that 'to enter language is to be severed from the 'real', that inaccessible realm which is always beyond the reach of signification, always outside the symbolic order.' The development of online identity is an extension of this lack or 'absence'. A human life can be defined by what is lacking. Identity is driven by the desire for what is not there. The online identity is a perfect extemporisation of the uniqueness of such a state. To 'enter language is to become prey to a desire' (Eagleton 1996) and 'language divides up-articulates-the fullness of the imaginary.'
In the future online identity will further develop through affinity groups as opposed to fixed and unidimensional identity groups. Online Activism It will continue to (as it has in the past) urge it's human participants toward continuous reconstruction and give voice to the previously oppressed (Carlson 2001) through the freedom that has emerged from a realm that is made up of a lack of pre-conceived notions of what identity is or what identity should be. It continues to grow, change, re-define itself and grow again.
Laura Keneally 11:24, 29 Oct 2004 (EST)
Bibliography
Carlson, D. 'Gay, Queer, and Cyborg: the performance of identity in a transglobal age'. Discourse: studies in the cultural politics of education (USA), vol 22,Issue 3, 2001, Miami University.
Eagleton, T. (1996). Literary Theory an introduction. (2nd ed) UK: Blackwell.
Turkle, S. (1995). Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet. New York: Simon and Schuster. ISBN 0684803534
Yorburg, B. (1974) Sexual Identity: Sex Roles and Social Change. New York: John Wiley and Sons.ISBN 0471978108
Laura Keneally 17:32, 28 Oct 2004 (EST)
