IDENTITIES AND COMMUNITIES ONLINE

Identities and communities online In order to grasp the significance of online culture in shaping the contemporary media landscape we will once again have recourse to the history of new media studies. The fact that the Internet has afforded new ways of experiencing the self and new ways of relating to groups in society has driven a significant body of net scholarship.

This work has sought critically to tease out the nature of the communicative practices that network computing facilitate and to define the precise nature of those forms of interaction where the participants are there but not there, in touch but never touching, as deeply connected as they are profoundly alienated. This research has had a number of clear threads that will guide our review of approaches and questions.

The first is the idea of anonymity and the effects that it has on communication. A focus on anonymous communication was a primary site of early investigations into CMC and continues now in research into avatar based communication environments such as MMOGs or ‘Second Life’. Research based in this tradition has emphasised ideas about identity, masquerade, performance and performativity.

A second overlapping tradition has been with the idea of the self in relation to others, to a community or network. This work that begins with investigation of community online, continues through research into people’s use of the home page, and now focuses on Social Network Sites. Here the focus is not on anonymity but on its opposite – self publication. An SNS affords its users the opportunity not only to publish themselves but also, and crucially, to publish their network.

The third strand that runs through the history of net research has to do with resolving the alleged dichotomy or difference between ‘real’ and ‘virtual’ experiences. It has become increasingly clear that we are in need of an epistemological framework that enables us to speak about the complex interplay between our experiences of the ‘virtual’ and the ‘real’, since daily life demands constant interaction between them.

Within this theoretical framework, identity is seen as anything but essential or fixed, on the contrary identity is understood as a fluid process in which ‘self’ and environment are constantly interacting. This idea rests upon the proposition that identity is constructed through discourse. (Or conversely since identity cannot be expressed as anything but discourse it must therefore exist as discourse.) Similarly arguments have long been advanced in sociology that social reality is created through discursive activity.

Generally; the way we talk about (and represent) our experiences somehow creates the possibility for the conditions of those experiences. This convention of thinking about identity as an antiessentialist, disembodied and discursive process derives more recently from Deleuze’s idea of identity as a ‘becoming’ filtered through authors such as Rosi Braidotti who discussed ‘nomadic identity’ in 1994 as a practice involving ‘the affirmation of fluid boundaries, a practice of the intervals, of the interfaces, and the interstices’ (1994: 7).

BY MWINYIJUMA REHEMA

BAPRM III - 42686