Digital Identities

Online Identities: Creating and Communicating the Online Self presents a critical investigation of the ways in which representations of identities have shifted since the advent of digital communications technologies. Critical studies over the past century have pointed to the multifaceted nature of identity, with a number of different theories and approaches used to explain how everyday people have a sense of themselves, their behaviors, desires, and representations.

In the era of interactive, digital, and networked media and communication, identity can be understood as even more complex, with digital users arguably playing a more extensive role in fashioning their own self-representations online, as well as making use of the capacity to co-create common and group narratives of identity through interactivity and the proliferation of audio-visual user-generated content online.

• Makes accessible complex theories of identity from the perspective of today’s contemporary, digital media environment
• Examines how digital media has added to the complexity of identity
• Takes readers through examples of online identity such as in interactive sites and social networking
• Explores implications of inter-cultural access that emerges from globalization and world-wide networking

Researchers and graduate students in psychology, digital humanities, media and communications studies, and sociology who deal with issues of identity.

• Cover
• Title page
• Table of Contents
• Copyright
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Ubiquitous Digital Networks, Identity, and the Self
• Chapter 1: Understanding Identity Online: Social Networking
  • Abstract
  • 1. Approaching identity
  • 2. Web 1.0 and online fluidity
  • 3. Profiles and performativity
  • 4. Identity, friendship, and the network
  • 5. Identity, multiplicities, and undoing
• Chapter 2: Performativity, Communication, and Selfhood
  • Abstract
  • 1. Identity in a media-saturated contemporary world
  • 2. Accessing identity information: available and unavailable discourses
  • 3. Mediating the self in a circular world – citationality and reading formations
  • 4. Conclusions: media, normativity, and pedagogy
• Chapter 3: Interactivity, Digital Media, and the Text
  • Abstract
  • 1. Digital media environments and identity today
  • 2. The nature of interactivity
  • 3. Interactivity and the author–text–audience relationship – synergy and struggle
  • 4. Push and pull: audience interactivity in history
  • 5. Reality TV, mixed mediums, and open/closed textualities
  • 6. Digital rights management and flashes: digital wars and interactive struggles
  • 7. Interactive identity
• Chapter 4: Bodies, Identity, and Digital Corporeality
  • Abstract
  • 1. Defining the body
  • 2. Representing corporeality on-screen
  • 3. Body–technology relationalities
  • 4. Body information: the body as a project
• Chapter 5: Identity, Internet, and Globalization
  • Abstract
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. The concept of globalization
  • 3. Global discursivity
  • 4. Global time, fluctuating space
  • 5. Global communication, ethics, and the importance of sound and listening
• Chapter 6: Mobile Telephony, Mobility, and Networked Subjectivity
  • Abstract
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. Mobile devices, accessibility, and ubiquitous connectivity
  • 3. Representing early adopters: from community to network
  • 4. Mobile assemblages, mobilities, and the public/private distinction
  • 5. Conclusions: performativity, identity, and the mobile network
• Chapter 7: Online Selves: Digital Addiction
  • Abstract
  • 1. The diction of addiction
  • 2. The youthful addict – a stereotype
  • 3. Online addiction
  • 4. Gaming addiction and new temporalities
  • 5. Digital/real and the discourse of the addict
• Chapter 8: Digital Surveillance, Archives, and Google Earth: Identities in/of the Digital World
  • Abstract
  • 1. Digital surveillance and contemporary identity
  • 2. Archiving the world
  • 3. Archiving and surveilling the Earth
  • 4. Conclusions: digital identities
• References
• Subject Index