Social Identities
The Internet competes for our time and attention by offering unprecedented autonomy. Password-protected private spaces offer a vault in which a secret identity experiments and grows. Unmediated message boards offer platforms for a secret identity to communicate as a public persona. The mirroring and replication on which the Internet depends offer security and fragmentation; most importantly the opportunity for more than one identity to persist. The owner of personae is not committed to any one identity. Because commitment is not required by digital technology, the integration of the characteristics of self becomes networked narratives, self-reflective stories for the group.
Online, identity can become a series of ingress points to digital personae, experimental selves constructing unique life stories that reveal and/or hide identity. That’s the gist I took from Wängqvist & Frisén’s research paper, Why am I online? Understanding the Meaning of Online Contexts for Identity Development (2016) that provides a coherent context for understanding identity exploration through self-presentation in social interactions, online and off. The most common categories of self explored online were sexuality and ethnicity.
Reading this shocking fun fact in the paper “Digital Identity Formation: Socially Being Real and Present on Digital Networks” (Bozkurt & Tu, 2016), 48% of 18–34-year-olds check Facebook when they wake up and 28% of 18–34-year-olds check Facebook before they sleep, the convergence of on- and offline activity seems to be entrenched in a near majority of adults. This trend has continued according to the Pew Research Center who reported last year that 49% of US adults who responded to their survey visited Facebook several times a day.
In Bozkurt & Tu’s opinion, activity online follows the same patterns as recreational and social offline activity, primarily flirting, networking, and interacting. Educational reasons for internet use, such as research for learning and content creation, were not on the list. I agree with the authors’ point of view, and the Pew data seems to support their idea that the research focuses on social media as a factor in identity development, but not the general use of the Internet. Trying to find more detailed statistics that included less socially-related categories was a challenge. The best I found was a report about mobile internet usage on Statista, still mostly recreational and social.
Alec Couros’s TEDTalk, Identity in a Digital World, tied these themes together. Because the Internet decreased the default level of effort of content sharing — default it is now effortlessly public — new complexities threaten our well-being and identity (or identities). This complex system enabling us to instantly share information continues to be passively public, augmenting the lives of others when they pull our content into their lives, and when the content platforms push it through their notification mechanisms. He said that forgetting is impossible, citing a teenage bill of rights from 1945 (allowing them to make mistakes) and the EU effort to create a right to be forgotten.
His final point was that modeling and cultivating positive online relationships — which he suggested is a responsibility of adults, especially parents — would be necessary to mitigate the challenges of our instant and persistent digital age, reinforcing the idea with a great quote, “We systematically overestimate the value of access to information and underestimate the value of access to each other” (Shirky, 2011). While digging into this dilemma, I found a Pew Research summary that offers positive news about how we value our access to each out. When they are determining how much screen time to allow their children, parents of those 5–11 year-olds value other people more. The top three sources for advice are human beings!
During this week’s reading, I was always thinking about how to use social media to enrich students’ classroom experiences. My first thought was that they’re mutually exclusive environments, like this note-to-self “Expecting efficient learning opportunities and classroom discussions to occur on Facebook is like going to your school’s baseball game — as players and/or spectators — expecting a productive discussion about a class topic.” As my focus shifted to self-identity, and how that is influenced by the classroom, I began to see how integration with social media could be useful. That said, checking social media first thing in the morning and at bedtime seems dangerous to me. That frequent repetition diminishes our independence, which is more critical to self-identity than group activities. At least, that is what I believe.
References:
Bozkurt, Aras & Tu, Chih-Hsiung, 2016. Digital identity formation: socially being real and present on digital networks. Educational media international, 53(3), pp.153–167.
Wängqvist, Maria & Frisén, Ann, 2016. Who am I Online? Understanding the Meaning of Online Contexts for Identity Development. Adolescent Research Review, 1(2), pp.139–151.
Couros, Alec. (2015). Identity in a digital world. TEDxTalks. Retrieved February 10, 2022, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pAlIBTgYfDo.
