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Under Construction: Cyberspace and Identity
The media present all kinds of stories and items that can be totally different, and we receive them all together. They provide recourses, context and practices to our identity. By watching the news, surfing on the Internet and listening to music we are informed about the war in Iraq, the personal lives of friends who live far away, showbiz news and the latest hit of Britney Spears. Giddens speaks about the collage effect. How can we make a stable narrative of the world and ourselves? Giddens argues:
"A collage is by definition not a narrative, but the coexistence of different items in mass media does not represent a chaotically jumble of signs. The separate stories, which are displayed alongside one another express orders of consequentiality typical of a transformed time and space environment. There is no single narrative."
According to Giddens, there is no single narrative. We ourselves may not have one single narrative. With the windows on the computer, we can open one to write a letter, one to chat, another to play a game, and another to read an online magazine. When we see the world as a stage, with actors, a front and a back, as Goffman did , we present ourselves in our work, at parties, on the Internet, in our family, and have moments with nobody around when we watch television or read a book.
I will try to show how the Internet can work as a place for presentation and experimentation. Firstly, I will introduce the concepts liminality, from the anthropologist Victor Turner and 'Virtual Moratorium', from the psychoanalyst Sherry Turkle. She argues that role-playing games on the Internet can be a tool for experimenting with identity, because it's anonymity guarantees more freedom than daily life. Secondly, I will focus on the social network that the Internet can become. I will focus on identity by using the example of personal profiles that are offered by networking sites such as Facebook.
All these environments create different narratives that together form the collage of our lives. Cyberspace is an important space for expression, experimentation and social contacts. In this chapter, I will explore the possibilities for the construction of identity with new media, especially the Internet. The construction of identity on the internet occurs in a space without face-to face contact. People can browse the Internet anonymously and experiment, but can also use it for social contacts, by using email, and joining communities or role-playing games. It is possible to experiment freely with taking different roles and behaving differently, by, for example, taking another name or gender. Besides, people can present themselves as 'real' persons, and interact about their work and private life, as is often done at so-called weblogs. The work of the anthropologist Victor Turner can be enlightening to distinguish between those features. In his book From Ritual to Theatre, he describes social interaction as 'social drama', which coincides with Goffman's metaphor of the stage. Turner became interested in the 'rites-de-passage', transition periods. One of the most important transition periods is the transition from child to adult. In many primitive societies, this is a period where teenagers can transgress familiar values. Turner calls this the 'liminal period'.
"… an extended liminal phase in the initiation rites of tribal societies is frequently marked by the physical separation of the ritual subjects from the rest of society. (…) Ritual symbols of this phase, though some represent inversion of normal reality, characteristically fall into two types: those of effacement and those of ambiguity or paradox."
The concept of a limen, a margin, resembles to the period of puberty in western societies, where teenagers are allowed to experiment. The psychoanalyst Erik Erickson has introduced the term 'moratorium' . It is a stage in the adult life where it is more or less allowed to experiment with relations, lifestyle, sexuality, alcohol, smoking, and drugs. This moratorium is not without risks, and adults can be punished by family, school or government, when things get out of hand. In cyberspace, it is possible to experiment with relations, identity, and many other things without any physical consequences like getting drunk, pregnant, or caught by the police.
A Virtual Moratorium
The American Psychologist Sherry Turkle describes how people play with their identities in so-called Multi User Domains in her book Life on the Screen (1996). These MUD's often contained role-playing elements based on the face-to-face role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons that became popular in the 1970's.
"In Dungeons and Dragons, a dungeon master creates a world in which people take on fictional personae and play out complex adventure. The game is a rule-driven world that includes charisma points, levels of magic, and rolls of the dice."
When Turkle conducted her research, these MUD's were not yet the three-dimensional graphical virtual worlds of Second Life, but instead were text-based. In these virtual text-based worlds, players connected to the computer could play in fantasy worlds, create virtual characters and interact with each other. They could experiment with many things without physical consequences.
Turkle describes several players for whom playing in virtual worlds functions as a kind of virtual moratorium, a place where they can experiment with their identity. These players often had great problems managing their lives, but in cyberspace they did not experience these real-life limitations. Persons who were to shy to interact face-to-face could, in a role-playing game, become highly successful. They could become popular, make friends, and even get married with another virtual personage. Turkle describes the example of Robert. He came from a broken family, his father being an alcoholic. He had an intense relationship with his mother, but this came to an end when he went to college. He felt very lonely and was also afraid that he mightbecome an alcoholic, just like his father. A friend of him introduced him to the world of MUDs. Shortly after, he became highly involved, playing eighty hours a week. He took many responsibilities as an administrator where he had to program the database, recruit people, teach the rules, and solve conflicts in the online community. The experience of getting responsibility and being valued by others made his offline life change as well. After a year, his college took back the computer that he leased, but by then he did not need the virtual world anymore.
(..) Robert acted out certain of his troubles on the MUDs. (…) After he was confident that he could function responsibly and competently on MUDs, Robert wanted to try the same behavior in real life. (…) He was able to use MUDDing as an environment in which he could talk about his feelings in a constructive way. In the real world Robert found it painful to talk about himself because he often found himself lying about such simple things as what his father did for a living. Because it was easier to "walk away" from conversations on the MUD, Robert found that it was easier to have them in the first place."
In short, playing online with a virtual identity and getting responsibilities, helped Robert to cope with real life. Afterwards, he was able to get a job, and to make friends more easily. Playing on a MUD was a kind of therapy.
Of course, not all players were able to improve their offline life, and playing in these virtual environments could also become an addiction. However, it is clear that online activities can affect offline life. We can consider the time people like Robert spend in these MUD's as a transition period, the liminal period or the moratorium. They can invert values, try new identities, and change their attitudes. This moratorium is not just applicable to a well-defined transition period as it happens in primitive societies. The virtual moratorium can appear when people connect to the Internet and experiment at any stage in their lives. There are always times and places separated from 'daily life', where people can 'play', apart from work and institutions. Victor Turner calls this the liminoid . Where the liminal is integrated in social-biological rhythms and transitions, the liminoid is more concerned with play and entertainment apart from daily life. Liminoid places are bars, pubs and social clubs. Internet communities can also certainly be perceived as a liminoid.
Social Media
While Turkle focuses on the playful element and the possibility for experimenting, it is clear that the interaction and construction of identity on the Internet are also a social thing. A person ascribes meaning to life in a social context, and online identity construction is part of that. The Internet greatly increases the opportunity to find information about established religion, but also provides room for new spirituality and communication with others about these subjects.
The Swedish sociologists Lövheim and Linderman describe teenagers who used the Internet to construct and develop their religious identity. Alruna, a 19 year old student found information about Wicca on the Internet and constructed a personal homepage herself. She now describes herself as witch. Though she may not find many persons in her environment who share the same interests and beliefs, the web is a perfect place to find information and to communicate with others.
"The problem is that it has been very difficult to find people who share my thoughts, and who are interested in this as strongly as I am. … I don't know what or where I would have been today if I hadn't had the Internet, actually. Because it helped me so incredibly in getting contacts and knowing where to find this and that. It wouldn't have worked otherwise."
This is also the case with David, a 23-year-old operator at a computer company. He is webmaster of an evangelical conservative homepage in Sweden. Evangelicals are a minority there, but online they can get information and interact with like-minded people.
"I come from a Christian context where… there is no interest in these kinds of discussions and debates. Now, I'm the kind of person who brings it up anyway, right or wrong, but you don't get much of a response in a context where people are not interested. I think the Internet can be a forum for people, who cannot find room for this kind of discussion in their congregations, for example."
Lövheim and Linderman conclude that relationships on the Internet are interdependent in the constructions of collective identities. People can search for information and fellowship, and are formed by the people with whom they interact. It can become a virtual liminoid; these communities exist apart from the central structures and operate in the 'margin' of the World Wide Web. On the Internet, social capital might develop social capital and social trust. The relationships online may be very different from traditional religious communities. However, these communities are also changing in real life, as I showed in the chapter ' The Pilgrim'.
The hypermedial self
"In digital media today, the practice of hypermediacy is most evident in the heterogenous "windowed style" of World Wide Web pages, the desktop interface, multimedia programs, and video games."
In creating our identity, especially online, we are, just like websites, always under construction. We can cut and paste what we like from several sources and combine them to a heterogeneous collage. Bolter and Grusin call the windowed style of media, where sound, text and images appear next to each other, hypermedia. With several windows, we can switch from one source to the other. In the discussion about the construction of identity and the role of new media, it is important to realize that it is possible for people without technical skills to create media. Jos de Mul described in 2002 how people could present themselves on a personal homepage, and construct an image of who they are (bricolage). To be able to construct a homepage, some knowledge about web design is necessary. Today, even this is not necessary anymore, because personal profiles can be made with a few clicks of the mouse. This enables us to create a hypermedial self, a collage of different elements existing together.
The possibilities for expression and creativity by new media are endless. Personal media like the mobile phone, the mp3 player, PDA's, game consoles like the X-BOX, Nintendo and the emergence of a more interactive internet, the so-called Web 2.0 like Youtube and Facebook all contribute to a media landscape that is pervasive. A western society without mobile phones and email is unthinkable nowadays. A great difference with the 'old' media, such as television and radio, is the interactivity and the degree unto which those media can become personalized. People have the choice between a large variety of 'gadgets' that suit their personal lifestyle.
New Media, especially the Internet, are the new 'stage' upon which people can express and present themselves. Personal websites used to be limited to those who were technically skilled, but today everyone can create a Hyves or a Facebook account, and even children can put their self-made videos on Youtube. With regard to identity, those features are extremely important, especially for adults who experiment with their identity. They communicate with their friends by mobile phone (sms), MSN or another form of Chat, and meet new people online. These media permit them to have conversations without the face-to-face interaction that puts limitations on behavior. Conversations by chat or sms can become much more personal and intimate and can therefore play an important role in their identity construction. This intimateness can, however, have negative consequences when people record intimate conversations or secretly film sexual encounters and put a collage on the Internet. The so-called cyber bullying can deeply hurt children and adults by putting private lives on the Internet, making them available to the whole world.
It is fascinating to see how much information people put on their personal profile. The example of Hyves, an originally Dutch facebook-like profile website, can illustrate this. On a personal profile you can find information about their living place, age, relationships, friendships, and sometimes their email-address. Profiles can contain 'Krabbels' (short messages); conversations with others, as well as blogs, pictures, photos and videos. Some people secure their profiles, when having a job interview, because employers too can google them and find information that would not contribute to their image as stable, serious and hardworking people. One of the most important connections on Hyves is the 'friend' feature. You can connect with others by inviting them to become your friend. Those friends are displayed on your personal page. Those personal profiles show well how important the identity is, on the net as well in 'offline' life. The offline life and online life are blurring into each other, because many offline contacts continue online or by SMS. The technological sophistication of mobile phones makes it possible to have a digital camera, telephone and Internet browser in the same device.
Conclusion: Personal Experimentation and Social Interaction
Cyberspace can be anonymous and social. Many people experiment with identity, search for spirituality and can express their creativity. The examples in this chapter show that the virtual communities can provide sources for social experimentation, as is the case in the MUDs that Sherry Turkle describes. Of course, it is possible to create a fictional identity on the Internet, because, as the joke goes, on the Internet, o-one knows that you are a dog. Internet communities can provide a virtual moratorium, providing recourses for important transitions. On the other hand, the Internet provides a stage where individuals can present themselves, interact, and form their opinions and identities. It encourages presenting a self that is always under construction. People can easily create personal profiles, upload personal movies, and join all kinds of communities. These communities can be religious, and thus contribute to religious identity, but new forms of spirituality are also flourishing online. The individual can create his or her own 'hypermedial self', a collage of different media sources. This creation can be very playful, (including funny pictures, video's, jokes, seemingly irrelevant messages), but should nonetheless be taken seriously. In the chapter 'Spiritual Identification in Virtual Worlds', I will elaborate more on playful side of identity.