Lesson 5: Who am I in the Cyberworld?

(Digital Self)

Lesson Objectives

At the end of this lesson, you should be able to:

1. define online identity;
2. compare real identity versus online identity;
3. describe the influence of internet on sexuality and gender; and
4. discuss the proper way of demonstrating values and attitudes online.

INTRODUCTION
These days, more people are becoming active in using the Internet for
research, pleasure, business, communication, and other purposes. Indeed, the
Internet is of great help for everyone. On the other hand, people assume
different identities while in the cyberspace. People act differently when they are
online and offline. We have our real identity and online identity.

ABSTRACTION
The number of people who are becoming more active online continues to
increase worldwide. More than half of the population worldwide now uses the
Internet. It has only been 25 years since Tim Berners-Lee made the Worldwide
Web available to the public, but in that time, the Internet has already become
an integral part of everyday life for most of the world’s population. The
Philippines is among one of the countries with the most active users (We are
Social and Hootsuite n.d.)
 Almost two-thirds of the world’s population now has a mobile phone.
 More than half of the world’s web traffic now comes from mobile phones.
 More than half of all mobile connections around the world are now
“broadband.”
 More than one in five of the world’s population shopped online in the
past 30 days.

Media users in the Philippines grew by 12 million or 25% while the number of
mobile social users increased by 13 million or 32%. Those growth figures are still
higher compared to the previous year. More than half of the world now uses a
smartphone.

Based on Figure 1, the number of digital users worldwide increases. More

people are becoming interested and devoted in using the Internet for various
activities, in the Philippines, adolescents are among the most avid users of the
Internet.

Online identity is actually the sum of all our characteristics and our
interactions while partial identity is a subset of characteristics that make up our
identity. Meanwhile, persona is a partial identity we create that represents
ourselves in a specific situation.

Selective Self-presentation and Impress Management

According to Goffman (1959) and Leary (1995), self-presentation is the

“process of controlling how one is perceived by other people” and is the key to
relationship inception and development. To construct positive images,
individuals selectively provide information about them and carefully cater this
information in response to one’s feedback.
Anything posted online should be considered “public” no matter what our
“privacy” settings are. Let us say, a student wrote online about how much he
hated another student in school, and started bullying him online. Does it matter
if the student said, “Well, this is my personal account”? Even if the student wrote
it in a “private” account, it can become public with a quick screen capture and
shared with the world. Personal identity is the interpersonal level of self which
differentiates the individual as unique from others, social identity is the level of
self whereby the individual is identified by his or her group memberships.

Belk (2013) explained that sharing ourselves is no longer new and has
been practiced as soon as human beings were formed. Digital devices help us
share information broadly, more than ever before. For those who are avid users
of Facebook, it is possible that their social media friends are more updated
about their daily activities, connections, and thoughts than their immediate
families. Diaries that were once private or shared only with close friends are now
posted as blogs which can be viewed by anyone. In websites like Flickr or
Photobucket, the use of arm’s-length self-photography indicates a major
change. In older family albums, the photographer was not often represented in
the album (Mendelson and Papacharissi 2011), whereas with arm’s-length
photos, they are necessary included (e.g., selfies and groupies). In addition, the
family album of an earlier has become some of an individual photo gallery in
the digital age. As Schwarz (2010) mentioned, we have entered an
extraordinary era of self-portraiture. Blogs and web pages have been
continuously used for greater self-reflection and self-representation. Facebook
and other social media applications are now a key part of self-presentation for
one sixth of humanity. As a result, researchers and participants become
concerned with actively managing identity and reputation and to warn against
the phenomenon of “oversharing” (Labrecque, Markos, and Milne 2011;
Shepherd 2005; Suler 2000; Zimmer and Hoffman 2011). Sometimes people
become unaware of the extent of information they share online. They forget to
delineate what can be shared online and what should not. Furthermore, it
provides a more complete narration of self and gives people an idealized view
of how they would like to be remembered by others (van Dijck 20018). Many
teenagers, as well as some adults, share even more intimate details with their
partners like their passwords (Gesrhon 2010). This could be an ultimate act of
intimacy and trust or the ultimate expression of paranoia and distrust with the
partner.

Because of the conversation of private diaries into public revelations of

inner secrets, the lack of privacy in many aspects of social media make the
users more vulnerable, leading to compulsively checking newsfeed and
continually madding tweets and postings in order to appear active and
interesting. This condition has been called “fear of missing out.” People would
like to remain updated and they keep on sharing themselves online because it
adds a sense of confidence at their end especially if others like and share their
posts. One of the reasons for so much sharing and self-disclosure online is so-
called “disinhibition effect” (Ridfley 2012; Suler 2004). The lack of face-to-face
gaze-meeting, together with feelings of anonymity and invisibility, gives people
the freedom for self-disclosure but can causes people to believe that they are
able to express their “true self” better online than they ever could in face-to-
face contexts (Taylor 2002). However, it does not mean that there is s fixed “true
self.” The self is still a work in progress and we keep on improving and developing
ourselves every single day. Seemingly, self-revelation can be therapeutic to
others especially if it goes together with self-reflection (Morris et al. 2010). But it
does appear that we now do a large amount of our identity work online. When
the Internet constantly asks us: “Who are you?” and “What do you have to
share?”, it is up to us if we are going to provide answers to such queries every
time we use the Internet and to what extent are going to share details of
ourselves to others.

In addition to sharing the good things we experience, many of us also

share the bad, embarrassing, and “sinful” things we experience. We also react
and comment on negative experiences of others. Sometimes, we empathize
with people. We also argue with others online. Relationships may be made
stronger or broken through posts online. Blogs and social media are primary
digital for a on which such confessions occur, but they can also be found into
photo- and video-sharing sites where blunders and bad moments are also
preserved and shared (Strangelove 2011). Why confess to unseen and
anonymous others online? In Foucault’s (1978, 1998) view, confessing our secret
truths feels freeing, even as it binds us in a guilt-motivated self-governance born
of a long history of Christian and pre-Christian philosophies and power structures.

According to Foucault (1998), confession, along with contemplation,

self-examination, learning, reading, and self-critical letters to friends, are a part
of the “technologies of the self” through which we seek to purge and cleanse
ourselves.
 Despite the veil of invisibility, writers on the Internet write for an unseen
audience (Serfaty 2004). Both the number and feedback of readers provide self-
validation for the writers and a certain celebrity (O’Regan 2009). Confessional
blogs may also be therapeutic for the audience to read, allowing both sincere
emphaty and the voyeuristic appeal of witnessing a public confession (Kitzmann
2003).

Consequently, we should have a filtering system to whatever information

we share online, as well as to what information we believe in, which are being
shared or posted by others online. We should look at online information carefully
whether they are valid and true before believing and promoting them. In the
same way, we should also think well before we post or share anything online in
order to prevent conflict, arguments, and cyberbullying, and to preserve our
relationships with others.

Gender and Sexuality Online

According to Marwick (2013), while the terms “sex,” “gender,” and
“sexuality” are often thought of as synonymous, they are actually quite distinct.
The differences between the common understandings of these terms and how
researchers think about them yield key insights about the social functioning of
gender. Sex is a biological state that corresponds to what we might call a
“man” or a “woman.” This might seem to be a simple distinction, but the biology
of sex is actually very complicated. While “sex” is often explained as biological,
fixed, and immutable, it is actually socially constructed (West and Zimmerman
1987). Gender, then, is the social understanding of how sex should be
experienced and how sex manifests in behavior, personality, preferences,
capabilities, and so forth. A person with male sex organs is expected to embody
a masculine gender. While sex and gender are presumed to be biologically
connected, we can understand gender as a socioculturally specific set of norms
that are mapped onto a category of “sex” (Kessler and McKenna 1978; Lorber
1994). Gebnder is historical. It is produced by media and popular culture
(Gauntlett 2008; van Zoonen 1994). It is taught by families, school, peer groups,
and nation states (Goffman 1977). It is reinforced through songs, sayings,
admonition, slang, language, fashion, and discourse (Cameron 1998; Cameron
and Kulick 2003), and it deeply ingrained. Gender is a system of classification
that values male-gendered things more than female related things. This system
plays out on the bodies of men and women, and in constructing hierarchies of
everythin g from colors (e.g., pink vs. blue) to academic departments (e.g.,
English vs. Math) to electronic gadgets and websites. Given this inequality, the
universalized “male” body and experience is often constructed as average or
normal, while female-gendered experiences are conceptualized as variations
from the n orm (Goffman 1977).
 Sexualityis is an individual expression and understanding of desire. While
like gender, this is often viewed as binary (homosexual or heterosexual), in
reality, sexuality is often experienced as fluid.

Performing Gender Online

Theorist Judith Butler (1990) conceptualized gender as a performance.
She explained that popular understandings of gender and sexuality came to be
through discourse and social processes. She argued that gender was
performative, in that it is produced through millions of individual actions, rather
than something that comes naturally to men and women. Performances that
adhere to normative understandings of gender and sexuality are allowed, while
those that do not are admonished (for example, a boy “throwing like a girl”)
(Lorber 1994). In the 1990s, many Internet scholars drew from Butler and other
queer theorists to understand online identity. According to the disembodiment
hypothesis, Internet users are the possibility of creating alternate identities (Wynn
and Katz 1997). The ability of users to self-consciously adapt and play with
different gender identities would reveal choices involved in the production of
gender, breaking down binaries and encouraging fluidity in sexuality and
gender expression.

Recently, social media has been celebrated to facilitating greater cultural

participation and creativity. Social media sites like Twitter and Youtube have led
to the emergence of a “free culture” where individuals are empowered to
engage in cultural production using raw materials, ranging from homemade
videos to mainstream television characters to create new culture, memes, and
humor. At its best, this culture of memes, mash-ups, and creative political
activism allows for civic engagement and fun creative acts. While Digg, 4chan,
and Reddit are used mostly by men, most social network users are women; this is
true in Facebook, Flickr, LiveJournal, Tumblr, Twitter, and Youtube (Chappell
2011; Lenhart 2009; Lenhart et al. 2010). But mere equality use does not indicate
equality of participation. While both men and women use Wikipedia, 87% of
Wikipedia contributors were identified as male (LaVallee 2009). Male students
more likely to create, edit, and distribute digital video over Youtube or
Facebook than female students. However, the Pew Internet and American Life
Project found no discernible differences in user-generated content by gender
except remixing, which was most likely among teen girls (Lenhart et al. 2010).
One explanation for these differences is that user-generated content is often
clustered by gender. Researchers have consistently shown that similar numbers
of men and women maintain a blog—about 14% of Internet users (Lenhart et al.
2010). While the number of male and female bloggers is roughly equivalent,
they tend to blog about different things. Overwhelmingly, certain types of blogs
written and read by women (e.g., food, fashion, parenting), while others (e.g.,
technology, politics) are written and run by men (Chittenden 2010; Hindman
2009; Meraz 2008). Although the technologies are the same, the norms and
more of the people using them differ.

Setting Boundaries To Your Online Self: Smart Sharing

The following guidelines will help you share information online in a smart
way that will protect yourself and not harm others. Before posting or sharing
anything online, consider the following.
 Is this post/story necessary?
 Is there a real benefit to this post? Is it funny, warm-hearted, teachable—
or am I just making noise online without purpose?
 Have we (as a family or a parent/child) resolved this issue? An issue that is
still being worked out at home, or one that is either vulnerable or highly
emotional, should not be made public.
 Is it appropriate? Does it stay within the boundaries of our family values?
 Will this seem as funny in 5, 10, or 15 years? Or is this post betted suited for
sharing with a small group of family members? Or maybe not at all?

Rules to Follow
Here are additional guidelines for proper sharing of information and
ethical uses of the Internet according to New (2014):
 Stick to safer sites.
 Guard your passwords.
 Limit what you share.
 Remember that anything you put online or post on a site is there forever,
even if you try to delete it.
 Do not be mean or embarrass other people online.
 Always tell if you see strange or bad behavior online.
 Be choosy about your online friends.
Be patient.