“Constructing a virtual representation of one’s self…”

“Constructing a virtual representation of one’s self…”
The virtual representations of one’s self in online and new media spaces is somewhat of a misnomer. Although many researchers like Nakamura, Miller and Slater have articulated well the negative aspects of online representations of self as manifestations of identity tourists or conspicuous consumers, their generalizations tend to represent online representation too blandly, that is as entirely virtual and separate from the person who mediated it, that is pure performance. Online avatars have been found to provide real opportunities for users to explore avenues of self-representation beyond the body, as Mary Flanagan establishes in the “Next Level: Digital Activism Through Gaming,” and Nick Yee and Jeremy Bailenson put forth in their article on dealing with SIDE theory and self-representation in, “The Proteus Effect.” However, their respective research does not indicate that the avatars or profiles that users create are actually closer to real identification than people tend to think. In fact, most current research deals with the thought of online identity as virtual, only near to the real and separate from it.
Online representations of self are so often considered virtual; and yet, if one were to communicate via a paper letter or résumé, the self represented therein would be considered real. I ask, “What is the difference in the mediated self that one represents through one medium as opposed to another?” Admittedly, the print résumé uses different conventions for expression and a different medium by which to communicate those expressions of identity; however, when a person is hired based on their résumé, it is expected to have been truthful representation of who they really are. Why is online identification considered to be so different, if not devoid altogether of truth? Bolter and Grusin in Remediation: Understanding New Media, offer up some interesting perspectives on the how the mediated self is merely remediated through online spaces and should not necessarily be considered as “virtual”, even if they argue that the act of creating an online self is an act of freedom, indicative of performance. The use of virtual identity seems to call for a syncristic neologism, such as mediated, because virtual infers that the entirety of identifications that takes place in online spaces are simulations, something that is a simulacrum of the self and thus only near to it, even outside of it. Moreover, the use of the term virtual denies the presence of a skepticism associated with the term, which denies any acknowledgement and responsibility to the identity claims made under its “banner”. In the Levinasian sense, the use of virtual denies the acknowledgment of that “otherwise than being, and that one’s life is in the hands of others, stripping the responsibility that online individuation has worldly consequences. Additionally, the continued use of virtual prevents invitation for outside assessment on our being and actions.
Bolter’s and Grusin’s idea is that mediated, online identities are part of a larger self, and are only one or a small component of the collective identities that individuate a person (Bolter and Grusin 232). Dana Boyd’s work on the creation of social profiles in “Why Youth (Heart) Social Networking Sites,” offers an interesting if not alternative facet to the idea that the online self is mediated, rather than virtual. Her study of youth behaviors regarding the creating and reading of social networking profiles as “dictated by social protocols,” belie any notions that virtual representation of self, whether bodily or otherwise, are somehow not actual and exist outside of society and devoid of consequences beyond the realm of online spaces. Scholars can keep referring to virtual identities if they like, but the consequences of those identity formulations in online spaces have effects that can be seen daily in everyday spaces. Therefore, mediated identities are not only facilitated by the technologies, but also by the peer groups that develop protocols for what constitutes acceptable online identity creation and representation, thus adding a layer of identity formation that is akin to that found in waking life. We are judged by our peers and represent ourselves to social expectation in both in-the-flesh and online spaces and situations, by making claims, as rhetorical posturing if you will, to who we are and desire to be. There is little that is virtual about it, other than the reliance on coding to represent our descriptions of self.
Interestingly, Boyd’s work with youth identity formation through online social networking sites, directly contradicts Bolter’s and Grusin’s statement that “in a virtual environment, we have the freedom to alter ourselves by altering our point of view and to empathize with others by occupying their point of view” (Bolter and Grusin 232). As Danah Boyd notes, social protocols dictate most online behaviors, which prevent, to a great extent, true identity tourism or a mediated self that is totally divested from the profile/avatar creator’s waking life identity. As a Nakamura critiques in Cybertypes, “the celebration of the internet as a democratic, “raceless” place needs to be interrogated” (32). Nakamura found that those who present themselves online as being of another race or gender, so often employ and redeploy stereotypical representations of race and gender, which are too often mediated by social practices in “eminently social spaces,” (54) that there is no possibility for true empathetic inhabitation of an identity that is not one’s own. Any claims to identity will be discovered to be false, and future claims will be denied, where the likelihood is to place them back into virtual. Attempts to obfuscate one’s identity will be revealed. Moreover, Nakamura, whose area of study is race representations online, claims that “though it is true that users’ physical bodies are hidden from other users, race has a way of asserting its presence in the language users employ, in the kinds of identities they construct, and the ways they depict themselves online, both through languages and through graphic images” (Nakamura 31). When compared to Boyd’s research dealing specifically with how users develop and disseminate profiles in socially and technologically mediate online spaces, which are subject to social protocols, the question is raised again, whether or not online identifications are truly virtual, or merely fragments of a larger individuation and identification process? Additionally, is the process of self-identification in online spaces, which researchers like Bolter and Grusin have espoused is an agentive act offering freedom to users to recreate themselves as they see fit truly a virtual experience?
Bolter and Grusin maintain that self-identification online is a result of users’ choices; however, sociologist like Manuel Castells, maintains that regardless of where it takes place, identity formation “always takes place as a social construction,” (7) something that was equally revealed through the work of Danah Boyd. So is online identity construction truly free, and up to the users’ choices, or are they adjunct manifestations of identity expectations similar to those we practice with our family, friends, coworkers, and peer groups? Mary Flanagan’s in “Next Level: Women’s Digital Activism through Gaming,” found evidence during the course of her research to suggest that “in many ways the current technologies reinforce the class hierarchy, gender imbalance and ethnic discrimination” (359). Flanagan found that although women gamers, who created avatars that were not always necessarily close representation of themselves, the social expectation from off-line environments found their way into online spaces. Likewise, Holloway and Valentine reassert Smith’s summation from Voices from the WELL, in Cyberkids: Children in the information age, that “despite the unique qualities of the social spaces to be found in virtual worlds, people do not enter new terrain empty-handed. We carry with us the sum-total of our experiences and expectations generated in more familial social spaces” (10). In brief, research upon researcher has found that identity construction, claims to who we are that take place in virtual spaces, seems to be as reliant on social protocols and all the multitude of other social and psychological dimensions of identification when one creates the self in more familiar off-line social spaces. It seems still seems somewhat absurd to refer to identities as being virtual, near to real, but not quite. This brief discussion is a call for syncrisis, in order to find a more apt term for the process that takes place when people struggle to represents themselves online. In fact, maybe the separation will cease. The stasis has already begun to some extent in the legal system, whether or not the online crime and criminal is dealt with like any other.

Works Cited
Bolter, Jay David and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. MIT Press: Cambridge, MA, 1999.
Boyd, Danah. “Why Youth (Heart ) Social Networking Sites: The Role of Networked Publics in Teenage Social Life” in MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Learning – Youth, Identity, and Digital Media Volume. David Buckingham, ed. MIT Press: Cambridge, MA, 2008. 1-26.

Castells, Manuel. The Power of Identity: The Information Age: Economy, Society, and Culture. Volume II. Blackwell Publishing: Malden, MA, 2004.

Flanagan, Mary. “Next Level: Women’s Digital Activism through Gaming”. in Digital Media Revisited: Theoretical and Conceptual Innovation in Digital Domains. by Gunnar Liestøl, Andrew Morrison, and Terje Rasmussen. Eds. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2003.MIT Press: Cambridge, MA 2003. 359-370.
Holloway, Sarah L. and Gill Valentine. Cyberkids: Children in the Information Age. RoutledgeFalmer: London, 2003.
Nakamura, Lisa. Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity on the Internet. Routledge: New York, 2002.
Miller, Dan and Don Slater. The Internet: An Ethnographic Approach. Berg: Oxford, 2000.
Yee, Nick and Jeremy Bailenson. “The Proteus Effect: The effect of Transformed Self-Representation on Behavior” in Human Communication Research. International Communication Association, 2007. (33)271-290.



Although online spaces have very often been referred to as virtual space where virtual communities arise and operate, my experience with social networking sites, like MySpace, Facebook and others, is that using them takes up real time, has real means which users use to purpose themselves and others, and have very real social protocols and consequences when it comes to user participation. Danah Boyd outlined the key features of social networking sites, or what she refers termed “networked publics,” as consisting of spaces where online users create profiles that are publically articulated. Boyd writes in “Why Youth (Heart) Social Networking Sites,” that while technological information gives them [users] the wherewithal to craft a profile, the interpretation and articulation of this performance is dictated by social protocols” (11). Moreover, the networked public profile can be seen as “a form of the “digital body,” (13) where individuals must write themselves into being. Nick Yee and Jeremy Bailenson in “the Proteus Effect,” suggest that since “the avatar is the primary identity cue in online environments,” (275) deindividuation occurs due to anonymity or reduced social clues,” because “the ability for the body to serve as a critical site of identity is simply not possible in online spaces” (275). Holloway and Valentine espouse similar researcher sentiment in Cyberkids: children in the information age, claiming that “the human body is regarded not only as invisible on-line but also as temporarily suspended such that it becomes a complete irrelevance” (60); however, this does little to contradict their findings that people, regardless of age, “do not enter new terrains empty-handed.” Through their study, they found that online users “bring the sum-total of their experiences and expectations generated in more familiar social-spaces,” (10) to online environments, such as social networking sites. In fact, Bolter and Grusin in Remediation: Understanding New Media, claim that the networked self is made up both of that self that is doing that networking and the various selves that are presented in the network” (233), in addition to all the other selves and multiple facets (various selves), thereof, that inhabit online social networking environments. The virtual self is not really completely disembodied at all, but rather a mediated self that is expressed through alternative communicative practices, like email and other forms of the symbolically remediated body. Bolter and Grusin found that “while text, images, audio and video all provide valuable means for developing a virtual presence, the act of articulation differs from how we convey meaningful information” that is not entirely comprised of body only representation. And, although online identification is done through variety of media and modes, those “skills that people need to interpret situations and manage impressions are different,” because “bodies are not immediately visible” in mediated environments (Boyd 12). Researchers like Danah Boyd found such social protocols to be operating amongst networked publics. Furthermore, social protocols do harbor real, corollary identification effects, similar to those that are taking place in any socially dense environment. It is conceivable to say that networked publics, like Facebook and MySpace, which “both services attract around 115 million people to their respective sites each month,” writes Michael Arrington from “Tech Crunch,” operate as highly, socially dense environments where deindividuation and attempts at reindividuation of the remediated, “oscillating identity” takes place as part of a natural socio-biological process.
Émile Durkheim found that “high social density increased the probability of there being similar social actors, i.e. social actors concerned with the same aims and the same end, for whom the chances of attaining those ends would be unequal” (Tajfel 286). Henri Tajfel claims that high density refers to not only to the number of individuals, but also to their similarities and interdependence (286-287). If considered to be real environments that are simply mediated, any attempts at reindividuation by users of Facebook and MySpace should be considered natural phenomena. Tajfel writes in Differentiation between Social Groups: studies in the social psychology of intergroup relations, that “when social comparison threatens identity, it tends to lead to differentiation of the social field rather than to converge on the part of the social agents” (286). “The expression of the social field,” claims Tajfel, “is a milder form of resolution of the struggle for survival, since there is no longer a question of elimination but of coexistence in a more heterogeneous system” (287). He continues, claiming that “social agents create, as they act and live with others, new areas of acting and living,” (269) which social networking sites could very well be considered, since they “provide the basis for the expression of the social field which becomes progressively more differentiated” (269). The question, however, is that as we change our self-representations, do our self-representations change our behaviors in turn? This prompted researchers Yee and Bialenson to tease out what SIDE researchers commonly held about attempts by people to reindividuate, except with a focus on online space. In “The Proteus Effect,” they write that Zambardo, “originally used deindividuation theory to argue that urban or crowded areas cause deindividuation that leads to antisocial behavior;” however, it has also been shown that deindividuation can lead to affiliate behavior as well, (273) what we night normally consider to be niches, cliques, or peer group, which make similar claims to identity in efforts to invite inclusion.
However, Yee and Bailenson, two researchers that have merged SIDE theory and the study of social networking sites, found that the responses by particular members of the networked publics, especially those that naturally desire to reindividuate themselves, is not always anti-social. In fact, they found that “behavior that is typically seen as anti-normative, such as flaming on message boards, may in fact turn out to be normative and expected in particular contexts,” (Yee and Bailenson 274) which does not necessarily mean that it is a direct attempt at reindividuation, rather than a fulfillment of a social protocol or expected behavior norm. It can suggest, however, that even in online environments, certain behaviors are to be expected just as in any other social setting that might be considered natural. Danah Boyd’s first detailed examination into social networking behavior, Taken Out of Context, found that participants of the social networking site, Friendster, “socially constructed” the rapidly increasing community and made attempts to distinguish themselves from other users. When Friendster resisted users attempt to identify as they saw fit, users jumped ship, finding a new home on MySpace and, eventually, Facebook. MySpace, in particular, which allow users to customize their personae (online identities), are natural sociological responses to the increase in social density on the web, which I will claim is why they have to a large extent become so popular. Still to come is whether or not users of Facebook will become tired of the limited profile adjustments that seem at times like a Microsoft résumé template, millions of which are available to the online job recruiter, and are equally ignored in equally large numbers. It is a natural response for people to try to reindividuate themselves, many times reinvent themselves, amongst the growing number of people. For the first time, it seems, researchers are taking recognition of common sociological phenomena happening in virtual spaces. In short, social networking sites enable user to differentiate themselves from the herd, where before, internet tools like email and even chatrooms prevented proper identification due partly to disembodiment. People’s desire to individuate themselves in times and spaces of high socials density, something that has been determined to be a natural phenomena, is facilitated by social networking web spaces.


Works Cited
Bolter, Jay David and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. MIT Press: Cambridge, MA, 1999.
Boyd, Danah Michele. Taken Out of Context: American Teen Sociality in Networked Publics. University of California, Berkley, 2008.
Boyd, Danah. “Why Youth (Heart ) Social Networking Sites: The Role of Networked Publics in Teenage Social Life” in MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Learning – Youth, Identity, and Digital Media Volume. David Buckingham, ed. MIT Press: Cambridge, MA, 2008. 1-26.

Castells, Manuel. The Power of Identity: The Information Age: Economy, Society, and Culture. Volume II. Blackwell Publishing: Malden, MA, 2004.

Holloway, Sarah L. and Gill Valentine. Cyberkids: Children in the Information Age. RoutledgeFalmer: London, 2003.
Nakamura, Lisa. Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity on the Internet. Routledge: New York, 2002.
Yee, Nick and Jeremy Bailenson. “The Proteus Effect: The effect of Transformed Self-Representation on Behavior” in Human Communication Research. International Communication Association, 2007. (33)271-290.