From De To Re abstract

Abstract:
From de to re. The social networking sites help users to reindividuate, repersonalize, and recreate online identity.
This article will explore how social networking sites, such as MySpace and Facebook, are enabling users to reindivituate their online identities. I will look to social psychology for insights to the reasons behind people’s desire to reassert their identities in online environments. I will examine current scholarship that has proved useful for examining the reason why online users so often feel the need to re-embody themselves through the guise of alternate personae, what Lisa Nakamura, in Cybertypes, terms identity tourists. After examining what those who participate in social networking sites are doing and how they are doing it, I will look to Henri Tajfel, a social psychologist who is considered the primogenitor of social identification theory. His ongoing, group studies of social dynamics and identity formulation within groups found that “the attempts to achieve differentiation from similar others,” is seen as protective, “against the threat of one’s identity providing at the same time a strong impetus for social creativity and innovation.” Moreover, he found that high social density, such as that found in competitive group dynamics like chatrooms, “increases the probability of their being similar social actors, i.e. social actors concerned with the same aims and the same end.” My claim, which I will discuss much more in depth, is to illuminate the hypothesis that online networking places, which allow the user to customize their persona (online identity), are natural sociological responses to the increase in social density on the web. It is a natural response for people to try to reindividuate themselves, many times reinvent themselves, amongst the growing number of people both off and online. 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.
Annotated Bibliography
Bolter, Jay David and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. MIT Press: Cambridge, MA, 1999.
Bolter and Grusin’s discussion on how online remediation and hypermediacacy have been used to reimagine the self in digital domains is important to the larger discussion, as to why users would choose social networking sites, often in the face of claims that “virtual environments [provide] the freedom to alter ourselves by altering our point of view and the empathize with others by occupying their point of view” (232). I ask the question: how do social networking site splay into the quest for reindividuation? Especially, when one considers claims made by Grusin and Bolter, as well as other scholars studying mediation of the self in online environments, that “newsgroups and emails,…,sometimes threaten to overwhelm users by sheer numbers” (232). It is for this reason, they claim that “the networked self may simultaneous lives in cyberspace and in her physical office” (232). Furthermore, they claim the users many times “constitute their collective identities as a network of affiliations among these other mediated selves” (232) The idea that mediated, online identities are merely part of a larger self is very interesting, because it makes the researcher account for, not only the use of identity as being fixed and solitary, but opens up the discussion about the use of avatars as possibly a more appropriate way to talk about someone’s representation of themselves on social networking sites.
This raises some very interesting questions. Should social networking identities be regarded simply as one facet to the many side a person provides to the world in the outward identification process? Are people like Nakamura (discussed herein) wrong when they make claims that those who represent themselves as something (race, gender, etc.) other than what they “really” are, “identity tourists,” who are engaging in behavior that is deleterious to the larger social group (race, gender, etc) that they have chosen to symbolically and vicariously inhabit? What if a female user who internally really does consider herself to be more male, wants to portray herself as a male on MySpace? What if a white guy from Oregon state really does identify more with black culture than the culture from which he was raised? Are these people true identity tourist exploiting the social networking sites visual aspect, or has social networking sites, allowed them to individuate themselves by expressing a part of their self as a different person, rather than reindividuate themselves as a response to density of users, which social identification theory suggests?
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.

Danah Boyd’s work in social networking really provides the foundation from where my argument will emerge. From her doctoral dissertation, Taken Out of Context: American Teen Sociality in Networked Publics, to her article, “Why Youth (Heart) Social Networking Sites”, her work offers up a continually maturing discourse of what the key feature of social networking sites are, how people learn to “write themselves” via mediated communication environments, and how creating an online profile (identity) is related to performance and social norms. It is from her work that my argument can foment.
In “Why Youth (Heart) Social Networking Sites”, Boyd offers up for consideration a testimonial by a young Xanga user named Vivien (13). Vivien defines herself as an unpopular person because she is cannot either self-label, nor has ever been considered as a cheerleader, the most popular, the prettiest, the funniest, or the smartest girl in school. She instead uses social networking to write about her family vacation photography as means to distinguish herself from her peer. Many examples from Boyd’s work exemplify Tajfel’s stance on SIDE theory and the psychological need for people in high density population to reindividuate themselves in ways that are not necessarily antisocial, such as “flaming” that is a prevalent behavior on message boards.


Campbell, John Edmond. Getting It On Online: Cyberspace, Gay Male Sexuality, and Embodied Identity. Harrington Park Press, New York, 2004.
Campbell ask a question from which my topic and the larger discussion of online identity foments: Why is it that “some individuals feel compelled to present themselves so differently online?” (176) Is the claim that the internet lets users create themselves how they really are, how they promised themselves to be, through either reindividuation or a reimagining of the body accurate? Are they spaces for enacting core values, or are they places for identity play, with both a trammel and a treasure to users, and offline agents who may be represented stereotypically by online social networking users?
Campbell book, although dealing with a group of users, the gay male, who have been traditionally foisted out of normative society, gives an insightful look at how body has been used to create online identity. My aim to is situate Campbell’s claim that gay men, one group amongst many, who use emoticons and qwerty keyboard characters in creative ways to mimic body image, are an example of a contingent of online users who tried to reindividuate themselves prior to the emergence of social networking sites.
Castells, Manuel. The Power of Identity: The Information Age: Economy, Society, and Culture. Volume II. Blackwell Publishing: Malden, MA, 2004.
Castell is useful to the discussion, because, like Bolter and Grusin, he too claims that “for a given individual, or for a collective actor, there may be a plurality of identities.” However, Castells presents a caveat that most of the research, which I have come across, either ignore or does not take into consideration, that a plurality of identities, regardless of where they are expressed, mediated, or established, can “present a source of stress and contradiction in both self-representation and social action” (6).
Additionally, the main reason Castell comes into the discussion is due to his prior work on identification theory and individuation. He provides a perspective on how identity is constructed, maintaining that identity formation “always takes place as a social construction,” (7) marked by power relationships and levels of desire. In this regard, identity then can be thought of as the definition of self. We so often define things by what they are not. When thinking of identity, how does a social networking site user differentiate themselves from others? Do they model themselves against those they feel are markedly different from themselves? How do they reindividuate against the background of the millions of other uses? Does it come partly through the reconstituting of the body? Moreover, Castell couches his larger discussion of identity from a Marxist perspective, which I think is extremely interesting when looking at how identification emerges as social, redindividuating action on social networking sites. By examining identification on social networking sites, from Castell’s perspective, that “the self-construction of identity is not the expression of an essence, but a power stake,” a power claim that’s only essence is power making, it broadens the scope of online identification in way that allows for the incorporation of social identity theory as a biological necessity.
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.
Digital Media Revisited, provided articles that draw on insights from a wide variety of scholarly disciplines, which the contributors use “to construct new positions from which to observe media in fresh and meaningful ways” (back cover). An article found in the book , “Next Level, Women’s Digtial Activism through Gaming,” directly correlates to my research exploration of how online users reindividuate themselves. Flanagan says that “women are at a disadvantage by being historically “tied” to the body,” even if it is virtual, they lose autonomy. The discussions on identity and how the body is imaged and portrayed act as a historical framework, a springboard into the larger discussion surround the reconstituting of identities via online networking sites, like LinkedIn, MySpace, and Facebook. I start be asking the question: Can people recapture some of their bodily identity, in a digital world that has long been considered to be a male constructed communicative domain?
Holloway, Sarah L. and Gill Valentine. Cyberkids: Children in the Information Age. RoutledgeFalmer: London, 2003.
In accordance with other researcher claims, Holloway and Valentine maintain that relationships made online are poor substitutes for the real. “Disembodied identities are viewed as superficial and inauthentic compared with embodied identities” (60). They point out an ironical assumption held by many critics of the internet, “that despite the fact that one of the main uses of ICT (internet communication technology) is for communication, these technologies are often imagined to be anti-social” (130). The conflicting ideas that Holloway and Valentine present in their book, raises some interesting questions and forces researchers to consider the amount of time spent online as a significant factor in how they categorize specific types of internet users.
The findings section of Cyberkids, maintains that research has “shown that ICT do not have any inevitable or fixed outcomes – either positive or negative – rather, they emerge in practice as different tools for different “communication practices”” (156) However, true this may be, when they present anecdotes about children adopting deferring identities online, because it allows them to escape from the confines of the body, often promoted as a fun thing to do, it reminds me of Lisa Nakmura’s critique of identity tourism in her book, Cybertypes. It also raises many question as to why someone would opt to limit the identification through body image, and other, such as the Gay Males portrayed in John Campbell’s book, Getting It On Online, would choose self-objectification via identification by body parts. Additionally, what does this identification behavior say about how people use the internet, in order to escape the need to come to terms with who they are and how they look?
Again, I will aim to relate the information provided in this book to the larger discussion how social networking sites, such as MySpace, partly eliminate anonymity, so often touted as the golden egg of the internet, by requiring that users agree to terms of service clause that require users to submit ''truthful and accurate'' registration information, as well as providing a space for users to create a visual profile.
Nakamura, Lisa. Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity on the Internet. Routledge: New York, 2002.
Cybertypes critical examination of identity tourism adds to the backdrop against which my discussion internet reindividuation takes place.
Many of know people that have made online avatars that are comprised of gender, races, ages, etc., that are different from the one that we inhabit in waking life. Nakamura looks critically at the practice of identity tourism. Her research indicates that identity tourist, after their online experiences as a person of a different race or gender, often comment as though they have experiences what it is like to be black or female, when, for example, they are Caucasian and make.
Nakamura’s examination of online identity tourism, shows that it can be very problematic when online users feel it is of no consequence to dawn and shed identities at will, especially after taking on stereotypical behaviors. She claims that “the romantic, inaccurate, and sometimes overtly racist visions of the orient that circulate in contemporary film, video games, television, and other electronic media are part of the vocabulary of signifying practices that are redeployed on the internet by identity tourists” (59). Moreover, she claims that the internet is a “theater of sorts,” and “celebration of the internet as a democratic, “raceless” place needs to be investigated” (2).
Miller, Dan and Don Slater. The Internet: An Ethnographic Approach. Berg: Oxford, 2000.
Miller and Slater take and interesting look at internet identity formation. There assessment is that the way people choose to portray themselves online, is often a manifestation of consumer practices, making a strong argument that conspicuous consumption is a prevalent factor in online identity construction. Internet identity construction is often viewed “as a means through which one can enact – often in highly idealized from – a version of oneself or culture,” which can lead to misrepresentation of both the user and their respective culture. Moreover, because Miller and Slater believe that the internet provides a “space for enacting core values, practices, and identities,” it allows users “to deliver on pledges that they have already made themselves about themselves” (10). I ask the question: What role have social networking sites played in helping people uphold the promises made to themselves? Are users who portray themselves differently online than they are in waking life really trying to realize the self-made promises about body image, work, consumption, etc.?
Tajfel, Henri. Differentiation Between Social Groups: Studies in the Social Psychology of Intergroup Relations. Academic Press, Inc.: New York, 1978.
Henri Tajfel maintains that “social agents create, as they act and live with others, new areas for activity and living.” “This provides the basis for an expansion of the social field, which becomes progressively differentiated.” Within those differentiations, individuals, either consciously or subconsciously, but always naturally, regard the background, which consists of multiple agents, as a threat to individual identity. Tajfel asserts, the threat of deindividuation “is offset in the course of a search for differentiation and “alterneity”’(269).
Additionally, Tajfel studies found that “when social comparison threatens identity, it tends to lead to differentiations of the social field,” rather than “to converge on the part of the social agents” (269). Social networking sites, at least from an initial surface viewing, seems to follow the Social Identity model, by enabling individuals to reindividuate themselves from others within the network, while maintaining their network identity.
According to Durkheim, who Tajfel incorporates heavily towards establishing his theoretical framework of social identity theory, “high social density increased the possibility of their being similar social actors,” particularly those “concerned with the same aims and the some ends” (286). Social Networking Sites, such as MySpace, Facebook, and LinkedIn, especially for digital native, are natural responses to the increase in social density on the web. It is a natural response for people to try and reindividuate themselves among the growing number of people in the global internet community. Social networking sites provide a space for both finding those who hold similar interest and for user to separate themselves by redeploying the use of body image, arguably the most uniquely identifying characteristic of a human being.
Watt, Susan E., Martin Lea, and Russell Spears. “How Social is Internet Communication?: A Reappraisal of Bandwith and Anonymity Effects”. in Virtual Society?: Technology, Cyberbole, Reality. edited by Steve Woolgar . Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2002. 60-69.
This book and this article, in particular, deal with group behavior in online spaces. Watt, Lea, and Spears provide a nice definition of deindividuation, as being “a state in which self-consciousness had weakened social controls such as guilt, shame, and fear that would normally inhibit anti-social behavior” (66). They take a close look at the problems that can arise when “the lack of interpersonal cues,” which exist in “text-based [communications].” Moreover, they claim that participation in online environments like chat rooms, which can result in deindividuation, “creates interactions that are less socially defined, constrained and regulated – in short, less social than face-to-face interactions” (69). Social identity theory, introduced by Tajfel, maintains that although deindividuation can take place in environments where social densities can attribute to identity suppression, the natural response is for people to reindividuate themselves. Is the incorporation of more thorough identification features by online community/social networking websites, such as MySpace, LinkedIn, and Facebook, as response to the deindividuation? Does the requirement to modify and provide a detailed image/individualized description just make me think this is a natural response to the deindividuation that takes place in internet environments?
“How Social is Internet Communication?” helped to broaden my research approach. The incorporation of ideas from social psychology provides insights into the behavioral patterns that may exist in social networking communities. Additionally, the article provided a nice segue into the research dealing specifically with Social Identification Theory.
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.
Yee and Bailenson provide a nice summation to what Zambardo originally refers to as deindividuation theory. Although they see deindividuation as a real possibility whne they choose to participate in online communities, like those offered by social networking sites, Yee and Bailenson point out nicely that “deindividuation does not necessarily always lead to antisocial behaviors as Zambardo originally argued, but may in fact cause a greater reliance on identity cues whether they are antisocial or prosocial” (273). Furthermore, their critique of Zambardo’s original argument linking deindividuation too strictly antisocial behavior discovered that “deindividuation, in and of itself, does not always lead to antisocial behavior…behavioral changes always depend on the group norms” (274).
“The Proteus Effect” article provides a good base for beginning the discussion of how reindividuation and body portrayal in online environments, and subsequent reidentification, as more than antisocial behavior, but rather a means to stand out among members of increasingly dense social networks. Yee and Bailenson provide a good definition of reindividuation that I can relate to SIDE theory.