From virtual communities to social network sites: Changing perspectives on online identity and social relations
Since their inception in the early and middle Nineties, the issue of online identity formation and online sociality has received great attention within Internet Studies. However, this line of research has witnessed a relevant shift from an initial emphasi
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Since their inception in the early and middle Nineties1, the issue of online identity formation and online sociality has received great attention within Internet Studies. However, this line of research has witnessed a relevant shift from an initial emphasis on the cluster of “disembodied/multiplicity/fantasy” to the contrasting interest on the cluster of “embodied/authenticity/reality” (Baym 2006: 41). This conceptual shift is embedded in at times radically different views of the internet, its relationship with the offline and, more in general, the relationship between technology and society, as well as in diverse concepts of both identity and community. At the same time, this re-framing mirrors the process of domestication (Silverstone/Hirsch 1992; Haddon 2004) of the internet, when it ceased to be “a special thing” (Wellman 2004: 125) in order to become an everyday practice for millions of users. This chapter is aimed at providing a brief review of the wide and interdisciplinary literature on online identity and relationships with a focus on the changing media environment that people inhabit, on the one side, and on the key concepts of the internet, identity and community in which these studies are grounded, on the other.
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Virtual communities and the disembodied self
In the early Nineties, the debate around the internet was polarized among utopian and dystopian perspectives, both grounded in a shared vision of the “cyber-
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Though the study of Computer Mediated Communication (CMC) among social pshychologists dates back to the 1970s, the “first age of the Internet Studies” (Wellman 2004) begun along with a increasing diffusion of the internet in the western societies in the middle of the Nineties.
C. W. Wijnen et al. (Hrsg.), Medienwelten im Wandel, DOI 10.1007/978-3-531-19049-5_10, © Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden 2013
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Giovanna Mascheroni
space” as a completely separated realm of experience, an alternative social space isolated from the physical places of everyday life. Enthusiasts of virtual communities adopted a postmodern notion of the self as fragmented and “saturated” (Gergen 1991) and an ideal concept of ‘authentic’ community, thus celebrating disembodiment as a means for recreating social relationships, which could balance the disappearance of place-based communities in the ‘real’ world. Freed from the spatial and temporal constraints of everyday life, divorced from the embodied self, individuals could engage in the construction and reconstruction of the self online and display multiple identities at the same time – one for each window open on the screen – which had varied relationships with the corporeal self. Liberating people from their social context, mediated encounters would have encouraged a more honest self-disclosure than face-to-face interactions. The playful manipulation of the multiple aspects of the self, it was argued, could also have positive implications in terms of the resolution of offline identity issues: virtual reality was conceived as an “identity workshop” or a “psychos
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