Digital Kultur

Identitet

I dag

• What is identity• Identity in cyberspace• Tekst-guides• Øvelser

Who am I?

Identity can be seen as the interface between subjective positions and social and cultural situations... Identity gives us an idea of who we are and of how we relate to others and to the world in which we live. Identity marks the ways in which we are the same as others who share that position, and the ways in which we are different from those who do not.'

(Woodward, 1997: 1-2) ©TurnitToJohn (from FLICKR)

Evolution of identity

Movement: no question to national to personal (Freud) to modern crisis (Giddens) to postmodern dissolutions (Turkle?)

Identity crisis

Stuart Hall (2000) tries to deconstruct the idea of integral, originary and unified identity:

Identities are “increasingly fragmented and fractured; never singular but multiply constructed accross different, often intersecting and antagonistic, discourses, practices and positions. They are subject to a radical historicization, and are constantly in the process of change and transformation.”

(Hall, 2000: 17)

essentialist identity

• Everybody from a country, ethnia, etc. shares a clear authentic set of characteristics with do not alter across time.

• Often claims of common history or culture• Tied to the physical: first territory, later body; i.e.

racial or sexual identity• Disrupted by: globalization, inmigration, break-

ups such as USSR...• Attempts to “recover” identity often produced

against the threat of “the Other” (such as Islam)

(Woodward, 1997: 11-19)

non essencialist identity

• Identity is relational, difference established by symbolic making

• Identity maintained through social and material conditions

• Even biologically grounded identity (such as gender, motherhood, etc) is constructed

• In postmodern theory, a step forward: dissolution of identity (ex. Turkle)

(Woodward, 1997: 12-13)

• Identities are produced at particular points in time (i.e. hippies, women’s liberation movements)

• parameters cut accross each other: class, country, religion, gender...

• Difference as essential to meaning, dichotomies, ex. Cixous: activity/passivity, culture/nature, father/mother, intelligible/sensitive... Important: divisions not equally weighted

• Subjectivity: sense of self, then we adopt identity (Woodward, 1997)

non essencialist identity II

imaginary identity

• When we claim the past as an identity we reconstruct it (Caribbeanness)

• Cultural identity about Becoming, as well as being

• “Difference”, i.e. how Martinique is and is not French

• Main point: we are not only positioned by identity, we can also position ourselves and reconstruct and transform historical identities.

Hall, 1990

group identities

• Bourdieu- individuals integrated in “fields”: families, peer groups, work, etc. Each has a material context and symbolic resources.

• We are the same person but have different roles, performance (Goffman)– Impression given– Impression given off

• Giddens: modernity “opens up the project of the self” (is it a threat?)

Identity in cyberspace

Representation: text, images… not bodies

Imaginary identity

Play with identity

Performance & self-staging

In our courseplan

• Identitet• Fælleskab (group identities)• Politik & Etik (class)• Sex & Krop (representation, RL-VL)• Køn (Gender debate)• Subkultur (Identity investment)

Sherry Turkle´s Life on the Screen

"Windows have become a powerful metaphor for thinking about the self as a multiple, distributed system," Turkle writes.

"The self is no longer simply playing different roles in different settings at different times. The life practice of windows is that of a decentered self that exists in many worlds, that plays many roles at the same time." Now real life itself may be, as one of Turkle's subjects says, "just one more window."

Susanne Vega i Second Life

Sherry Turkle´s Life on the Screen

-flexible self: multiple fragments interacting with each other

-she explores why people play MUDS and what kind of experiments they do with identity

- Real life and MUD life blur together along the boundaries "between self and game, self and role, self and simulation"

Alter Ego: Avatars and Their Creators

Tracy Spaight & Robbie Cooper

2007

Digital Kultur/02.10/15

Choose your own

adventure

Mr Bungle (Julian Dibbell)

• The play turns to nightmare

• Virtual and real rape• Reactions• How real are our

avatars?

Digital self-presentation

http://www.ikissyou.org/

"I KISS YOU!!!!!!!" "Who is want to come TURKEY I can invitate ..... She can stay my home ........" "I like music , I have many many music enstrumans my home I can play" "I like to be friendship from different country"

(Mahir website, 1999)

Who killed kate modern?

Spinoff of Lonelygirl15

Identity as connections, relationships, shopping

preferences?

give us a break!

Tekst-guides

-Cheung: self-representation, construction of identity, negotiation/exploration, becoming, impression given/given off

-Stone: you are still a dog on the Internet! About cyberdiscourse.

Til næste uge

• lÆS– Cavanagh, Allison. 2007. Sociology in the Age

of the Internet. – Bakardjieva, Maria. 2003. "Virtual

Togetherness: and Everyday-life Perspective".

• INGEN ØVELSER I NÆSTE UGE!

Bibliography BOURDIEU, P. 1984. Distinction: a social critique of the judgement

of taste. Cambrige, MA: Harvard University Press. CIXOUS, Hélène. 1975. “Sorties” In MARKS, 1980. French

Feminisms: an anthology. Amherst: The University of Massachussetts Press.

DIBBELL, Julian. “A rape in Cyberspace”. (http://www.juliandibbell.com/texts/bungle.html)

GIDDENS, Anthony. “’Modernity and Self-Identity’ Tribulations of the Self”.

GOFFMAN, Erving. 1959. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Doubleday.

HALL, Stuart. 1990. “Cultural Identity and Diaspora”, in Rutherford, J. (ed). Identity: community, culture, difference. London: Lawrence and Wishart.

HALL, Stuart. 2000. “Who needs “identity”?”. In duGay, P. (ed) Identity: a reader. London: Sage

TURKLE, Sherry. 1995. Life on the Screen. WOODWARD, Kathryn. 1997. “Concepts of Identity and

Difference”. In Identity and Difference. London: Sage.