Online Identity Creation: It's Heathers & Mean Girls, Folks, Forever.

What the assigned readings for this week show us is that the matter of identity is not one with clear boundaries that are easily marked and monitored. Identity creation comes from the liminal spaces where the individual (internal) and the community (external) meet, because neither party has total control over how identity gets constructed. The commonality of these three assigned articles concerns how the forces in play in this space interact.

Online identity construction is, essentially, the same as offline identity construction with the sole difference being that it is far easier to see how this process operates in an online context because--as of this post--the technology used makes it transparent to a savvy observer. We see this most obviously in the identity construction processes at YouTube, where the efforts of the young women and girls we've read about to construct an identity that they control run straight into the counter-effort by others to control the identities of these same female users through the use of Comments, Upvotes/Likes and the View Counter.

These same contentions of identity control exist when one posts on Reddit, Facebook, Google Plus, etc. despite the lack of visceral experience that video provides. The push of a given conception of myself--who I want, and intend, for you the reader to see me as, to identify me as--gets contested by those that respond by voting/Liking the post, commenting on that post, and linking (or not) to that post. Manipulating the technical system to promote or denigrate the original poster is quite effective in seizing control of an online identity and shaping it to one's desire; this is not because you're taking control of the original poster, but rather that you're making the poster a pariah to the observers watching the interaction- this makes identity creation an inherently political act. This is the sort of thing that public relations professionals, and their fellows in marketing and advertising, find fertile ground for their skills and expertise.

The result, therefore, is that the rise of YouTube and similar Internet phenomenon such as Felicia Day's Geek and Sundry as well as FPSRussia--there's your segway for next week--where individuals that understand how to create and control popular perception of your persona become able to exploit this online identity creation process for their own ends, and thus remove some of the amateurism that's commonplace in the social media space. This is not a place where intellect rules--my fellow geeks and nerds, I am sorry to tell you so--but (as with offline identity matters) a realm where, once again, it's charisma that matters most.