Digital Identities Creating and Communicating the Online Self

Online Identities: Creating and Communicating the Online Self presents a critical investigation of the ways in which representations of identities have shifted since the advent of digital communications technologies. Critical studies over the past century have pointed to the multifaceted nature of identity, with a number of different theories and approaches used to explain how everyday people have a sense of themselves, their behaviors, desires, and representations.

In the era of interactive, digital, and networked media and communication, identity can be understood as even more complex, with digital users arguably playing a more extensive role in fashioning their own self-representations online, as well as making use of the capacity to co-create common and group narratives of identity through interactivity and the proliferation of audio-visual user-generated content online.

Chapter 1: Understanding Identity—Theories and Approaches

Chapter 2: Identity, Behavior, and Performativity

Chapter 3: Identity and Digital Medical—From Virtual Realities to Virtual Identities

Chapter 4: Digital Media and Corporeality

Chapter 5: Identity and Social Networking

Chapter 6: Mobile Information, Mobilities, and Networked Subjectivity

Chapter 7: Identity and the Digital Divide

Chapter 8: Identity, Internet, and Globalization

Chapter 9: Digital Identity and Surveillance

Chapter 10: Identity, Digital Communication, and Community

Chapter 11: Beyond Identity and Normativity

• Makes accessible complex theories of identity from the perspective of today’s contemporary, digital media environment
• Examines how digital media has added to the complexity of identity
• Takes readers through examples of online identity such as in interactive sites and social networking
• Explores implications of inter-cultural access that emerges from globalization and world-wide networking