The Alteration of Personal Identity in a Textual Reality

Much of online communication, such as this blog that I have written and that you are now reading, is textual in nature. Due to the lack of face-to-face interaction, there is disembodiment associated with text-based, online communication. Speaking of computer-mediated communication (CMC), Nayar said, "This mediation marks a radical redefinition of both the individual subjectivity and his/her social experience, where face-to-face is replaced by face-to-screen" (2010, p. 183). Similarly, Kendall reported that there is widely held public opinion that online interaction is not "real" (2004); Kozinets referred to this artificiality as "textual reality" (2010).

Because online communication is not face-to-face, participants can opt for anonymity or pseudonymity; therefore, without repercussion, they may be tempted to alter their personal characteristics and distinct personalities (i.e., their personal identities).

 "However, it bears consideration that alteration, as technological mediation, is nothing new. The social fields we interact in exist quite concretely. The people at the other end of a social networking site or in virtual worlds are no less real that the people who talk to us on the telephone, author books we read, or write us letters. It is true that textual communication omits many aspects of in-person communication, with its tonal shifts, pauses, cracked voices, downward turns of the eye, and so on. However, it may include other important symbolic expressions impossible to transmit through the body." (Kozinets 2010, p. 130)

People can alter their personal identities using other technology, such as the telephone, books, or letters. If people deceive you by using online communication rather than by using the telephone, books, or letters, are the deceivers any less real? 

Many people compartmentalize different portions of their lives by using different personal identities; this is commonly referred to as wearing "different hats." For example, I could speak separately of my distinct identities as a father, nephew, aviator, or researcher. How could you tell the difference between the wearing of  "different hats" and the altering of personal identity? In your research, with what confidence could you detect someone who has altered his or her personal identity? Even if you were sure of an alteration, what would you do differently?

Kendall, L. (2004). Participants and observers in an online ethnography: Five stories about identity, In Jones, M.D., Chan, S.L.S., and Hall, G.J. (eds) Online Social Research: Methods, Issues, and Ethics. Peter Lang. New York.

Kozinets, R.V. (2010). Netnography: Doing Ethnographic Research Online. Sage. Los Angeles, CA, London.

Nayar, P.K., (2010). The New Media and Cybercultures Anthology. Wiley-Blackwell, Chichester, UK.

Notions of Privacy in the Content of Computer-Mediated Communication

Ethical practice in research is guided by federal government regulations (National Archives and Records Administration, Office of the Federal Register) that were inspired by the Belmont Report (National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research, 1979). The Institutional Review Board (IRB) of each university assures that research adheres to the principles written in the federal regulations (Kozinets, 2010). One such principle is that of informed consent; subjects consenting to a research study must clearly understand the facts of the study and the consequences of their participation (Homan, 1991).  However, research can be performed without informed consent if the place and content are public (Svenningsson-Elm, 2009). In this blog, I examine the latter.

What are the notions of privacy in the content of computer-mediated communication? At first, I assumed that people behave rationally, keeping private matters private and not divulging intimate detail to the public. Then I read the following opinion by Bauman.

"The public is colonized by the private; public interest is reduced to curiosity about the private lives of public figures, and the art of public life is narrowed to the public display of the private affairs and public confessions of private sentiments (the more intimate the better). Public issues, which resist such reduction, become all but incomprehensible." (Bauman, 2000, p.37) 

 "For the individual, public space is not much more than a giant screen on which private worries are projected without ceasing to be private or acquiring new collective qualities in the course of magnification: public space is where public confession of private secrets and intimacies is made." (Bauman, 2000, p.40)

According to Bauman, public perception of privacy is in flux. With the steady barrage of reality television, soap operas, and tabloids, it has become increasingly acceptable to reveal private matters to the public. Exposure to private matters in public has changed people's perception of public spaces.

There is a distinctively public nature about computer-mediated communication, such as open chat rooms or web pages. However, it is not so easy to distinguish private content from public content. Perhaps it is not so much a dichotomy, but a continuum of content from private to public. For the researcher, this poses challenges and ethical concerns. Potentially, are we harming some individuals who fail to perceive the public quality of the Internet?  

Bauman, Z. (2000). Liquid modernity. Cambridge, MA. Polity Press.

National Archives and Records Administration, Office of the Federal Register. Code of Federal Regulations Title 45, Part 46, Protection of Human Subjects.

Homan, R. (1991). The ethics of social research. London; New York: Longman

Kozinets, R.V. (2010). Netnography: Doing Ethnographic Research Online. Sage. Los Angeles, CA, London.

Markham, A. N. & Baym, N. K. (2009). Internet inquiry. Los Angeles: Sage Publications.

National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research (1979). Belmont Report: Ethical Principles and Guidelines for the Protection of Human Subjects of Research, Report of the National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research. 

Svenningsson-Elm, M. (2009). How do notions of privacy influence decision in qualitative internet research? Internet inquiry. Markham, A. N. & Baym, N. K. (eds.). Los Angeles: Sage Publications.

A Critique of Manovich

New media is a term for on-demand and interactive access to media made possible by the proliferation of information and communications technology (ICT) during the recent two decades (Manovich, 2003). In his book, The Language of New Media, Dr. Lev Manovich contrasts narrative as a form of cultural expression with what he calls "database" - his metaphor for the culture of new media.

"As a cultural form, the database represents the world as list of items, and it refuses to order that list. In contrast, a narrative creates a cause-and-effect trajectory of seemingly unordered items (events). Therefore, database and narrative are natural enemies. Competing for the same territory of human culture, each claims an exclusive right to make meaning out of the world." (Manovich, 2001)

Contrary to Manovich's claim, structure is a quality of a database. However, new media is characterized by beautifully unstructured free text, free tagging of photographs and video.

 "The new media object consists of one of more interfaces to a database of multimedia material. If only one interface is constructed, the result will be similar to a traditional art object, but this is the exception rather than the norm." (Manovich, 2001)

A great deal of new media is copyrighted. Would copyright owners freely allow others to place different "interfaces" on their precious copyrighted material? Manovich only gives two examples in support of his point: David Blair's Wax Web (1993) and Olga Lialina's Last Real Net Art Museum (1996). Two examples can hardly be considered to be the norm as he claims.

 "It is not surprising, then, that databases occupy a significant, if not the largest, territory of the new media landscape. What is more surprising is that the other end of the spectrum - narratives - still exists in new media." (Manovich, 2001)

Manovich's claim of the near extinction of narrative seems odd in light of the work of Rosson and Carroll that stresses the powerfully motivating quality of narratives (2012).

Blair, D., (1993). Wax Web. Available online at http://www2.iath.virginia.edu/wax/.

Lialina, O., (1996). Last Real Net Art Museum. Available online at http://myboyfriendcamebackfromth.ewar.ru.

Manovich, L. (2001). The Language of New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 218-236.

Manovich, L. (2003), New Media From Borges to HTML. The New Media Reader. Wardrip-Fruin, N. & Montfort, N. (eds.). Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2003. 13-25.

Rosson, M.B., & Carroll, J. (2012). Scenario-based design. Handbook of Human-Computer Interaction. Erlbaum Associates, In press.

Relative Time and Space

According to Bingham, actor-network theory is "concerned with how all sorts of bits and pieces; bodies, machines, and buildings, as well as texts, are associated together in attempts to build order" (1996). Therefore, agency is purely relational and absolute time and space are irrelevant (Graham; 1998).

Several scientists have similar views of time and space in the social construction of technology. Harraway talked of the coming of cyborgs - an increased blending of humans with the technological (1991). Pile and Thrift said, a "vivid, moving, contingent and open-ended cosmology" is emerging (1996: 37). These scientists draw from Bruno Latour's actor-network theory (ANT) (1993); they hold rather relational views of the social construction of   technology. 

Whiggishness, taking its name from the British Whigs, is a historiography that believes in an endless progression of social democracies toward greater enlightenment, mainly through the effect of scientific progress. Actor-network theory does not concern itself with a priori structures, such as a power, but neither does Whig history. Are Harraway, Pile, and Thrift trying to re-introduce Whig history into information sciences and technology studies? 

Driven by actor-network theory, Nigel Thrift said,

"No technology is ever found working in splendid isolation as though it is the central node in the social universe.  It is linked - by social purposes to which it is put - to humans and other technologies of different kinds. It is linked to a chain of different activities involving other technologies. And it is heavily contextualized. Thus the telephone, say, at someone's place of work had (and has) a different meaning from the telephone in, say, their bedroom, and is often used in quite different ways" (Thrift, 1996).

However, Latour makes little distinction between humans and machines as actants because actor-network theory is too wrapped up in how actants relate to each other in the network. Are we really indistinct from machines? Do machines have agency?

Bingham, N., (1996). Object-ions: from technological determinism towards geographies of relations.  Environment and Planning D: Society and Space. 14,635-57.

Graham, S.,   (1998). The end of geography or the explosion of place? Conceptualizing space, place, and information technology. Progress in Human Geography. 168-85.

Harraway, D., (1991). A manifesto for cyborgs: science, technology, and socialist-feminism in the late twentieth century. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women. Harraway, D. (ed.) 149-81.

Latour, B., (1993). We have never been modern. London: Harvester Wheatsheaf.

Pile, S., and Thrift, N. (1996). Mapping the subject.  In Mapping the Subject: Geographies of Cultural transformation. Pile, S., and Thrift, N. (eds.) London: Routledge, 13-51.

Thrift, N. (1996). New urban eras and old technological fears: reconfiguring the goodwill of electronic things. Urban Studies. 33, 1463-93.

The Archival Quality of the Online Context

What is the quality of the online context? Its persistence is of interest to me because of its value and its cause for concern.

"Thanks to the hardware and software, we have the artifactual textual traces of interaction created instantaneously, at the moment of utterance. For scholars with an interest in discourse analysis, literary criticism, rhetorical studies, textual analysis, and the like, the Internet is a research setting par excellence, practically irresistible in its availability." (Jones, 1999, p.13)

According to Jones, the Internet is an ideal place to conduct research because of its archival quality. His enthusiasm is obvious for qualitative research conducted online. What better tool medium for scholars to study the complexity of cultures across multiple places (Kozinets, 2010)?

The Internet records and archives, in textual, publicly available, accessible, and easy to copy form, the social interactions of its many participants (Kozinets, 2010). Blogs, microblogs, newsgroups, and social networking interactions are digitally captured and preserved for many years. Google and other Internet search engines make it so easy to find what you are looking for. The Wayback Machine (i.e., Internet Archive) archives the social interactions for many years in the future. This provides ample time for researchers to conduct a Netnography.

Newhagen and Rafaeli (1997) said,

"Communications on the Net leaves tracks to an extent unmatched by that in any other context - the content is easily observable, recorded, and copied. Participant demography behaviors of consumption, choice, attention, reaction, learning, and so forth, are widely captured and logged." (Newhagen and Rafaeli, 1996)

On the other hand, Marcus asserted that proposed multi-location ethnographies are a way to illuminate trans-local connections (Marcus 1995). Buraway et al. took an innovative approach to ethnography by allowing the subjects of the study to define how, when, and where the inquiry was to take place (Buraway et al., 2000, p. 4). The result is an ethnography that strives "to study others in their place and time." Nicola Green tackled uncertainty in tracking objects, persons, and narratives in her multi-sited ethnographic work on virtual worlds (1999).

There is a distinctively persistent nature about online communication. It is a treasure trove for the researcher. However, what about user's privacy concerns? In the interests of the public good, are we researchers we overstepping out bounds? In doing so, might we harm some individuals by invading their privacy?

Buraway, M. et al. (2000). Global ethnography: Forces, connections, and imaginations in a postmodern world. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Green, N. (1999). Disrupting the field: Virtual reality technologies and "multi-sited ethnographic methods. American Behavioral Scientist, 43(5), 409-421.

Hine, C. (2000). Virtual ethnography. London: Sage Publications.

Jones, S. (1999). Studying the Net: Intricacies and Issues, In S. Jones, (ed.), Doing Internet Research: Critical Issues in Methods for Examining the Net. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. pp. 10-35.

Kozinets, R.V. (2010). Netnography: Doing Ethnographic Research Online. Sage. Los Angeles, CA, London.

Marcus, G. E. (1995). Ethnography in/ of the world system: The emergence of multi-site ethnography. Annual Review of Anthropology. 24, 95-117.

Markham, A. (1998). Life online: Researching real experience in virtual space. Walnut Creek, Ca: Altira Mira Press.

Markham, A. N. & Baym, N. K. (2009). Internet inquiry. Los Angeles: Sage Publications.

Newhagen, J. E. and S. Rafaeli, (1996). Why communication researchers should study the Internet: a Dialogue on-line, Journal of the Computer-Mediated Communication, 1(4), available online at http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol1/issue4/