【精品】Selling Your Self Online Identity in the Age of a ...75.doc

Selling Your Self: Online Identity in the Age of a Commodified InternetAlice Emily MarwickA thesissubmitted in partial fulfillment of therequirements for the degree ofMaster of ArtsUniversity of Washington2005Program Authorized to Offer Degree:Department of CommunicationTable of ContentsTable of ContentsiList of FiguresiiiIntroduction: A Brief History of Online Identity Scholarship1Introduction1Contemporary Internet Life7Thesis Structure12Conclusion15Chapter One: Identity Scholarship, Cyberfeminism, and the Myth of the Liberatory Subject16Introduction16Identity16Online Identity and Identity Online21Early Cyberculture Studies23Queer Theory and Post-Human Subjectivity27Critical Cyberculture Studies37Authenticity47Conclusion51Chapter Two: Internet Commercialization and Identity Commodification52Introduction52Internet History54Early Internet Culture61Mosaic and the Expansion of the Internet64The Boomtime67Contemporary Internet Era70Commodification of Identity74Identity and Commodification86The Digital Divide92Conclusion94Chapter Three: Self-Presentation Strategies in Social Networking Sites95Introduction95Social Networking Services96Social Network Analysis97Social Networking Sites101Self-Presentation in Social Networking Sites104Authenticity108User Presentation Strategies110Application Assumptions116Conclusion122Chapter Four: Xbox Live and the Political Economy of Video Games123Introduction123Introducing the Xbox125Ms Pac Man to MMOs: A Highly Abbreviated Video Game History129Identity Presentation in Gaming Environments134Xbox Live141X and G145Xbox 360148Framing Gaming as Commodity152Conclusion: Reflections155Introduction155Authenticity156Back to Theory159The Evil Empire vs. The Creative Commons: False Dichotomies in Cyberculture Studies162Identity Management Moving Forward164Conclusion167Bibliography170List of FiguresFigure 1: Top 10 Parent Companies of Popular Websites in the United States, Home Panel71Figure 2: Example of an Authentic profile111Figure 3: Example of an Authentic Ironic profile112Figure 4: Example of a Fakester profile113Figure 5: Ad placement based on search results on MySpace121Introduction: A Brief History of Online Identity ScholarshipIntroductionConceptualizing online identity has been a key part of cyberculture scholarship throughout the history of the field. Indeed, mediated communication has long held a fascination for writers and researchers interested in how self-expression may change as it moves through a telephone line or fiber-optic cable. Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman,See McLuhan, M. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964) and Postman, N. Amusing Ourselves to Death. (New York: Penguin Books, 1985). for example, both wrote of the shift from a literate culture to one mediated by television, and how the presentation of information altered as the medium through which it was transmitted changed. This presentation includes the way the author or originator of the information is represented. A sense of self or authorship is conveyed differently in a telephone conversation, a hand-written letter, a printed book, a home movie or an in-person meeting. These concerns are equally applicable to internet and computer-mediated communication. The increased interactivity and creative potential of the Web has brought issues of identity and self-representation to the forefront of cyberculture studies. Generally, early cyberculture scholars regarded online spaces, such as MUDs, “MUDs” is an acronym which stands for either Multiple User Dungeons or Multiple User Domains, depending on who you ask. bulletin boards, chat rooms and text-based adventure games, as sites in which users could play with aspects of their identities that, in meat-space, would generally be viewed as fixed, such as gender. This idea of the internet as a site for identity play assumes that users can and do represent themselves online in ways that do not map to their physical bodies. Freed from the constraints of the flesh, users could choose which gender or sexuality to perform, or create entire alternate identities nothing like their “real-life” counterpart, even in online environments where play was not presumed. This idea held a great deal of fascination for scholars and journalists alike. For example, Sherry Turkle devoted a chapter of her influential work Life on the Screen to gender-switching in MUDs, interviewing users who “play” a different gender online than they perform in real life. Turkle, S. Life on the Screen. (New York: Simon and Shuster, 1995.) See also Bruckman, A. “Gender Swapping on the Internet.” In Proceedings of the Internet Society (INET '93) in San Francisco, California, August, 1993, by the Internet Society. Reston, VA: The Internet Society. <http:/www.cc.gatech.edu/asb/papers/old-papers.html#INET> (18 February 2004). Similarly, Howard Rheingold, in The Virtual Community, writes “the grammar of CMC media involves a syntax of identity play: new identities, false identities, multiple identities, exploratory identities are available in different manifestations of the medium.” Rheingold, H. The Virtual Community: Homesteading On the Electronic Frontier. Revised Edition. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000) 152.Inevitably, this ability of users to consciously perform identity in a flexible, non-fixed way was viewed as liberatory, as a way to break down the traditional liberal humanist subject as one “true identity” grounded in a single physical body. Allucquère Rosanne Stone writes in The War of Desire and Technology:The cyborg, the multiple personality, the technosocial subject. all suggest a radical rewriting, in the techno-social space, of the bounded individual as the standard social unit and validated social actant. Stone, A. R. The War of Desire and Technology. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996) 43.For Stone, the ability of users to change their performative identities at will, or to perform a series of differing identities simultaneously, is representative of a larger breakdown in a singular concept of self. Frequently, thinking about selfhood in these terms is intimately tied to the deconstruction of fixed conceptions of gender and sexuality. Turkle writes: “like transgressive gender practices in real life, by breaking the conventions, online gender play dramatizes our attachment to them.” Turkle, 212. As feminist postmodern scholarship was deconstructing gender as a social construct expressed through a series of performative actions, There are key differentiations to make here between the idea of performance and performativity. Ill use gender as an example: playing with gender online would be performance while the day-to-day performance of gender in real-life illustrates genders performativity. The distinction between the two involves how agency plays into the performance. A person interacting as an alternate gender online is conducting a self-conscious, deliberate performance (for whatever reason). Alternately, a woman living daily life as a woman, whether online or offline, is, most likely, not making strategic choices about enacting and re-enacting her gender in her daily life; she is not self-conscious about performing as a particular gender. However, whether or not a person performing gender is aware of the performance of gender does not change the fact that gender as a concept is performative: that is, a non-essentialist, constructed category re-inscribed and bounded by actions that are invoked and reinforced socially and temporally. the ability of users to self-consciously adopt and play with different gender identities revealed the backstage choices involved in the production of gender. Cyberspace, then, became a site where previously fixed categories of identity could break down altogether, freeing up offline personas from the suffocating bounded-ness of rigid categories of gender and sexuality. Donna Haraways cyborg was the preferred metaphor of this new way of looking at identity. Her widely cited essay “A Manifesto for Cyborgs” posited the cyborg subject as a site where formerly oppositional concepts could simultaneously reside, thus breaking down entire dichotomies. Haraway certainly did not locate her cyborg in an inherently liberatory place- for one thing, she recognized the patriarchal and militaristic overtones inherent in the metaphor. As easily as the cyborg could convert rigid categories into rich, mestiza Following Gloria Anzaldua, a borderland, mestiza consciousness is a subject position of inherent multiplicity that is tied to the post-colonial and globalized agent rather than the cyborg. For more, see Anzaldua, G. Borderlands/La Frontera. (San Francisco, CA : Aunt Lute, 1987). sites, it could simultaneously become “the final abstraction embodied in a Star War apocalypse waged in the name of defense, about the final appropriation of womens bodies in a masculinist orgy of war.” Haraway, D. “Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980's.” Socialist Review 80 (1985), 78. Despite Haraways recognition and warning of these contradictions, other scholars took solely the redeeming qualities of the metaphor, and the resulting scholarship on identity adopted the breathless tones of the convert in describing the internet as a panacea. See Hayles, N. K. How We Became Posthuman. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999) and Badmington, N. Posthumanism. (New York: Palgrave: 2000), for more on the liberatory nature of the cyborg / posthuman subject. For more general scholarship on the internet and gender, see Cherny, L. and Weise, E. R., eds. Wired Women: Gender and New Realities in Cyberspace. (Seattle: Seal Press, 1996). The idea of technology as inherently progressive See Hamilton, S. “Incomplete Determinism: A Discourse Analysis of Cybernetic Futurology in Early Cyberculture.” Journal of Communication Inquiry 22, no.2 (1998): 177-206 for an interesting exploration of the evolutionary metaphor as it applies to information technology and cyberculture in general. was applied to identity and combined with the cyborg to create the “post-human” subject position that would allow humanity to progress to a more flexible, mutable stage of development. Although concepts of “identity” were simultaneously being rethought and re-configured by postmodernist theorists, social activists and writers, this body of knowledge was often ignored once the online realm came into play. Rather than looking at the “virtual” or “online” sphere as another social space that the “offline” self passed through, it was treated as revolutionary and entirely separate from “real life”. Eventually, the view of the internet as inherently utopian came to be critiqued, particularly when it came to ideas of technology as “transcending” race, class, and gender. Beyond simply the Digital Divide, The Pew Internet and American Life Project found a “Digital Divide” between people with and without access to the internet; this divide was mapped along lines of race, gender and class. However, assuming that internet access will continue to grow, and especially considering the high penetration rates of internet technologies among teenagers across race, class, and gender lines, I am more interested in looking at the underlying assumptions of the technologies used. This is discussed in more depth in the second chapter. a significant amount of scholarship has examined the assumptions built into internet technologies. Ellen Ullman located programming, coding and the technology industry as a whole in an inherently masculine space. She warned in her 1995 essay “Out of Time: Reflections on the Programming Life” that the new, interactive internet could reproduce and re-enact “life as engineers know it: alone, out-of-time, disdainful of anyone far from the machine.” Ullman, E. “Out of Time: Reflections on the Programming Life.” In Resisting the Virtual Life, ed. Brook, J. and Boal, I. A. (San Francisco: City Lights, 1995) 143. Beth Kolko examined the lack of racial descriptors in particular text-based interactive worlds, and what this revealed about the “assumptions technology designers carry with them as they create virtual environments.” Kolko, B. E. “Erasing race: Going White in the (Inter)Face.” In Race in Cyberspace, ed. Kolko, B. E., Nakamura, L., and Rodman, G. B. (New York: Routledge, 2000) 225. Similarly, Lisa Nakamura, analyzing the formation of racial identity in LambdaMOO, uncovered the way that race is written (or designed) out of the system and then re-inscribed using stereotypes. Nakamura, L. "Race in/for Cyberspace: Identity Tourism and Racial Passing on the Internet." Cyberreader, ed. V.J. Vitanza. (Needham Heights, MA, 1999) 442-453. See Silver, D. “Looking Backwards, Looking Forward: Cyberculture Studies 1990-2000.” In Web.studies: Rewiring Media Studies for the Digital Age, ed. Gauntlett, D., (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000) 19-30 for another discussion of this piece. But while a minority of scholars were locating cyberspace within an assumed narrative of white male technological subjectivity, the ideal of multiple, flexible identity remained. In the late 90s, the American internet changed in two significant ways. The first shift was modal. The early internet was solely text-based, accessed through command lines and green-screen terminals. Starting in the mid-90s, internet users browsed web sites and applications that included pictures, photographs, and eventually audio, video and interactive media. The internet became visual and multi-modal. The way that information was presented changed, and, as a result, the types of information that could be presented changed. Much as the shift from the command line-based operating system to the graphical user interface helped to fuel the home computer revolution of the 1980s, the shift to a more visual way of representing information made the web and the internet as a whole more user-friendly and, as a result, more popular. The second shift, then, was social. The invention of Mosaic and, later, Netscape made the World Wide Web available to more than just hobbyists, geeks, and academics tied to their .edu accounts. This expansion in popularity came hand-in-hand with increased commercialization of the internet. The rise of name-brand portals and shopping sites gave birth to an enormous variety of ventures, some of which generated intense speculative wealth for their inevitably photogenic, brash young (male) CEOs. As stocks soared, Time and Newsweek ran hundreds of inches of column space on the “dot-com revolution” and internet use skyrocketed. Whil