A Stranger-web: The Death and Rebirth of the Chatroom (2013) (original) (raw)

From Usernames to Profiles: The Development of Pseudonymity in Internet Communication

Internet Histories, 2017

This article traces the development of Internet communication by examining online names and pseudonyms. I argue that choosing a username, as the first interaction a person has with a platform, sets the tone for how communication and content flows through platforms. By focusing on pseudonymity as an enduring, if contested, affordance of online communication, I consider the sociocultural conventions of naming in early computer terminals and operating systems, email, bulletin boards, chatrooms, chat programs and social networking. In doing so, I demonstrate that pseudonymity remains a way to deliberately compartmentalise identities, and therefore audiences. I map two broad shifts in online communication: from people who belonged to institutions reaching each other in the 1970s and 1980s, to usernames and channels on bulletin boards and chatrooms in the 1990s, and networked profiles on social media in the 2000s. While recognising cultural and socioeconomic factors influence engagement in online communication, I argue that we are moving towards increasing use of multiple accounts and platforms.

The Search for Identity in Online Chat

Internet communication is one of the most important applications of the 21 st century. College students are among those who make use of this activity for both academic and personal interest. Students usually vary in their use, appreciation and response to this widely used activity. Accordingly, the present research paper aims at answering the following questions: to what extent college students use the instant-messaging system in initiating and developing personal and social communication? and to what extent the revealed identities are real or fake? If real, how many aspects of identity are real or fake? What is the purpose behind using fake identities? Are there any similarities and differences between gender-based identities? To what extent messages reflect the user's identity and gender? And what are the different ways of identity manifestations? To achieve the above aims, a questionnaire has been conducted on the students of Baghdad University to closely examine the relationship between online interaction and gender identities. The results showed that the highest percentage of students, 94%, agrees that chat is of great help in establishing and maintaining distant and local relationships. While the lowest percentage, 1.1%, goes with the proposition that chat is the most important application of the internet.

From Homepages to Network Profiles: Balancing Personal and Social Identity

2013

The World Wide Web constitutes one of the most important inventions of the late 20th century: it has changed culture, society, business, communication, politics, and many other fields of human endeavour, not least also by providing a more user-friendly pathway of access to its major underlying technology, the Internet itself.

Cyber-Identities and Social Life in Cyberspace

Handbook of Research on Social Software and Developing Community Ontologies

Information and communication technology gradually transform virtual communities to active meeting places for sharing information and for supporting human actions, feelings and needs. In this chapter the authors examine the conceptual definition of virtual community as found in the traditional cyberliterature and extend it to accommodate latest cybertrends. Similar to the ways that previous social and mass media dissolved social boundaries related to time and space, cyber-communities and social software seem to also dissolve the boundaries of identity. This, in turn, questions the trust, privacy and confidentiality of interaction. The authors present a way of classifying and viewing self-presentation regarding cyber-identity management in virtual communities. It is based on the characteristics that cyber-surfers prefer to attribute to themselves and accordingly present themselves to others. In so doing, the authors coin the terms for five distinct phenomena, namely nonymity, anonymi...