Online Identity and Presence Research Papers (original) (raw)

Written whilst a Research Fellow at ResCen, Centre for Creation Processes in the Performing Arts, Middlesex University, London, Autumn 2000 This paper was written 10 years into my work on virtual presence, just after directing 2... more

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- New Media, Performing Arts, Digital Humanities, Digital Media

From the Sexuality & Cyberspace issue of Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory (1997)

Striley, K. & King, S. (2013). Rebooting social identities: Computer mediated communication’s role in coping with negative social identity. In D. Lasora & A. Rodriguez (Eds.), Social identity in communication: New agenda, (pp.... more

Striley, K. & King, S. (2013). Rebooting social identities: Computer mediated
communication’s role in coping with negative social identity. In D. Lasora & A.
Rodriguez (Eds.), Social identity in communication: New agenda, (pp. 149-167).
Taylor & Francis.

This paper reports on an investigation into the online visibility of work undertaken in South Africa in the field of poverty alleviation. An experiment with
Google searches was undertaken, motivated by concerns about the visibility of South African research and development work, particularly in a context where social
inequality is extreme and poverty such a critical issue. Aware that much attention – through research and the practice of development work – is being paid to
poverty alleviation1
, the authors set out to examine whether that work could be found easily, and what the nature of the search results would be. Significant sums
of public money are invested in research, which should result in the production and dissemination of locally generated knowledge as a public good grounded in
local realities. A great deal of national and international funding is also spent. Thus, research published online should inform and reflect on national and regional
development practice, while contributing perspectives from the South to the global corpus of poverty research. Research to understand poverty and inform the design
and targeting of poverty alleviation programmes needs to be freely available and actively shared in order for it to accumulate value. In this regard it is argued that
there are exponentially beneficial linkages between research, scholarly publication and social development, which originate with local knowledge production and
are amplified by the availability and discoverability of that research. Availability and discoverability add breadth and depth to the potential use, value and impact
of the knowledge produced

- by Laura Czerniewicz
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- Information Science, New Media, Library Science, Publishing

Blogging, tweeting, commenting a Facebook status, pinning, online networking, online dating, liking and disliking or even friending have become integral part of our language and activities on the Web. All these activities produce what researchers call ‘digital footprints’. These digital footprints are disparate, spread, fragmented and incomplete. Nevertheless the collection of these digital footprints and their display enable peoples, companies or even search-engines, to re-form the online identities of Internet-users. The aim of this study is to explore the online identity of media students in France and in the United-Kingdom, in order to ascertain if they are aware of the complexity of online identity. The purpose of this study is also to get a better understanding of the students’ constructions of online identities and more precisely their constructions of professional online presences. To do so, a creative research method is used. The latter consists of allowing the participants of the experiments to construct a model, which represent their online identity with Lego bricks and figures. This method led to a variety of findings, such as the media students’ awareness of having an online identity, online identity as a reflexive project and online identity management as a complex activity.

- by Jean Baptiste Mac Luckie
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- Communication, Social Networks, Social Networking, Digital Media

Ölümcül Kimlikler kitabı İLEM I. kademe değerlendirme yazısı

- by Zeynep Macit
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- Online Identity and Presence, Books, Kimlik, Amin Maalouf
- by Randy Boone
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- Information Systems, Psychology, Cognitive Science, Personality Psychology

Screen-based virtual worlds have been described as fundamentally disembodying. Contrary to this, the aim of this article is to provide a phenomenological analysis of bodily presence in one case of screen-based virtuality. By integrating phenomenology with qualitative research methodologies, I explore esports practitioners’ experiences of bodily presence in League of Legends (LoL). Here, descriptions from real-life esports practitioners are analyzed within the phenomenological framework of ‘incorporation’. My analysis shows that the practitioners’ experience and engage with their virtual world not just by incorporating their physical gaming equipment, but also through incorporation of virtual abilities and tools specific to the game world. Having shown that the LoL practitioner’s body spans both physical and virtual space without leaving the body behind, I situate these results within the discussion of virtual presence in video games. I claim that the practitioners’ sense of presence can be accounted for by situating the integrated physical and virtual tools and abilities within the phenomenological framework of the ‘nullpoint’, understood as a bodily field of activity shaped by our incorporated skills and tools.

- by David Ekdahl
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- Philosophy, Philosophy of Technology, Embodiment, Phenomenology

Published for the occasion of CYBORGY_
April 24 - May 17, 2015 @ Expoplu Nijmegen

- by Alix Rübsaam
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- Popular Culture, Posthumanism, Music Video, Critical Posthumanism

Scholars globally are increasingly required to account for the visibility and impact of their research, and visibility and impact are increasingly digitally-mediated through the platforms and practices associated with Web 2.0. Traditional prestige-based metrics of visibility (ISI/WoS Impact Factor) measure only scholar-to-scholar outputs like journals and books. In many African universities with nascent research cultures, legacies of colonialism and imperatives of national development, these measures present scholars with particular challenges. At the same time, in the North, moves towards Open Access, along with the potential of Web 2.0 technologies for increasing visibility of research, offer the potential for changes to traditional measures of assessing impact and visibility. Using a framework whereby the extent of change in research communication practices at all stages of the research process can be analysed, this paper reveals the pressures shaping African research communication practices and the visibility of research, using data from a case study at the University of Namibia.

- by Laura Czerniewicz
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- Open Access, Open Access Publishing, Scholarly Communication, Metrics

This book aims to provide insights into how ‘second lives’ in the sense of virtual identities and communities are constructed textually, semiotically and discursively, specifically in the online environment Second Life and Massively Multiplayer Online Games such as World of Warcraft. The book’s philosophy is multi-disciplinary and its goal is to explore the question of how we as gamers and residents of virtual worlds construct alternative online realities in a variety of ways. Of particular significance to this endeavour are conceptions of the body in cyberspace and of spatiality, which manifests itself in ‘natural’ and built environments as well as the triad of space, place and landscape. The contributors’ disciplinary backgrounds include media, communication, cultural and literary studies, and they examine issues of reception and production, identity, community, gender, spatiality, natural and built environments using a plethora of methodological approaches ranging from theoretical and philosophical contemplation through social semiotics to corpus-based discourse analysis.

- by Astrid Ensslin
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- Discourse Analysis, Semiotics, Architecture, Online Communities

This article examines cultural anxieties surrounding the life and death of online data. Through the examination of a wide range of discourses, including “lifestyle” news articles, online user comments, essays and books by novelists and engineers, and the websites of information management services, I argue that death online—defined as the persistence of informatic remainders after the death of the human user—reveals how networked data are constructed as both an authentic duplicate of identity and as a threat to personal identity that must be managed. Because humans are understood as finite and mortal, while data are immortal and everlasting, the “life” formed out of online data is understood as beyond any possible control of the user. With the death of the user, the perceived connection between the user and data is revealed as a contingency rather than a necessity. Information is produced as autonomous. It is nearly identical to yet separate from the user; it belongs to nobody except, perhaps, the network itself.

- by Grant Bollmer
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- New Media, Social Media, Facebook, Social Networking Sites (SNS)
- by Irudaya Raj
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- Online Identity and Presence

The chapter summarizes research about Czech adolescents using the Internet. One part of the contribution deals with online identity construction which seems to play an important role in the development of identity and self-concept. The second main division consists of the online risk behavior which adolescents may face to. The authors discuss the addiction on the Internet, pro-ana blogs as well as self-damaging in blogs.

- by David Smahel
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- The Internet, Online Identity and Presence, Adolescentes, Online risk behavior

Based on five years of participant-observation on the social networking sites MySpace, Facebook, and Tribe.net, The Virtual Campfire explores the increasingly blurred boundaries between human and machine, public and private, voyeurism and exhibitionism, the history of media and our digitized future. Woven throughout are the stories and experiences of those who engage with these sites regularly and ritualistically, the generation of "digital natives" whose tales attest to the often strange and uncomfortable ways online social networking sites have come to be embedded in the everyday lives of American youth.

- by Jenny Ryan
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- Communication, New Media, Web 2.0, Social Networks
- by Adam Tyma
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- Michel Foucault, Online Identity and Presence, MySpace, Boundary management
- by Laura Czerniewicz
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- Scholarly Communication, Online Identity and Presence, Online, South Africa

Networked learning theory and the related literature express the importance of access to resources or content, but there is no singular way of discussing these information management processes. On the web, the rise in information abundance has seen the terms curation, digital curation, content curation, and social curation gain in popularity to describe how individual users manage their information intake, processing and sharing. This paper attempts to distinguish between these overlapping terms and argues that the term social curation could describe the information management processes required of networked educators and learners. In addition it proposes a terminology for phases of the social curation process, which may aid networked learners and educators in the adoption and scaffolding of social curation processes for learning. This paper further explores the distinctive opportunities social curation offers for online identity expression and construction for circumventing known issues such as collapsed contexts and role conflict that occur in other social media sites.

No presente artigo abordamos como o design de interfaces, aplicado ao campo dos jogos digitais, potencializa transmissão de sensações ao jogador. Iniciamos com uma discussão sobre a metáfora da interface e suas possibilidades de manifestação nos videogames no uso de recursos narrativos e regras para compor mundos ficcionais. Partiremos da relação entre o Dasein e os entes fundamentais de Heidegger (1927) e também das teorias sobre a presença virtual, discutindo suas características e aplicação na composição de mundos ficcionais que estimulem a percepção de presença no jogador. Em seguida, consideramos o conceito de meaningful play e exploramos as sensações possíveis ao jogador quando em processo de imersão em um espaço simulado. Por último, discutiremos a presença do outro e como tais relações se apresentam no jogo Death Stranding, partindo para uma análise estética.

- by Anne Farrell
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- Cultural Studies, Gender Studies, New Media, Digital Media
- by Atisak Klammeng
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- Cognitive Psychology, Social Networks, Ethnography, Educational Psychology

This research is a webometric study of the web presence of academic libraries in Nigeria. The research work considered all the 129 accredited universities in Nigeria on National University Commission (NUC) website. Links to libraries on the homepages of the universities were searched. Google search engine was used for counting the webpages and in-links to the available libraries' websites. Webometric Analyst software was used for generating the most targeted top level domains and link analysis of the websites. Findings showed that more than 50% of the academic libraries did not have websites. Also, academic libraries can be accessed from the homepages of 42% of the universities in Nigeria. There was an average of 20,203.47 webpages, 5.21 in links and 0.000258 web impact factors per academic library. Though most of the academic libraries that had websites are old and owned by the federal government, the private university libraries' websites had more webpages than others. Generally, the web impact factors of the academic websites were negligible, which suggests that the academic libraries did not have useful information and innovation on their websites. The most targeted top level domains were .com (58.7%), followed by .org (12.4%), and the link network diagram shows that the libraries did not exchange information online. It is recommended that academic libraries in Nigeria should form a consortium that will manage the development and standardisation of the websites of academic libraries.

- by Keith Massie
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- New Media, Digital Media, Critical Race Theory, Feminism

Drawing from theory and research on participatory practices, fan communities and their role in the identity and social work of teenagers, the paper contributes to the debate by analyzing how Italian teenagers take part in a writing-oriented social network such as Wa pad. ese practices of authorship and readership have been explored through a mixed method approach, including participatory workshops, interviews and netnography, with a sample of 103 Italian students. Findings show several di erent ways to approach to digital narration and also di erent competences connected to such practices, that could be exploited in educational contexts. Di erent approaches to authorship are thus identi ed, spanning from an “industry” oriented to an “identity” oriented approach. Also several typologies of social readership emerge, since fans, peers and supporters are di erent cognitive, emotional and social shapes that teens give to their relation and participation online. e paper aims at describing such models, underlining the deep identity and social work that teens perform through them and o ering some suggestions about how to connect it to formal educational contexts.

This chapter explores the tentative line between erotic spectacle and horror; a judgement that is problematic given that is based on an axis of moral or ideological normality. The contexts of viewing impact on the status of ‘obscene’ images, both in terms of the communities that view them and their motivation for viewing; for sexual arousal, out of morbid curiosity or malevolence, or perhaps all three simultaneously. The reception of an obscene image is largely based upon the issue of viewer consent, but this itself comes at the expense of the reality of bodies depicted, that are pushed to (and beyond) their limits. The chapter examines the moral and philosophical implications of desires that place the body in extreme states of sexualized deconstruction - both real and faked – and how these apply to images and communities in cyberspace.

- by Steve Jones
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- Self and Identity, Internet Studies, Popular Culture, Online Communities

Pro–eating disorder (ED) scholarship in the field of new media studies largely consists of text, discourse, and theoretical analyses. Far fewer studies involve audience work with women in eating disorder subcultures online to cross-reference scholarly analyses with the women’s own experiences. Using a Foucauldian theoretical framework, this study provides data from in-depth interviews with 10 practicing-ED bloggers on how they felt silenced by the media deadlock of the thin ideal and sought vocal expression online. The findings call for an expansion of scholarly discourse beyond catch-all “pro-ED” terminology to better capture women’s experiences with online identity formation. Additionally, considering blogging’s revival with women’s lifestyle blogs, it is vital to understand online ED subcultures’ foundations in the blogosphere to better position future research addressing online female identity in emerging social media.

A debate is currently raging regarding the value of anonymity online. On one side of the debate is Facebook, the world’s largest social network site. Facebook demands that people use their real names and is one of the leading forces behind the push towards a “real name” Internet. On the other side of the debate are scholars such as danah boyd and Bernie Hogan and sites such as 4chan and Reddit that view anonymity and pseudonymity as important to how people construct identity online. While much has been written about the benefits of anonymity and pseudonymity, there is a lack of published research examining specific practices enabled by pseudonyms. This article provides a detailed account of the behaviors enabled through pseudonymous identity construction through a case study of the subreddit r/gonewild. The main contribution of the article is to provide a specific account of the costs of a totalizing embrace of the “real name” Internet.

- by Emily van der Nagel and +1
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- New Media, Social Media, Anonymity, Pornography

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are a new form of educational provision occupying a space between formal online courses and informal learning. Adopting measures used with formal online courses to assess the outcomes of MOOCs is often not informative because the context is very different. The particular affordances of MOOCs shaping learning environments comprise both scale (in terms of numbers of students) and diversity (in terms of the types of students). As learning designers we focus on understanding the particular tools and pedagogical affordances of the MOOC platform to support learner engagement. Drawing on research into learner engagement conducted in the broader field of online learning, we consider how learner engagement in a MOOC might be designed for by looking at three pedagogical aspects: teacher presence, social learning and peer learning.

- by Laura Czerniewicz and +3
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- Teaching and Learning, Distance Education, Learning and Teaching, Online Learning

In terms of general acceptance, online therapy is today where online education was around 1990. Speaking from my perspective as a veteran distance educator who lived through the period when distance education slowly became mainstream, I... more

The author explores the linguistic dimension of brand “Barack Obama”: analyses the role of American values in Obama’s presidential campaign, describes neologisms coined from his name, and studies the impact of Barack Obama’s rhetoric on... more

- by Siti Rohimah Rejab
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- Communication, New Media, Social Networks, Social Networking

Several factors contribute to an individual’s experiences in computer-based environments. Previous research shows one such factor, the degree to which users feel connected to a virtual environment, influ- ences the actions of individuals within the environment (Banos et al., 2008; Welch, 1999). Additional factors, such as people’s personality and the personality of their avatar, influence behaviors in virtual environments (McCreery, Krach, Schrader, & Boone, 2012). The current study focused on the role of presence as it affects behavior within the virtual environment. Presence has been defined as the psychological state where virtual experiences feel authentic. However, the degree to which presence acts as a mediating variable in virtual environments is not well understood. The current study employed a combination of survey instruments and direct observation to explore the relationships among personality of self and avatar, presence, and behaviors within a virtual environment. Findings indicated that participant scores in the domain of agreeableness were a significant predictor of agreeable behavior in the virtual environment. However, with the exception of negative effects (e.g., dizziness), presence does not appear to influence behavior. Overall implications for these findings are discussed.

- by Michael McCreery and +1
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- Psychology, Personality Psychology, Human Computer Interaction, Game studies

At the 15th annual conference of the Science and Technology Global Consortium on April 10, 2015 in Washington, DC, I presented my paper titled "Techethnie: Can Technology Create a Singular Cultural Identity?" Attached is the slideshow of... more

- by Dr. Peter J . Moons
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- Technology, Humanities, Digital Humanities, Social Sciences
- by Lesley Withers
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- Psychology, Social Psychology, Trust, Virtual Teams

In this paper, I attempt to gain an understanding of the dynamics of the Es de roto Facebook page as an online space that brings together Chileans from different class backgrounds. With this, I intend to find if social class distances, so stark in Chilean society, are symbolically diminished by the collective representations of roto memes, or by people’s interactions with them. To do so, I analyse the page from three different but complimentary theoretical standpoints: social media, class, and nation. I find that people from diverse classes associate the page with something other than class: despite its name, they associate it with ideas of nation or ‘Chileanness’. Hence, though class differences are not negotiated, another type of collective identity arises in parallel, which, depending on the context, can be stronger or weaker than class affiliations, but due to is nature is transcendent of class.

- by Rocio Abarzua
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- Social Representations, Identity (Culture), Social Media, National Identity

As the boundaries between technology and social media have decreased, the potential for creative production or participatory practices have increased. However, the affordances of online content creation (OCC) are still taken up by a minority of Internet users despite the opportunities offered for engagement and creativity. Whilst previous studies have addressed creative production by university students for specific purposes, there is a research gap concerning OCC in the everyday lives of African university students. This paper describes the stories of three students who are online creators of content, the social media they utilised; their trajectories; their linkages with career interests; the types of online presences they created, maintained or discontinued into their university lives. As the case studies spanned digital practices that were informal and extracurricular yet peer supported as well as interest-driven and academically-oriented, the pedagogical framework of Connected Learning proved an appropriate heuristic. The study shows that being a digital creator gives students a competitive edge in our globally competitive society.

- by Laura Czerniewicz and +1
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- Scholarly Communication, Online Identity and Presence, Students, Networked Learning

Identity became apparent as an important theme while investigating the role of interaction in the asynchronous discussion forums of an online post-graduate TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) education subject. Identity emerged through dialogic choices as students projected an impression of themselves, negotiated their positioning within the group, and established what was valued in this context. Without usual face-to-face meaning making cues, what students post to the forums carry the load of what they mean. Discourse analysis of the initial forums using systemic functional linguistics, provided insights into how identity was being constructed concurrently through interpersonal manoeuvring. This reveals a process of multiple identity construction, with the effect of perceived negative identity discussed. The impact of different tasks on identity formation is also considered.

- by Erik Bigras
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- Game studies, Ethnography, Social and Cultural Anthropology, Virtual Communities

Internet mění způsob, jak mrtví zůstávají v našich životech. Již nemáme jen portréty, fotografie, úřední doklady, rukopisné památky či tělesné pozůstatky, ale i veřejně přístupné stopy na internetu od nahodile roztroušených fotografií přes webové stránky až po profily na sociálních sítích. Mění se tím něco na způsobu, jak žijeme s mrtvými? V této recenzi jsem se pokusil shrnout hlavní myšlenky dle mého názoru výborné knihy australského filosofa Patricka Stokese "Digital Souls. A Philosophy of Online Death" (Bloomsbury 2021)

- by Jakub Čapek
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- Mourning, Personal Identity, Philosophy of Death, Online Identity and Presence
- by Gregory Asmolov
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- Online Journalism, Online Identity and Presence

This study explores Black British women's motivations for divulging racial and ethnic identity in the blogosphere (sometimes referred to as blogging while Black) and their use of blogs for discursive activism. It builds on previous research that gives voice to Black women's marginalized experiences through powerful counter narratives. The blogosphere is often perceived as a racially neutral space where shared interests across geographical and temporal boundaries limit the significance of racial and ethnic identity. However, the constructed narratives of Black British women in this study highlight their experiences of subtle forms of prejudice and discrimination perpetuated through dominant discourses in the mainstream media. The findings demonstrate how they use blogs as a medium for discursive activism to challenge stereotypical raced and gendered representation in the mainstream media. Much of the research on the blogosphere in Britain reflects its use by the White majority population. This study therefore extends understanding of the blogosphere and highlights alternative modes of political communication.

- by Dr. Deborah Gabriel
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- Blogs, Race and Racism, Race and Ethnicity, Blogs, Blogging, the Blogosphere