Self-presentation in the online dating environment.

This study explored the world of Internet dating. It examined how daters presented themselves and formed impressions of others online with a particular focus on the accuracy of the online presentations. Five men and women who were currently dating online were interviewed and observed. In addition, one participant's observations prior to and after meeting another participant online were obtained. Participants reported that Internet dating was a great way to meet people but a difficult method of determining compatibility without meeting in person. Relationships that began on the Internet were continued offline only if the daters experienced chemistry in person. Deception was expected due to the nature of the medium (e.g., the lack of non-verbal cues), but the deception that was encountered was small in scale. All the participants claimed honesty in their presentations, but they misrepresented themselves in small, unintentional ways. Overall, the online impressions differed from the reality but not significantly enough to be a concern. Deception appeared to be no more rampant on the Internet than it is in everyday life.The original print copy of this thesis may be available here: http://wizard.unbc.ca/record=b163702

Fabricating identities : dress in American realist novels, 1880-1925

The vital connection between self and the clothed body forms the basis for this study of representative American realist novels set during the decades spanning the years 1875 to 1925. American social history of these decades is marked both by the swelling of a middle class defined through respectability and by the emergence of a consumer culture that promised through its proliferation of images and commodities that the "good life" was within the reach of all. This history sets the scene for these literary works. In examining female characters' attempts to construct selves outfitted for this new social order, I argue that in these characters' quests to move beyond the domestic sphere, a model for social change emerges. Through focusing on novelists' descriptions of clothing and through mapping out the cultural grid that brings symbolic meaning to these descriptions, this study aims toward recreating what Mikhail Bakhtin called "the social atmosphere of the word." A complex weave of cultural meanings is illuminated through attention to dress and to the social backdrop against which it etches its fashion statement. Unravelling the "living dialogic threads" weaving themselves around images of draped and bustled skirts, gigot sleeves, or serpentine teagowns, a reader can begin to expose the warp of social class and gender expectations integral to selfhood and examine the emerging constructions of the female self