The Making of Online Identity. The use of creative method to support young people in their reflection on age\ud and gender

In the .GTO.project our ambition is to study how young people (10 to 14 years old) in Estonia and Sweden construct and normalise gender and age, as markers of identity and identity development, in their online interactions. After\ud conducting interview studies on how young people experience on- and offline interactions, and their intertwining, as well as online ethnographic studies of online presentations, we went on with the third phase of the project: creative\ud workshops with young people. In these workshops, young people in groups of four were to create fictitious online characters. In the analysis of these, we focus on how power differentials and identity markers such as age and gender are constructed and negotiated.\u

Going Offline : How Online Initiatives Revive Offline Civic Engagement

Departing from the concept of the new identity and acknowledging a growing concern about disengaged citizenry, soundly expressed in the accounts of eroding social capital and the crisis of public communication thesis, this paper will develop two assumptions. First, it will argue that online interactions in virtual communities have the potential to create group identity hence providing a source of content that has the capacity to transform virtual into physical communities. Second, it will assume that these virtually created and physical consumed communities have the capacity to induce public action and positively contribute to civic engagement. In order to explore aspects of virtual communities as local e-engagement spaces, this paper will present two case studies – the MoveOn and the Meetup Initiatives

Virtual Identity: Applying Narrative Theory to Online Character Development

This paper will explore the realm of virtual identity within the context of the online virtual world, Second Life. The creation of virtual identities involves the complex process of constructing an online self-presentation. With the prevalence of online forums and virtual reality, ordinary people are crafting identities online and digressing from their actual identities in real life. In order to explain this phenomenon, I draw on narrative theory's conceptualization of character in order to understand how people craft online identities

Ethical Research Dilemmas and Their Implications In English Language Teaching Studies

Researchers across the disciplines, including those whose passions are in English teaching studies, are always challenged to continuously contribute their research findings to the development of science. However, ethical considerations must be adhered to when they involve humans as participants in their study. Ethical dilemmas, even though they are considered important, are still rarely discussed. Thus, depicting the sketch of a comprehensive configuration of ethical dimensions is extremely needed for ESL researchers to serve as a guidance to carry out their research. This paper concludes with some ethical implications for researchers to carry out research ethicall

‘Looking like my favourite Barbie’ – Online Gender Construction of Tween Girls in Estonia and in Sweden

The aim of this article is to analyse how tween girls in Estonia and in Sweden describe and discover their gender identities when selecting profile images for social networking sites (SNSs). To this end, interviews with tweens in Estonia (N=21) and in Sweden (N=31) were carried out. As SNSs largely exist without the recognisable surveillance of adults, children can explore the social matrix of relating to others, and they also feel safe to try out and display different constructions and reconstructions of their identity. At the same time, in communicating online, impression management is formulated with constant worry about how to construct one’s virtual identity so that it will be appreciated and accepted by one’s peer group. In this article, our analysis focuses on the most popular posing strategies used by tween girls, which, it turns out, are often marked by reproduction of the dominant heterosexual cultural norms and values

The Impact of New Media on Intercultural Communication in Global Context

The rapid development of new media has been the main force accelerating the trend of globalization in human society in recent decades. New media has brought human interaction and society to a highly interconnected and complex level, but at the same time challenges the very existence of intercultural communication in its traditional sense. It is under this circumstance that we see more and more scholars becoming involved in the investigation of the relationship between new media and intercultural communication. Emerging topical areas in this line of research mainly include three categories: (1) the impact of national/ethnic culture on the development of new media, (2) the impact of new media on cultural/social identity, and (3) the impact of new media (especially social media) on different aspects of intercultural communication (e.g., intercultural relationships, intercultural adaptation, and intercultural conflict). This paper discusses this trend of research on the relationship between new media and intercultural communication. [China Media Research. 2012; 8(2): 1-10

A Queer and Feminist Defense of Being Anonymous Online

From the earliest days of digital communities, online abuse has been connected to anonymity. While concerns around the impact of anonymity, particularly for women, people of color and LGBTQ folks, is legitimate, this paper argues that a flat rejection of digital anonymity is problematic, foreclosing certain forms of queer and feminist praxis. To make this case, I turn to the platform politics of Craigslist. Using Craigslist as a case study, I discuss the persistent stigma attached to online anonymity, before addressing specific tactics of online anonymity associated with queer and feminist values of privacy and mutual aid. Drawing on accounts of Craigslist users who saw anonymity as a protective form of control over their personal information, I outline ways in which anonymity is not solely an enabler for misogyny and homophobia, and can instead (or rather, also) be a subversive tool for self-expression and intimacy

From “Is” to the (News) World: How Facebook Jeopardized Its Life-Diary Nature and Occupied the Network

This article focuses on self-narratives and identity construction in the context of social networking sites (SNSs). It does so by discussing the findings of a research that had at its core a practice-based module titled “Facebook and Autobiography”, which was designed and taught at a major Hong Kong University. Through a cyber autoethnographic approach, which aligns to the methodological orientation of the second wave in narratology studies, the research explores how the infrastructure of Facebook affects the processes of self-narration in comparison with traditional written dairies. Contrary to previous studies, the interviews with students-participants and the analysis of their Facebook’s profiles suggest that the retrieval on Facebook of even small self-narratives is impaired by the fact that the platform has abandoned its life-diary orientation in favour of a news-based business model where the posthuman connotation of profiles prevails