engleski

How Modern Technology Shape-shifts Our Identity

This article addresses some aspects of virtual reality as part of our social reality. For most people, the Internet is more of a medium than a technology. Moreover, it is a shape shifting, borderless medium firmly in the hands of ordinary citizens bent on turning it to extraordinary ends. The anonymity of cyberspace enables an endless space of possible identities that humans can construct in online communication. Online characters are an expression of real-world experiences, desires, fantasies and ideas ; they are connected to the offline world. If we know the endowment of an individual with different types of capital, we cannot deduce his or her online identities. Thus, cyberspace offers a niche for each of these specific facets of selfhood. Some people even talk about how we can “deconstruct” ourselves online. In cyberspace, the correlation between the choice of the name (or the picture that represents us) and our identity is not completely free from everyday cultural and political norms as the net utopians had imagined it to be. I give a several examples of how this was done through social networks in so-called “Macedonian cyberspace”.

social network, cyberspace, identity, Macedonian blog community, Macedonian cyberspace

nije evidentirano