Summary of Chapter 2 of Unspun - Identity

Cyberspace provides an interesting forum for the notion of "identity." It is a community in which one's identity can change on a daily or even hourly basis. There are many ways our identiy can be difined on the Web. Simply based on the websites we visit and the links we click, someone could creat a sort of profile what they interpret as our identity. Advertisers see internet users and individuals whom they can target with their advertistments. Websites can now track and individual user's activity and therefore tailor advertisments sepcificly for that user. They can also sell this information to other websites. Our "identites" are being bought and sold on the internet every day but they are not necessarily who we really are.

Many people voluntarily post their personal information on hompages or homemade websites. These types of websites provide people with a forum to share their personal information with anyone who cares to view it. It confuses the definitions of public and private information because people are able to post personal pictures such as those of their pets or children while at the same time making it available for the public to view.

An even more personal way to put one's identity on the Web is through the use of the webcam. The user can literaly put him or herself on the internet. Wether through pictures, images that are updates every so ofter or even through live video that is constanly visible to anyone who happens to click the link that takes them there. This represents a "total media saturation" in which a person can almost become unaware that they are on view for the entire world since they are so used to having their identity available to the public.

There are also types of internet communities in which users can create identities and act out certair stories that read like unscripted plays. Users can make up characters and speak as if they were actually that person. This blurs the lines of identity since no one really knows who anyone else is. Men play the roles of women and women play the roles of men. The whole purpose of these communities, called MUD's is to experiment and manipulate identity through what is known as "constructive hypertext."

A person's identity on the internent is simply defined as the types of connections he or she decides to make at any given time. It has nothing to do with who exactly they are. They can be anyone they want to be online since no one has the ability to prove otherwise. The community that they belong to therefore, is the collection of all of the useres who are connected by the same series of links.

There is also the question of wether or not the body of the users becomes completely irrelevant. The only thing that appears to matter on the web is the mind. Can the user completely seperate him or herself from race, gender, and other social stereotypes? Some believe that this is an impossibility since there can never be a complete seperation of the body and the mind. One, always gives away some of their social connections wether or not the body is visible. To really be able to separate onself from the social norms of the real world, he or she would have to remain completely isolated. Ultimatly the World Wide Web remains simply a place of makebelieve in which users can create their own identies but can never really escape from the social constrictions of the real world.