Identities and separate roles in the virtual world

This week’s lecture is on MMO (multiple players roles online) that stimulate my interest in the studies of identity in new digital age.

The notion of the term “identitiy” has been diversified with the emerging of digital network cultures. The term  identity” was originally referred to the idea of “being who or what a person or thing is” (def. Oxford). Identity is built up with human interaction. People develop their identities with language through communication. The historical context of identity has suggested a basic evolution procedure for  changing notions of identity according to the reformation of social construction. Identity, back to Agrarian Era was determined by the State and geography hence people’s family network and the social class they were born into generally define their social statusWith the emerging of digital age, additional meaning were added to social identity and meanwhile, the notion of identity has been altered and becomes more complicated with the multiplication on individual status.Theorists stated that identity forms within the processes of social cognition and self-interaction. The process of cognition involves the procedure of selecting and filtering of other’s memory toward their impression on us. Identities on SNS in digital age were largely referred to our “self-definition” of oneself which is how people pretend or present themselves to the public, resulting multiplication and overlapping of identities as an obvious fact in the world of digital media.  Consequently, The notion of identity in contemporary network age has distorted due to reconstruction social cultures and networks. and the meaning had to be redefined.

Provided that the arrival of digital age have bought a big turning point to the notion of identity, The opened network public in digital platform such as social network sites and games has caused problem for controlling self-identity and personal information. Several research claimed that adolescents gamers tend to feel threatened by the unmanageable privacy in network public. The emerging of network culture also contributed to the contemporary social conflict. The information,  texts and images that people provided to digital platform had been treated as the portrait of their real self by others. This caused problems of indentity fragmentation and decentralization of individual identity. Sociologists have claimed that it is common for people nowadays to have multiple personalities and identities, therefore, judging someone only from virtual world is unfair. Accordingly, digital platform are seen to be a place of self-isolation.

In conclusion, the emerging of virtual network culture has big influences toward individual identity in contemporary time. Digital platform provides enormous platform for transportation information and communication, hence provided the ease of creating multiple identities and roles.