Selling Your Self: Online Identity in the Age of a Commodified Internet

Alice Emily Marwick

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts

University of Washington 2005

Program Authorized to Offer Degree: Department of Communication

Table of Contents Table of Contents..................................................................................................................i List of Figures.....................................................................................................................iii Introduction: A Brief History of Online Identity Scholarship.............................................1 Introduction......................................................................................................................1 Contemporary Internet Life.............................................................................................7 Thesis Structure.............................................................................................................12 Conclusion ....................................................................................................................15 Chapter One: Identity Scholarship, Cyberfeminism, and the Myth of the Liberatory Subject................16 Introduction....................................................................................................................16 Identity...........................................................................................................................16 Online Identity and Identity Online ..............................................................................21 Early Cyberculture Studies............................................................................................23 Queer Theory and Post-Human Subjectivity.................................................................26 Critical Cyberculture Studies.........................................................................................37 Authenticity....................................................................................................................47 Conclusion.....................................................................................................................50 Chapter Two: Internet Commercialization and Identity Commodification.......................51 Introduction....................................................................................................................51 Internet History .............................................................................................................53 Early Internet Culture....................................................................................................60 Mosaic and the Expansion of the Internet......................................................................63 The Boomtime...............................................................................................................66 Contemporary Internet Era............................................................................................69 Commodification of Identity..........................................................................................73 Identity and Commodification ......................................................................................84 The Digital Divide.........................................................................................................90 Conclusion.....................................................................................................................92 Chapter Three: Self-Presentation Strategies in Social Networking Sites..........................93 Introduction....................................................................................................................93 Social Networking Services...........................................................................................94 Social Network Analysis................................................................................................95 Social Networking Sites.................................................................................................99 Self-Presentation in Social Networking Sites..............................................................102 Authenticity..................................................................................................................106 User Presentation Strategies........................................................................................108 Application Assumptions.............................................................................................114 Conclusion...................................................................................................................120 Chapter Four: Xbox Live and the Political Economy of Video Games..........................121 Introduction..................................................................................................................121 Introducing the Xbox...................................................................................................123 Ms Pac Man to MMOs: A Highly Abbreviated Video Game History.......................127

Identity Presentation in Gaming Environments...........................................................132 Xbox Live....................................................................................................................139 Xbox.com and Gamertagpics.com...............................................................................143 Xbox 360......................................................................................................................146 Framing Gaming as Commodity..................................................................................149 Conclusion: Reflections...................................................................................................153 Introduction..................................................................................................................153 Authenticity..................................................................................................................154 Back to Theory.............................................................................................................157 The Evil Empire vs. The Creative Commons: False Dichotomies in Cyberculture Studies..........................................................................................................................160 Identity Management Moving Forward.......................................................................162 Conclusion...................................................................................................................165 Bibliography....................................................................................................................168

ii

List of Figures Figure 1: Top 10 Parent Companies of Popular Websites in the United States, Home Panel...................................................................................................................................70 Figure 2: Example of an Authentic profile......................................................................109 Figure 3: Example of an Authentic Ironic profile............................................................110 Figure 4: Example of a Fakester profile........................................................................111 Figure 5: Ad placement based on search results on MySpace.........................................119

iii

Introduction: A Brief History of Online Identity Scholarship

Introduction Conceptualizing online identity has been a key part of cyberculture scholarship throughout the history of the field. Indeed, mediated communication has long held a fascination for writers and researchers interested in how self-expression may change as it moves through a telephone line or fiber-optic cable. Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman,1 for example, both wrote of the shift from a literate culture to one mediated by television, and how the presentation of information altered as the medium through which it was transmitted changed. This presentation includes the way the author or originator of the information is represented. A sense of self or authorship is conveyed differently in a telephone conversation, a hand-written letter, a printed book, a home movie or an inperson meeting. These concerns are equally applicable to internet and computer-mediated communication. The increased interactivity and creative potential of the Web has brought issues of identity and self-representation to the forefront of cyberculture studies. Generally, early cyberculture scholars regarded online spaces, such as MUDs,2 bulletin boards, chat rooms and text-based adventure games, as sites in which users could play with aspects of their identities that, in meat-space, would generally be viewed as fixed, such as gender. This idea of the internet as a site for identity play assumes that users can and do represent themselves online in ways that do not map to their physical bodies. Freed from the constraints of the flesh, users could choose which gender or
1

See McLuhan, M. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964) and Postman, N. Amusing Ourselves to Death. (New York: Penguin Books, 1985). 2 MUDs is an acronym which stands for either Multiple User Dungeons or Multiple User Domains, depending on who you ask.

2 sexuality to perform, or create entire alternate identities nothing like their real-life counterpart, even in online environments where play was not presumed. This idea held a great deal of fascination for scholars and journalists alike. For example, Sherry Turkle devoted a chapter of her influential work Life on the Screen to gender-switching in MUDs, interviewing users who play a different gender online than they perform in real life.3 Similarly, Howard Rheingold, in The Virtual Community, writes the grammar of CMC media involves a syntax of identity play: new identities, false identities, multiple identities, exploratory identities are available in different manifestations of the medium.4 Inevitably, this ability of users to consciously perform identity in a flexible, nonfixed way was viewed as liberatory, as a way to break down the traditional liberal humanist subject as one true identity grounded in a single physical body. Allucqure Rosanne Stone writes in The War of Desire and Technology: The cyborg, the multiple personality, the technosocial subject... all suggest a radical rewriting, in the techno-social space, of the bounded individual as the standard social unit and validated social actant.5 For Stone, the ability of users to change their performative identities at will, or to perform a series of differing identities simultaneously, is representative of a larger breakdown in a singular concept of self. Frequently, thinking about selfhood in these terms is intimately tied to the deconstruction of fixed conceptions of gender and sexuality. Turkle writes: like transgressive gender practices in real life, by breaking the conventions, [online

Turkle, S. Life on the Screen. (New York: Simon and Shuster, 1995.) See also Bruckman, A. Gender Swapping on the Internet. In Proceedings of the Internet Society (INET '93) in San Francisco, California, August, 1993, by the Internet Society. Reston, VA: The Internet Society. <http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~asb/papers/old-papers.html#INET> (18 February 2004). 4 Rheingold, H. The Virtual Community: Homesteading On the Electronic Frontier. Revised Edition. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000) 152. 5 Stone, A. R. The War of Desire and Technology. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996) 43.

3 gender play] dramatizes our attachment to them.6 As feminist postmodern scholarship was deconstructing gender as a social construct expressed through a series of performative actions,7 the ability of users to self-consciously adopt and play with different gender identities revealed the backstage choices involved in the production of gender. Cyberspace, then, became a site where previously fixed categories of identity could break down altogether, freeing up offline personas from the suffocating boundedness of rigid categories of gender and sexuality. Donna Haraways cyborg was the preferred metaphor of this new way of looking at identity. Her widely cited essay A Manifesto for Cyborgs posited the cyborg subject as a site where formerly oppositional concepts could simultaneously reside, thus breaking down entire dichotomies. Haraway certainly did not locate her cyborg in an inherently liberatory place- for one thing, she recognized the patriarchal and militaristic overtones inherent in the metaphor. As easily as the cyborg could convert rigid categories into rich, mestiza8 sites, it could simultaneously become the final abstraction embodied in a Star War apocalypse waged in the name of defense, about the final appropriation of womens bodies in a masculinist orgy of war.9 Despite Haraways recognition and warning of

6 7

Turkle, 212. There are key differentiations to make here between the idea of performance and performativity. Ill use gender as an example: playing with gender online would be performance while the day-to-day performance of gender in real-life illustrates genders performativity. The distinction between the two involves how agency plays into the performance. A person interacting as an alternate gender online is conducting a selfconscious, deliberate performance (for whatever reason). Alternately, a woman living daily life as a woman, whether online or offline, is, most likely, not making strategic choices about enacting and reenacting her gender in her daily life; she is not self-conscious about performing as a particular gender. However, whether or not a person performing gender is aware of the performance of gender does not change the fact that gender as a concept is performative: that is, a non-essentialist, constructed category reinscribed and bounded by actions that are invoked and reinforced socially and temporally. 8 Following Gloria Anzaldua, a borderland, mestiza consciousness is a subject position of inherent multiplicity that is tied to the post-colonial and globalized agent rather than the cyborg. For more, see Anzaldua, G. Borderlands/La Frontera. (San Francisco, CA : Aunt Lute, 1987). 9 Haraway, D. Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980's. Socialist Review 80 (1985), 78.

4 these contradictions, other scholars took solely the redeeming qualities of the metaphor, and the resulting scholarship on identity adopted the breathless tones of the convert in describing the internet as a panacea.10 The idea of technology as inherently progressive11 was applied to identity and combined with the cyborg to create the post-human subject position that would allow humanity to progress to a more flexible, mutable stage of development. Although concepts of identity were simultaneously being rethought and re-configured by postmodernist theorists, social activists and writers, this body of knowledge was often ignored once the online realm came into play. Rather than looking at the virtual or online sphere as another social space that the offline self passed through, it was treated as revolutionary and entirely separate from real life. Eventually, the view of the internet as inherently utopian came to be critiqued, particularly when it came to ideas of technology as transcending race, class, and gender. Beyond simply the Digital Divide,12 a significant amount of scholarship has examined the assumptions built into internet technologies. Ellen Ullman located programming, coding and the technology industry as a whole in an inherently masculine space. She warned in her 1995 essay Out of Time: Reflections on the Programming Life that the new, interactive internet could reproduce and re-enact life as engineers

10

See Hayles, N. K. How We Became Posthuman. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999) and Badmington, N. Posthumanism. (New York: Palgrave: 2000), for more on the liberatory nature of the cyborg / posthuman subject. For more general scholarship on the internet and gender, see Cherny, L. and Weise, E. R., eds. Wired Women: Gender and New Realities in Cyberspace. (Seattle: Seal Press, 1996). 11 See Hamilton, S. Incomplete Determinism: A Discourse Analysis of Cybernetic Futurology in Early Cyberculture. Journal of Communication Inquiry 22, no.2 (1998): 177-206 for an interesting exploration of the evolutionary metaphor as it applies to information technology and cyberculture in general. 12 The Pew Internet and American Life Project found a Digital Divide between people with and without access to the internet; this divide was mapped along lines of race, gender and class. However, assuming that internet access will continue to grow, and especially considering the high penetration rates of internet technologies among teenagers across race, class, and gender lines, I am more interested in looking at the underlying assumptions of the technologies used. This is discussed in more depth in the second chapter.

5 know it: alone, out-of-time, disdainful of anyone far from the machine.13 Beth Kolko examined the lack of racial descriptors in particular text-based interactive worlds, and what this revealed about the assumptions technology designers carry with them as they create virtual environments.14 Similarly, Lisa Nakamura, analyzing the formation of racial identity in LambdaMOO, uncovered the way that race is written (or designed) out of the system and then re-inscribed using stereotypes.15 But while a minority of scholars were locating cyberspace within an assumed narrative of white male technological subjectivity, the ideal of multiple, flexible identity remained. In the late 90s, the American internet changed in two significant ways. The first shift was modal. The early internet was solely text-based, accessed through command lines and green-screen terminals. Starting in the mid-90s, internet users browsed web sites and applications that included pictures, photographs, and eventually audio, video and interactive media. The internet became visual and multi-modal. The way that information was presented changed, and, as a result, the types of information that could be presented changed. Much as the shift from the command line-based operating system to the graphical user interface helped to fuel the home computer revolution of the 1980s, the shift to a more visual way of representing information made the web and the internet as a whole more user-friendly and, as a result, more popular.

13

Ullman, E. Out of Time: Reflections on the Programming Life. In Resisting the Virtual Life, ed. Brook, J. and Boal, I. A. (San Francisco: City Lights, 1995) 143. 14 Kolko, B. E. Erasing @race: Going White in the (Inter)Face. In Race in Cyberspace, ed. Kolko, B. E., Nakamura, L., and Rodman, G. B. (New York: Routledge, 2000) 225. 15 Nakamura, L. "Race in/for Cyberspace: Identity Tourism and Racial Passing on the Internet." Cyberreader, ed. V.J. Vitanza. (Needham Heights, MA, 1999) 442-453. See Silver, D. Looking Backwards, Looking Forward: Cyberculture Studies 1990-2000. In Web.studies: Rewiring Media Studies for the Digital Age, ed. Gauntlett, D., (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000) 19-30 for another discussion of this piece.

6 The second shift, then, was social. The invention of Mosaic and, later, Netscape made the World Wide Web available to more than just hobbyists, geeks, and academics tied to their .edu accounts. This expansion in popularity came hand-in-hand with increased commercialization of the internet. The rise of name-brand portals and shopping sites gave birth to an enormous variety of dot.com ventures, some of which generated intense speculative wealth for their inevitably photogenic, brash young (male) CEOs. As stocks soared, Time and Newsweek ran hundreds of inches of column space on the dotcom revolution and internet use skyrocketed. While early cyberculture scholars were examining a medium populated mostly by early adopters and edge cases, the modern internet has become, for Americans, almost as ubiquitous as cable television (which is now digital, broadcast in HDTV, and augmented with TiVo and burned DVDs). Current estimates of worldwide internet users put the number somewhere between 800 and 900 million, with more than 200 million in the United States alone.16 Penetration rates are likely to rise as the net-savvy under-35 population ages; the current UCLA Internet Report, for example, puts internet use by American teenagers at close to 97 percent.17 Compare this to the (admittedly imprecise) demographic reports from 1995 and 1996,

16

Estimating the number of internet users is notoriously difficult, however, there are several online resources which can help to paint a rough picture of the current online population. See ClickZ Stats staff. Population Explosion! ClickZ Trends & Statistics: The Web's Richest Source. 16 March 2005, <http://www.clickz.com/stats/sectors/geographics/article.php/5911_151151> (30 March 2005) for current statistics culled from the CIA World Factbook and the Nielsen/NetRatings audience measurements. See also Miniwatts International. Internet Usage Statistics for the Americas. InternetWorldStats.com. 2005, <http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats2.htm> (30 March 2005), which estimates audiences by country. The Center for the Digital Futures Internet Project (formerly the UCLA Internet Project) is a yearly report with comprehensive statistics on American internet user behavior. See The University of Southern California. Surveying the Digital Future: A Longitudinal International Study of the Individual and Social Effects of PC/Internet Technology. Center for the Digital Future. 2004, <http://www.digitalcenter.org/pages/site_content.asp?intGlobalId=22> (2 July 2005). 17 The University of California, Los Angeles Center for Communication Policy. The UCLA Internet Report, Surveying the Digital Future, Year Three. Center for the Digital Future. February 2003, <http://www.digitalcenter.org/pdf/InternetReportYearThree.pdf> (30 March 2005).

7 which estimated the number of internet users worldwide to have been 16 and 36 million, respectively.18 These two changes in the scope of the internet are crucial, and we must recognize them if we wish to create cyberculture scholarship that is relevant to the realities of online life today. Turkles musings on MUDs seem quaint when confronted with Everquest, a synthetic world with an economy that rivals Bulgaria.19 Likewise, how is Rheingolds discussion of the WELL relevant to LiveJournal, a blog-based community with more than two million users with an average age of 18? The explosion in internet usage and applications requires a re-examination of presumptions about online life. Contemporary Internet Life The massive increase in internet use among Americans was contemporaneous with the widespread commercialization of online life. Despite the collapse of the dot-com bubble, the colonization of the internet by major corporations continues. No longer Rheingolds wild frontier populated by hardy homesteaders, the Web is used by more heartlanders than hackers. Todays American internet user buys access through his cable or phone company, starts her session at a portal run by Yahoo!, MSN or AOL and runs instant messaging software complete with banner ads promoting reality television shows and just-released medication. EBay and Amazon.com, the two major survivors of the dot.com bust, are robust and reporting quarterly profits, and online shopping has become normative, if not preferable, for most people. As I write this, the 2004 holiday shopping
18

Miniwatts International. Internet Growth Statistics. InternetWorldStats.com. 1 July 2005, <http://www.internetworldstats.com/ emarketing.htm> (3 July 2005). 19 Castronova, E. "Virtual Worlds: A First-Hand Account of Market and Society on the Cyberian Frontier." CESifo Working Paper Series no. 618 (December 2001): <http://ssrn.com/abstract=294828 > (18 February 2004). For more on the economies of synthetic worlds, see Dibbell, J. The Unreal Estate Boom. Wired 11 no.1 (January 2003), < http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.01/gaming.html> (30 March 2005).

8 season has just begun, and reports from Goldman Sachs indicate that online shoppers spent more than eight billion dollars online in November alone, a sixty-two percent increase from the previous year.20 Total online retail spending for 2004 is estimated at $75.7 billion, 6.6% of total US retail revenue.21 Despite the increased emphasis on online consumption, many popular internet applications are focused on social relations. Online personals, for example, are now the most lucrative form of content on the Web with $418 million in revenues in 2003 and 45 million projected users.22 Social networking sites, weblogs, online journaling applications and instant messaging provide internet users with still more ways of meeting and interacting with others. It is likely that the options available for users to communicate with each other will continue to increase as mobile devices become progressively more Web-enabled. As companies continue to make money from online social interactions, the motivation to commercialize offline social interactions will escalate. The increase in communication options and the resulting convergence of offline and online social life implies that companies will focus on replicating and then monetizing offline social structures as they move to the Web. How the complexity of online identity interacts with this process remains to be seen. However, the internet is now located temporally in a post-boom paradigm. In order for such new applications to be financially successful, they require ways to target and sell to people moving through them. Think of Microsoft Passport, which asks users to provide personal information as a pre-requisite for using a variety of free Web
20

Reuters Limited. E-shoppers spend more this holiday season. MSNBC.com. 8 December 2004, < http://msnbc.msn.com/id/6661308/> (10 December 2004). 21 The E-Tailing Group. E-Facts. E-Tailing.com. 2004, <http://www.etailing.com/newsandviews/facts.html> (20 December 2004). 22 Egan, J. Love in the Time of No Time. The New York Times Magazine. 23 November 2003, 66-128.

9 applications. Similarly, social networking sites like Friendster provide a unitary profile per person, which is then analyzed for commodities, such as music, movies, and books, which can be advertised directly to the user. Gmail, a free email service, mines user email for keywords and targets ads based on interest. Thus, as people move through internet structures, they are increasingly tied to unitary, and immediately commodified, concepts of identity. To the corporation, the unitary identity is more reliable than the multiple. Amazon.com recently instituted its Real Name program, which privileges users who contribute content (reviews, etc.) to the site. The catch is that they must use the same name that appears on their credit card. The Amazon.com site describes this program: A Real Name is a signature based on the name entered by the author as the cardholder name on his or her credit card, i.e. the author represents this name as his/her identity in the "real world." An author willing to sign his or her real-world name on a piece of content is essentially saying, "With my real-world identity, I stand by what I have written here." Real Name signatures therefore establish credibility much as reputations built over time in the Amazon.com community, and just as high-reputation authors and their works receive badges, authors who use Real Names receive badges.23 If, to amazon.com, a Real Name is a sign of credibility, it follows that the use of a pseudonym is a sign of dis-credibility, or, indeed, dishonesty. The multiple identity works against corporate interests. A flexible, mutable online self can neither be pinned down nor sold to; neither can its demographic information be captured, packaged, and added to a marketing database. This privileging of the unitary is deliberate, strategic, and necessary to commercial interests.24

23

Amazon.com. Your Real Name Attribution. Amazon.com. 2005, <http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/browse/-/12986081/102-2706979-1350564> (1 July 2005). 24 It is interesting to note that this shift to a unitary and commodified identity comes at a time when people are increasingly encouraged to adopt identities by purchasing products, and purchasing products that will allow them to adopt multiple consumer identities based on fads and fashion, at that.

10 It is important not to see internet structures and technologies as monolithic, however. As much as major corporations and software development companies wish to target the user, the anarchic spirit of early users of the Web does remain. A combination of technologies (open source software, encryption, filesharing) and organizations (the Electronic Frontier Foundation, downhill battle.org, the ACLU) provide a minority of users the ability to opt-out of this widespread shift to a wholly commercialized internet. These structures, then, do not affect everyone the same way. A stratified class structure divides users based on technical knowledge and ability. Returning to the single, commodified user profile, I posit that this concept of identity assumes that the singular profile is authentic in nature. In other words, as Jane Doe moves through the internet with a single name, address, and Passport, her online identity should presumably map correctly on to her body, gender, location, socioeconomic status and earning potential. The single user online becomes the actual user offline; we return to the single body unit grounded in self.25 Without this authenticity, she cannot be commodified and her singularity becomes useless to corporate interests. But the authentic is not that simple. It is important to note here that I use the term authentic throughout this paper to represent a series of problematic concepts. Authenticity, itself, is context-dependent, and not something inherent or intrinsic to a person, place, or thing. David Grazian writes in Blue Chicago that authenticity is defined as to conform to an idealized representation of reality.26 In other words, an authentic tour of Thailand would refer to certain assumptions, stereotypes and beliefs about the

25 26

Stone, 85. Grazian, D. Blue Chicago. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003) 10-11.

11 attraction held by the tourist and what constitutes an appropriate experiential model. Thus, authenticity is always manufactured and always constructed in contradistinction to something else27 the inauthentic. However, because authenticity is imagined does not make it imaginary.28 The idea of authenticity is very real, and it has real, practical implications that play out online and offline every day. Returning to the shifting concepts of online identity, Stone and Turkles conceptualizations of identity as flexible and mutable still remain useful and salient as a jumping-off point. Turkle writes, Many more people experience identity as a set of roles that can be mixed and matched, whose diverse demands need to be negotiated.29 Identity, rather than being a fixed, unitary label, is a series of performative acts that vary depending on context and location.30 Similarly, the definition of authenticity changes based on the location of the actor who performs it.31 Jane Doe might perform authentically at work at a non-profit, in a rock club, or in her place of worship. These performances may vary considerably from each other, yet be judged as equally authentic by Jane and others. Offline social situations allow Jane to choose how she authentically represents herself at any time. In real life, there is multiplicity, but markers of authenticity such as speech, dress, body language, and the like can all change based on context and personal strategy. Naturally, some signifiers remain fixed for most people (gender and race, for example, although the ability to pass in any given situation should not be discounted), but
27 28

Ibid, 13. Gupta, A., and Ferguson, J. Beyond Culture : Space, Identity, and the Politics of Difference. Cultural Anthropology 7.1 (1992): 725. 29 Turkle, 180. 30 Goffman, E. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. (New York: Anchor Books, 1959) further discusses how these acts change strategically based on social situation, audience, and companions. 31 Grazian, 159.

12 overall, identity presentation is context-dependent and variable. However, it is important to remember that this presentation is generally unconscious. Multiplicity, thus, is a limited tool of resistance; the multiple subject lacks the agency to be deployed strategically. Singular, commodified concepts of online identity limit this ability to vary selfpresentation strategies. For most users, this will rarely become problematic. However, there are key spaces that demonstrate how these issues become troubling for the user structures of conflict. More worrying is how these conflicts and spaces will change for future users. Previous concepts of the multiple, flexible online identity are no longer helpful when we deeply examine such issues. Clearly, a new concept of identity online is necessary. This concept should not assume that technology is either a panacea or inherently negative. It should acknowledge the current commercialized version of the internet. It should also be an inherently useful concept, one that is workable for both application designers and users as they move through structures of conflict. A new paradigm of convergence emerges as the digital citizen is transformed into the Passport-holding consumer. As social life increasingly moves online, we (users, netizens, people) will find that more spaces have become conflicting. Thesis Structure In undertaking this thesis, my goal is to examine identity within the context of the modern-day, commodified internet, with the aim of creating a strong foundation for future theories of how identity operates online today. I draw from both theories of identity and discussions of the granular workings of contemporary internet structures in

13 order to show that previous scholarship on online identity is no longer applicable considering the major shifts that have taken place online in the last two decades. In the first chapter, I look at previous work on internet identity, which generally viewed the internet as a unique realm where identity operated differently than it did offline. In other words, internet users were thought to be inclined to role-play different genders and alternate personas, which theorists believed might help to illuminate the constructed and performative nature of many categories which are generally taken as inherent. I hope the reader will come away understanding why the idea of internet interaction as somehow uniquely revealing was so appealing and influential to cyberculture studies in the 1980s and 1990s. In the second chapter, I switch to a more pragmatic and historical view of the internet. First, I provide an abbreviated history of the internet in order to demonstrate the shift from an online culture influenced by academics and software developers to one largely dominated by commercial enterprises. Second, I place identity within that culture, showing how personal information has become a commodity, and how the emphasis on unitary self-presentation strategies is directly linked to specific online business practices. The overall goal of both sections is to show how we must look at the political economy of the internet if we are to examine identity. The third and fourth chapters are case studies of particular structures where commodification has directly affected the way that users experience identity and selfpresentation. Chapter three discusses profile-based social networking sites such as Friendster, MySpace, and Facebook. Each of these sites assumes that a single user profile is necessary in order to maintain the utility of the services as networking tools. However, this fixity becomes problematic when the inherently flexible nature of offline identity is

14 considered. I maintain that as offline social structures continue to replicate online, these types of conflicts will continue. As a result, users have adopted specific self-presentation strategies in order to mitigate the privileging of a single, presumably authentic identity. In chapter four, I undertake a close examination of the video game industry. Much scholarship around online identity has involved gaming, presumably since it is seen as inherently playful and thus more suited to the flexibility of role-playing that online identity supposedly facilitates. However, looking at Microsofts Xbox Live system, I find that the same market forces discussed in the second chapter have effectively required Live users to adopt a singular model of identity. Although previous studies of Live have demonstrated that this singularity makes the service more usable and increases sociability, my point is that even in the most playful of internet realms, multiplicity is, for the most part, de-emphasized in favor of unitary, presumed authentic identity. Most video games are no longer examples of technology where identity play is always encouraged and promoted. This thesis concludes with several guidelines that can assist in formulating future answers to the question Given the changes in the internet over the last two decades, how can we accurately conceptualize identity? First, I talk about the ways in which authenticity operates within the context of the commodified internet. Second, if we do reconceptualize identity, I outline what must be taken into account. Third, I note how we must be careful not to fall into false dichotomies when analyzing corporate sites. Finally, given the current engineering developments in federated identity management, I stress the importance of contextualizing cyberculture studies within the political economy.

15 Conclusion In the current era of online interaction, where accurate personal information has been transformed into currency for marketers and corporate interests, the early concepts of multiple identities seem to regain some of their liberatory origins. However, while the potential for resistive use may remain, the experience of the great majority of users no longer fits within this paradigm. In this thesis, I hope to provide the foundations for a new model of online identity that will advise not only scholarship, but the work of application designers and users. As the internet has changed, so must our scholarship.

16 Chapter One: Identity Scholarship, Cyberfeminism, and the Myth of the Liberatory Subject Introduction

In this chapter, I provide a brief review of the literature I have drawn from to inform my thesis. Two particular perspectives inform my research overall: theories of identity and cyberfeminism. First, I outline theoretical concepts of identity as they pertain to both the traditional essentialist notion of self and the post-modernist idea of self as a project. Turning to identity online, I review early approaches to online identity from the canon of cyberculture studies, specifically, Brenda Laurel, Sherry Turkle, and Howard Rheingold. In looking at cyborg and post-human feminist theory, especially the work of Donna Haraway, Allucquere Rosanne Stone, and N. Katherine Hayles, I use the work of queer theorist Judith Butler to analyze the usefulness of these concepts in examining the performative nature of self and identity. Next, I review some of the major critiques of the liberatory idea of multiplicity online, particularly those of Lori Kendall and Eleanor Wynn and James Katz. Finally, I problematize the idea of authenticity in order to provide a strong foundation for my next chapter. Identity Before we move to identity online, let us define what we mean by identity, as it is not a simple concept to unpack. The traditional concept of identity, in terms of the traditional liberal humanist subject, assumes that identity consists of a clear, authentic set of characteristics32 that is connected, presumably, to the essence of the self. This
32

Woodward, K. Identity and Difference. (London: Sage Publications, 1997) 11.

17 identity operates as a coherent, singular, agented subject position. Thurlow, Lendal and Tomic summarize the essential model of identity: identity was also believed to be unitary (i.e. we each have one, true identity), fixed (i.e. its established during adolescence) and stable (i.e. it stays basically the same).33 This concept of identity is current and popular in Western society. People tend to think of themselves as a core self that remains constant and unchanging over time. We tell stories about ourselves that inscribe our experiences within socially co-constructed metanarratives. This allows us to interpret our experiences through recognizable lenses, making sense of them within different and varying social discourses. For example, coming out narratives often follow a similar path through which people re-interpret memories of formative experiences into well-trodden paths of queer stories. Although each of us may have an individual sense of identity, the tools available at our disposal to construct and describe these identities are social and co-constructed. Woodward, for example, discusses how national identities rely on essentialist concepts to exist. For example, traditional American values or non-assimilationist Islamic ideals both assume that all members of a certain identity group share certain characteristics, which are fixed non-temporally and do not vary across the group. Thus, what it means to be American becomes an inherent property of the American body and mind, rather than something historically variable and constituted by discourse. With the rise of fundamentalist movements linked to nationality, ethnicity, religion, and other cultural markers, the essentialist notion of identity has maintained particular currency in the popular imagination.
33

Thurlow, C., Lendal, L. and Tomic, A. Computer Mediated Communication. (London: Sage Publications, 2004) 97.

18 However, social scientists and critical theorists have long since seen the idea of an essential identity as solely a useful social construct. Rather than inherent or biological, viewing identity as essential is just one model. An alternate, postmodernist model, which views identity as a project, assumes an identity that is constructed and variable. Stuart Hall writes that identity is not fixed. Instead, it is a production which is never complete, always in process, and always constituted within, not outside, representation.34 Rather than what Stone calls a Body Unit Grounded by Self (BUGS),35 one core persona mapping to one bounded body, identity is consistently in flux and changes based on social context. Woodward summarizes: Consider the different identities involved in different occasions, such as attending a job interview or a parents evening, going to a party or a football match, or visiting a shopping mall. In all these situations, we may feel, literally, like the same person, but we are differently positioned by the social expectation and constraints and we represent ourselves to others differently in each context. In a sense, we are positionedand we also position ourselves according to the fields in which we are acting.36 Hall further points out that the subject always speaks from a particular historical or cultural position. Woodward calls this contingent identity, pointing out that it is a product of an intersection of different components, of political and cultural discourses and particular histories.37 Returning to our example of cultural identity above, while the essentialist model of identity assumes that, say, an American reclaiming an authentic, inherent Irish identity is discovering a truth about oneself through shared history and culture, there is another way of thinking about such things. When we adopt an identity,

34

Hall, S. Cultural identity and Diaspora. In Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader. Williams, P. & Chrisman, L. eds. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994) 392. 35 Stone, A. R. The War of Desire and Technology. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996) 85. 36 Woodward, 22. 37 Woodward, 28.

19 although that identity has a past, as we claim that past, we reconstruct it. The past is transformed, and we become part of an imagined community.38 Contemporary ideas of identity as non-essentialist point out that identity is marked by difference (or, conversely, similarity), and thus is defined in opposition to an alternate identity. With particular regard to popular notions of essentialism, this difference can be marked on the body for example, the gendered body as either male or female, or the raced body as Black or White. However, this difference can be marked symbolically what brand of sneakers a person wears, what flag she flies, or what religious symbol she prays to. Woodward writes that these symbolic markers function as how we make sense of social relations and practices, for example, regarding who is excluded and who is included. Social differentiation is how these classifications of difference are lived out in social relations.39 If identity is always defined oppositionally, symbolic markers are how those differences are made visible. Some theorists believe that the overall concept of identity is problematic. Stuart Hall, for example, prefers the term identification rather than identity for a number of reasons. First, it de-centers the essentialist notion of identity. Points of identification40 are unstable and shifting rather than fixed and inherent. Secondly, it emphasizes the idea of representation and symbolism in relation to identity. The truth of certain subject positions becomes only a series of symbolic markers that are given meaning by social context. This is not to say that identity does not exist, or that it is a series of lies. It is imagined, but not imaginary.41 Identity has real effects, on the person performing it, the
38 39

Woodward, 20. Woodward, 12. 40 Hall, 395. 41 Gupta, A., and Ferguson, J. Beyond Culture : Space, Identity, and the Politics of

20 people interacting with that person, and the society in which the person exists. Foucault refers to this phenomenon as a regime of truth:42 if a society believes something to be true, and acts as if it is true, it does not matter whether it literally is true. What matters is whether people treat it as if it were so. This regime of truth extends similarly to identity performance and symbolic markers. In communication literature, several key theorists have contributed to our understanding of the postmodernist, performative conceptualization of identity. Erving Goffmans The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life43 is one of the foundational texts of the field of communication studies, as he was one of the first theorists to suggest that identity might not be linked to an inherent, fixed subject position. Rather than viewing interaction as people relating to each other based on an essential, natural version of themselves, Goffman takes up the metaphor of dramaturgy to explain individual action in face-to-face, small group contexts. He conceptualized people as actors, whose performance varied based on social context, particularly in terms of who they were performing for (the audience) and with whom (the team). This concept of identity, involving a series of expressive acts to give off particular impressions, necessarily conflicts with classic humanist ideas of the essential identity; Goffman wrote that even when alone, people perform for a team of one.44 It is important to note that Goffman did not believe that these performances were particularly self-reflexive. Although the variation in actions or presentation could be, and were, strategic, he noted that every day actors believe in the parts that they play. Whereas
Difference. Cultural Anthropology 7.1 (1992): 725. 42 Foucault, M. Truth and Power. Power/Knowledge : Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 19721977. (New York: Pantheon, 1980) 133. 43 Goffman, E. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. (New York: Anchor Books, 1959).
44

Goffman, 81.

21 one might try very hard to make a good impression at a job interview or formal event, there is a key distinction between these types of self-conscious performances and the performance of identity categories seen as essential, such as gender or class. For Goffman, these different types of performances could be placed on a continuum, with some types of performance so ingrained as to become naturalized, whereas the more extreme types of performative actions coming into play within areas of conflict (service work, unusual social situations, and interacting with people of different classes, for example). Although Goffman does not delve deeply into the idea of gender or sexuality as performative, his theories are still remarkably relevant to modern theories of identity as a series of constructed identifications. Online Identity and Identity Online

The advent of new technologies has traditionally brought with it new examinations of identity. Print media, television and radio have been carefully analyzed for their impact on peoples expression of self and identity.45 This examination similarly extends to the internet and computer-mediated communication. Since the early days of email and rudimentary text-based chat worlds, theorists, journalists, computer scientists and academics have postulated that the broad rubric of online communication would bring about, variously, the end of face-to-face communication, the eradication of racism and sexism, drastic changes in grammar and spelling (both positive and negative), and the
45

Butcher, M. Transnational Television, Cultural Identity and Change. (London: Sage Publications, 2003); Dyer, R. The Role of Stereotypes. The Matter of Images: Essays on Representations. (New York: Routledge, 1993); Gauntlett, D. Media, Gender and Identity. (London: Routledge 2002); Saco, D. Voices from the Distance: Radio Martil and the(Pen) Insular Construction of Cuban Identity. Unpublished M.A. thesis, Florida Atlantic University, 1992; Tubella, I. Television and Internet in the Construction of Identity. Project Internet Catalunya, UOC. 2001, <http://www.presidenciarepublica.pt/network/apps/immatubella.pdf.> (1 March 2005).

22 rise of a new, global village, to name but a few. Most often, these discussions have taken place in multiple realms, with both foreboding and forward-thinking perspectives represented in the mainstream press, academia, and the technology industry. In this chapter, I am focused on examining the writings specifically pertinent to identity online. I am indebted to Crispin Thurlow for the distinction made between online identity and identity online. The term online identity somehow connotes an identity that is different or separate from our offline identity. However, as the previous section outlined, all identity is performative work, not just identity that is expressed through a computer-mediated medium. This is a key concept as scholarship on online identity often falls into one of two traps. Either virtual identity expression is presented as somehow less real than identity that is performed face-to-face, or it is privileged as something extraordinarily fluid when compared to the stolid, fixed way that people express their identities in the offline world. The latter implies a false dichotomy between essential and constructed identity that depends on the medium through which it is presented46. In order to discuss identity online, I will be drawing from some of the more visible practitioners of cyberculture studies, an emerging field which Silver divides into three stages of development: popular cyberculture, cyberculture studies, and critical cyberculture studies.47 The first stage, popular cyberculture, consists of descriptive writings about the internet from the early to mid-1990s, largely authored by journalists and technology enthusiasts. Although the works that make up this stage remain historically relevant, for the most part they suffer from what Silver calls a limited dualism and can be described as either dystopian rants or utopian raves. It is not until
46 47

For a more thorough examination of this distinction, see Thurlow, Lendal and Tomic, 104-105. Silver, D. Looking Backwards, Looking Forward: Cyberculture Studies 1990-2000. In Web.studies: Rewiring Media Studies for the Digital Age. Gauntlett, D., ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000): 19-30.

23 the second stage, cyberculture studies, that we find a significant amount of work on identity, exemplified by writers like Sherry Turkle, Howard Rheingold, and Allucquere Rosanne Stone. The distinction between the two latter stages is far from absolute, but critical cyberculture studies moves beyond the analysis of the second stage to contextualize and offer more complex, more problematized findings.48 Although, within this framework, much of the literature discussed in this chapter is situated within cyberculture studies, my aim in undertaking this work is to provide a concept of identity that can be useful for critical cyberculture work. Early Cyberculture Studies Brenda Laurel, a significant figure in early feminist cyberculture studies, is a software developer, writer, and theorist who works primarily around interface design. In her prescient 1993 work Computer as Theatre, Laurel extended Goffmans dramaturgical metaphor to human-computer activity. Laurel, with the goal of creating applications that facilitated user action, encouraged user interface designers to view human-computer interaction more similar to drama than narrative. She writes: The search for a definition of interactivity diverts our attention from the real issue: How can people participate as agents within representational contexts? Actors know a lot about that, and so do children playing makebelieve. Buried within us in our deepest playful instincts, and surrounding us in the cultural conventions of theatre, film, and narrative, are the most profound and intimate sources of knowledge about interactive representations.49 Although Laurel was not making any claims about identity, this passage illustrates what would come to be a given in cyberculture studies: the idea of expression of agency
48 49

Ibid. Laurel, B. Computers as Theatre. (Reading, Massachusetts: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, 1993) 21.

24 through computer mediation as inherently performative. Laurel, however, does not seem to believe that the expression of self through a computer is inherently liberatory in some way. Rather, like Goffman, she sees identity expression generally as a series of dramatic acts. Sherry Turkles influential 1995 book Life on the Screen provided cyberculture scholars with the first lengthy and complicated text on identity expressed through computer-related media. Turkles analysis begins by citing Freud and Lacan, psychoanalytic theorists who contributed to postmodern and poststructuralist ideas that destabilized the concept of the core self. She writes that postmodernists attempt to portray the self as a realm of discourse rather than a real thing or a permanent structure of the mind.50 As we will see in the next section, which draws heavily from queer theorist Judith Butler, this destabilization of the unitary subject, replaced by one that is created and represented by and within discourse, was highly influential on feminist and queer theorists of the 1990s. Turkle relates these concepts of multiplicity, heterogeneity, flexibility, and fragmentation51 to people using IRC, email, and MUDs. She writes: Traditional ideas about identity have been tied to a notion of authenticity that such virtual experiences actively subvert. When each player can create many characters and participate in many games, the self is not only decentered but multiplied without limit.52 Here, Turkle points out that people are used to thinking of themselves as a single, fixed identity (iron-like solidity)53 that does not change from situation to situation. However, online communication, especially during the period in which Turkle was writing (early to
50

Turkle, S. Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995) 178. 51 Turkle, 178. 52 Turkle, 185. 53 Turkle, 179.

25 mid 1990s), encourages people to create personas or characters that differ from their presumably authentic conceptions of themselves. For example, a male might play a female character in an online game, or a person might create two or three identities with which they interact with others in a chat room. In other words, computer games and online interaction make the actual experience of performing alternate identities other than the privileged unitary a familiar and usual one for certain groups of people. Turkle takes this idea further, claiming that this playful, multiple approach to identity can actually help people view their own unitary identity as constructed: Having literally written our online personae into existence, we are in a position to be more aware of what we project into everyday life. Like the anthropologist returning home from a foreign culture, the voyager in virtuality can return to a real world better equipped to understand its artifices.54 The implication is that the experience of performing alternate or multiple characters online will somehow illuminate the performative aspects of everyday life. This may allow people to experiment offline with diverse presentations of self, such as more fluid representations of sexuality and gender. She cites other experiences, particularly creating homepages and the rise in multiple personality disorder, that contribute to multiple concepts of identity as increasingly familiar and common. Like Turkle, Howard Rheingold embraces online experiences as positive contributions to new concepts of identity as multiple. In his popular 199355 book The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier, Rheingold talks about MUDs (essentially text-based chat worlds that can be configured simply for sociable

54 55

Turkle, 263. I am citing the 2000 reprint, but the major changes from the 1993 addition are the introduction and the conclusion, not the sections that I am discussing in this chapter.

26 conversation or for more narrative-based gaming) and how identity is fluid for MUD users. Rheingold is primarily concerned with the community aspects of MUDs, so his examination of identity is superficial when compared to Turkles. However, he perpetuates Turkles view of playing characters on MUDs as somehow dissolving boundaries of identity:56 The grammar of CMC [computer-mediated communication] media involves a syntax of identity play: new identities, false identities, multiple identities, exploratory identities, are available in different manifestations of the medium.57 Rheingold makes implicit claims that these new vocabularies of identity extend beyond the computer-mediated world, but these are never made explicit. Still, the popularity of ideas of online interaction as conducive to multiple, flexible identity constructions remained. It is important to note that this liberation was almost entirely focused on gender. The idea of liberating people from the confines of racial or ethnic identities was rarely discussed in this stage of cyberculture studies. This is partly due to the white normativity of the participants in cyberspace at this time, and partly due to the emphasis on gender performativity that existed within womens studies and queer theory. Online communication became a new sphere for theorizing that would prove the theoretical constructs advanced by post-structuralist gender theory in the 1990s.

Queer Theory and Post-Human Subjectivity

56

Rheingold, H. The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier. Revised Edition. (Reading, Massachusetts: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, 2000) 151. 57 Rheingold, 152.

27 Cyberfeminist scholarship held up these concepts of the mutable, flexible online identity as proof of ideas advanced by feminist theory, namely that sexuality and gender were constructed and not inherently tied to biological, genital bodies. Feminist theorists from the 1960s onward argued that the idea of the feminine and the masculine were social constructs, entirely separate from biology, and infinitely variable and historically/temporally situated. In other words, the anatomical differences between man and woman existed as sexes, but on to these bodies were mapped two genders that depended entirely on social convention to exist and remain58. At the same time, feminist activists frequently utilized essential concepts of womanhood: separatist logics often positioned women as inherently peaceful, loving, or maternal (for example, ecofeminism, lesbian separatists and feminist peace activists). Judith Butlers 1990 book Gender Trouble problematized this nature/culture split and argued that feminism could no longer rely on an essential concept of Woman to create a political subject position, even strategically. Gender Trouble is a dense text in which not only sexuality, but gender itself is uncoupled from the pre-discursive body and resituated along a non-binary framework. Butler draws on literary theory, French feminist theory, and psychoanalytic theory to illustrate how contemporary ideas of male and female, masculine and feminine, and heterosexual and homosexual, are entirely social constructs. She writes: Gender is not to culture as sex is to nature; gender is also the discursive/cultural means by which sexed nature or a natural sex is produced and established as prediscursive, prior to culture, a politically neutral surface on which culture acts.59
58

See Felluga, D. Modules on Butler: On Performativity. Introductory Guide to Critical Theory. 28 November 2003, < http://www.purdue.edu/guidetotheory/genderandsex/modules/butlerperformativity.html> (12 February 2005) for a nice summary, from which much of this section was drawn. 59 Butler, J. Gender Trouble. (New York: Routledge, 1990) 11.

28

In other words, according to Butler, the idea that the body (primarily the genitals) is inherently sexed pre-discursively is in itself rhetorical. Sex is produced discursively, as is gender. Butler also advanced the concept of gender performativity far beyond what previous feminist theorists had discussed. Although femininity had long been seen as something produced by culture, Butler dis-associates the idea of the subject from the performance in order to critique the idea of a pre-performative (and thus natural) subject. Whereas Goffman saw identity performance as actors playing particular, and variable, roles, the idea of the subject-as-actor remained. Felluga, writing about Butler, summarizes: Unlike theatrical acting, Butler argues that we cannot even assume a stable subjectivity that goes about performing various gender roles: rather, it is the very act of performing gender [emphasis mine] that constitutes who we are.60 Rather than identities performing variable acts, Butler argues that identity (and thus any sense of subjectivity) is created by our performances. Although (as discussed above), we may view ourselves as fully agented subjects, this sense of subjectivity is a fiction produced entirely by our constant enactment of social convention. The performativity of gender, then, refers to gender as an ideological style that is constantly reproduced and reinscribed by the subject who enacts it. All manner of social reality is not a given, but produced through language, gesture, and all manner of symbolic and social signs.61

60 61

Felluga. Butler, J. Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory. Performing Feminisms: Feminist Critical Theory and Theatre. Case, SE, ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1990) 270.

29 Butler is careful to disclaim the idea of an agented subject who blithely and deliberately performs. Rather, what is intelligible is bounded by the limits of discourse and what is excluded.62 That is not to say that these limits do not change; on the contrary, they blur and transform all the time. Subsequently, Butlers theory of performativity can be used as a tool to identify cultural practices that re-bound discourse, particularly in regard to sexual minorities (drag queens and kings, transpeople, hermaphrodites and the like). Before discussing the application of Butlers work to cyberculture theory, I would like to turn to a similarly influential essay, Donna Haraways 1985 work A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century.63 Haraway argues for the cyborg as a postmodern, strategic metaphor that can be used as a political and theoretical tool. The (singular and collective) cyborg subject is purposefully constructed to side-step not only oppositional dualisms that mark certain groups/subjects as Others, but the essentializing effects of identity politics. Haraways cyborg is a construct created not only to point out the problems inherent in universal, totalizing theory,64 but to demonstrate the possibility of liberatory science and technology. The cyborg is conceived as a response to the essentialist subjectivity that silences mestiza border consciousness (permanently partial identities)65 and ignores the social construction of race, gender and class, re-inscribing difference as it attempts to dismantle it. Haraway argues that the very idea of identity politics based upon a natural
62

Thomas, H.K. How to Do Whatever in Three Assignments. Computers and Composition Online, Spring 2003, <http://www.bgsu.edu/cconline/Thomas/sequencedassignments.html> (1 March 2005). 63 Haraway, D. Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in The 1980's. Socialist Review 80 (1985): 65-108. 64 Haraway, 181. 65 Haraway, 154.

30 identification66 assumes there is, indeed, something un-constructed, and thus essential, about that identity. Simultaneously, identity politics based on binaries (man/woman, human/animal, nature/technology) erases the lived experience of multiple, borderlands identity, instead re-situating a bounded, dichotomous existence. The cyborg subject, in contrast, is by its very nature a mestiza67 consciousness. First, as a shifting, mutable human/machine hybrid, it cannot possibly re-situate the cleaved binaries of Western dualism. Instead, the cyborg is strategically constructed, and indeed finds pleasure, within and across border spaces. Secondly, it de-constructs the idea of the natural by simultaneously placing what we conceive of natural and unnatural within one subject position. When the subject is both human and inhuman, we cannot place it in opposition to nature. Finally, the choice to create ones own subject position based on strategic affinity, rather than natural commonality, allows for powerful sites for resistance that do not re-inscribe difference. The example Haraway explores is that of the constructed unity68 of women of color. The (collective) subject position marks out a self-consciously constructed space that cannot affirm the capacity to act on the basis of natural identification, but only on the basis of conscious coalition, of affinity, of political kinship.69 The idea of a self-constructed subject position that finds pleasure in the mutability of boundaries70 is a powerful one. Haraway makes use of the cyborg to identify the limits of epistemologies that position themselves as totalities. She critiques the construction of (womens) subjectivity as outlined in Marxism, socialist feminism, and radical feminism as embodied by
66 67

Haraway, 156. Anzaldua, G. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Spinsters/Aunt Lute, 1987. 68 Haraway, 154. 69 Haraway, 156. 70 Haraway, 150.

31 MacKinnon. In Marxism, labor constructs the subject position. In Marxist/socialistfeminism, the subject is the ontological structure of labor (i.e. the differentiation/valuation of mens labor and womens labor). In radical feminism, the subject position is constructed through mens sexual objectification of women. Haraway persuasively argues that each point of view constructs the subject as a unified whole. This is problematic for two main reasons: it negates the existence of other forms of domination (racism, for example), and it posits each theory as total, claiming entirety in its explanation of domination and call to action for liberation. It is tempting to add cyborg theory to that list, as Haraway certainly seems to position the cyborg body as a site for liberation. But she argues, effectively, I think, that the very acceptance of multiplicity and embracing of collectivity negates the possible problem of reducing domination to a single agent or site. The cyborg is polymorphous, perverse,71 and therefore infinitely flexible. The genesis of the cyborg itself is within science and technology. Although the self-conscious irony Haraway employs throughout the Manifesto makes it difficult to discern the boundaries between metaphor and experience (and indeed, perhaps the boundaries themselves are strategically blurred), it is clear that the birth of the Cyborg as concept took place within science/fiction. The cyborg subject is a side effect of the breakdown in clean distinctions between organism and machine,72 the bastard child of militarism and patriarchal capitalism.73 Strategically, the use of a metaphor taken from within science and technology - a field usually set up in opposition to environmentalism, compassion, feminism, liberation - allows Haraway not only to argue for the necessity for feminist work within science and technology, but also for the potentially liberatory
71 72

Haraway, 151. Haraway, 174. 73 Haraway, 151.

32 effects of science/technology. If boundaries formerly seen as dichotomous and clearly situated are breaking down, becoming mutable, as a result of technology, then radical politics/feminists should take advantage while they are available, rather than rejecting all sci/tech on sight. Whereas Haraways cyborg was a metaphor that provided a conceptualization of what a subject de-stabilized from binaries of gender, sexuality, race and nature itself might look like, the literal combination of human and machine was embraced by cyberculture scholars as a bringing about of the post-human. It is crucial to note that Haraway herself was aware of this contradiction, as a recent interview with Lisa Nakamura shows: Haraway: The cyborg in the "Manifesto" was not supposed to be the fembot in Wired magazine. Nakamura: Right. Exactly. Nor was it supposed to be Ripley in the Alien films with her mechanical arms. I'd say that's a vision of the feminist cyborg which has been celebrated far too much Haraway: And my cyborg was not a celebratory, blissed-out wired bunny.74 Haraways cyborg a metaphor for a new type of subject positionwas taken somewhat literally and transformed into the post-human subject, which again gave birth to the post-human body. Whereas Butler looked to uncouple the idea of pre-discursive body from subject, and Haraway attempted to re-conceptualize the subject as capable of simultaneously encompassing seemingly oppositional binaries (thus demonstrating the false naturalization of male vs. female, nature vs. technology, etc.), the post-human,

74

Nakamura, L. and Haraway, D. Prospects for a Materialist Informatics: An Interview with Donna Haraway. Electronic Book Review. 30 August 2003, <http://www.electronicbookreview.com/v3/servlet/ebr?essay_id=nakamuraaltx&command=view_essay> (14 March 2005).

33 although ostensibly re-seating consciousness outside of body, still relied on notions of subjectivity which implied essential agency as somehow linked to inherent self-hood. Allucquere Rosanne Stone builds on both Butler and Turkle in The War of Desire and Technology. Stones poetic account of her own experience of multiple identities situates a cyborg-like subject within discourses of the post-human and the virtual age. She discounts the idea of the essentialist subject, rather, viewing the body as a creation of discourse and performativity:75 The societal imperative with which we have been raised is that there is one primary persona, or true identity, and that in the off-line worldthe real worldthis persona is firmly attached to a single physical body, by which our existence as a social being is authorized and in which it is grounded.76 Stone critiques both the essentialist concept of identity and the idea that performances of identity online are somehow less real, or false, when compared to the performance of identity offline. Rather, like Turkle, she believes that the various types of multiplicity encouraged by online interaction lead to a destabilization of the offline subject: The cyborg, the multiple personality, the technosocial subject, Gibsons cyberspace cowboy all suggest a radical rewriting, in the technosocial space of the bounded individual as the standard social unit and validated social actant.77 Stone views essentialist concepts of identity as similar to social conceptions of gender, sexuality, and race as fixed. She points out that feminist theories may deconstruct gender, but they stop just short of tinkering with the framework upon which the idea of gender itself is based the framework of the individuals self-awareness in relation to a physical body.78 Like Butler, Stone believes that deconstructing the essentialist subject is
75 76

Stone, 40. Stone, 73. 77 Stone, 43. 78 Stone, 85.

34 a necessary precursor to the deconstruction of gender. If we take it that our experience of the body is mediated socially (i.e. gender is a social construction), we can take that one step further and conceptualize the subject as a construction, and one that is dissociated from the body. What is key here, though, is Stones belief, like Turkle, that there is something unique about computer-mediated communication that destabilizes essentialized subject positions. She writes that technology illuminates visual knowledge which makes the machineries of subjectivity visible and the nuts and bolts that hold the surface of reality together stand out from the background.79 Interacting through online technology, then, can make us aware of the inherent performativity of our roles offline. It is through our interactions with technology that we will be liberated from essentialism, and thus from the fixity of identity that produces hierarchical binaries of gender, sexuality and race. N. Katherine Hayles posits the idea of the post-human body as an alternate model of subjectivity that combines the idea of technology as liberatory with Haraways conception of the cyborg subject position to create a new way of looking at both consciousness and subjectivity. Unlike Haraways cyborg, the post-human can take the form of a literal body that transforms to post-human with either biological modification through techniques such as genetic engineering, plastic surgery, and cloning,80 or prosthetic or cybernetic devices extending its capabilities. Interestingly, it is with such bodily advances that the post-human subject is illustrated. Hayles delineates four points that characterize the post-human.81 First, information is privileged over tangibility. In other words, the ability of a subject to
79 80

Stone, 180. Hayles, N. K. How We Became Posthuman. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999) 241. 81 Hayles, 242.

35 project a Self through technology de-seats consciousness from a physical site. Secondly, what Hayles refers to as the Western model of consciousness, and what we have discussed as the essentialist notion of identity, is constructed, not inherent. However, Hayles claims that this is due to technology breaking down social ideas of presence and agency. Third, the post-human body thus becomes simply prosthetic to the dephysicalized self. Turkle writes that the message of new, prosthetic technologies such as virtual reality helmets and headphones is that we are so much like machines that we can simply extend ourselves through cyborg couplings with them.82 Finally, the combination of all these shifts in understanding produces a new concept of humanity, which merges with the concept of the intelligent machine. This shift in subjectivity is the post-human. Considering what we have already discussed, this model is problematic. First, the coupling of post-human body with post-human subject assumes that body and subject are somehow inherently connected, which would return us to a more essentialist subject position based on biology. This contradicts queer theorys conception of identity as something generated by performance rather than flesh. Second, whether or not the posthuman subject is de-seated from the body or not, it is still described in unitary terms as a singular subject position. Third, Wynn and Katz critique the idea that the idea of self as unitary will change at all, let alone as a result of internet technology. I will discuss these ideas further in this chapter. What the post-human does give us is a model of the non-essentialist body. Although Butler decouples the biological body from discursive conceptions of sex, the idea of the body itself, removed from meaning, remains. Although Butler would argue that there is no such thing as a pre-discursive body, only one made intelligible through
82

Turkle, 177.

36 performance, the post-human gives us another way to think about the body. I do not believe that post-humanists would contend with Butler that the pre-discursive body exists. Rather, they would take the position that a body, once inscribed discursively, can be actively changed and transformed through technology. Although the meaning of such a body would change, the literal flesh of the body would likewise be transformed. This gives us another way to conceptualize the essential body. We canand do deconstruct the way the flesh is made into gender, or race, or identity. But once the flesh itself is deconstructed, what, in fact, is at all essentialist about the body itself? We can argue that this concept of body is not unique to the post-human theorists. Cosmetic surgery, for example, has been around for several hundred years, and long before that, people altered their body through the use of cosmetics and clothing. It may be a marker of the utopian giddiness of post-humanist cyborg theory that the rise of online communication is linked to these transformations. Nonetheless, what I am particularly interested in here is the idea of identity concepts that do not rely on a body made intelligible. This became a key idea in cyberculture scholarship of this era. For Turkle, Stone and their ilk, computer-mediated communication allowed people to uncouple their body from their subject position (and therefore identity), expressing themselves without the constraints placed on them by gender, race, or other essentialized notions of selfhood. Thus we have the idea that the internet allows people to enact dis-embodied identities; without a literal body to map identity on to, the fully constructed nature of gender (and so forth) is revealed. In summary, we have three ways in which expressing multiple identities online can be liberatory for users. First, this type of identity play encourages people to view

37 their identities as inherently multiple, allowing for greater flexibility in self-presentation. Secondly, according to post-humanist scholarship, multiplicity online de-couples the Body from the Mind, allowing people to transcend bodily limitations. This performance is claimed to negate the effects of privilege and prejudice.83 Finally, performing gender online reveals the performative nature of gender offline. In the next section, I review some critiques of these claims.

Critical Cyberculture Studies Despite the canonical nature of the texts previously discussed, they have not been sacred cows in cyberculture scholarship. The relationship between self, identity, gender and performance, online and offline, has been critiqued by many theorists who have problematized several of the more overwhelmingly positive or utopian constructions. Simultaneously, the idea of the internet, and technology as a whole, as inherently liberatory has been critiqued by theorists who point out the race, class, and gender assumptions often hidden by Wired-era excess. I will examine both types of criticisms in this section of the chapter, focusing on the former. Eleanor Wynn and James Katz provide an exemplar of this type of critique in their 1997 essay Hyperbole over Cyberspace: Self-Presentation and Social Boundaries in Internet Home Pages and Discourse.84 Overall, they critique the notion that the self can be changed in some way by moving to an allegedly anonymous electronic medium.85 They outline contemporary social science theories of the self, pointing out
83

Kendall, L. Hanging out in the Virtual Pub: Masculinities and Relationships Online. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002) 10. 84 Wynn, E. and Katz, J. Hyperbole Over Cyberspace: Self-Presentation and Social Boundaries in Internet Home Pages and Discourse. The Information Society 13 (1997): 297-237. 85 Wynn and Katz, 301.

38 that for Goffman and others (they cite Simmel, Mead, Schutz, Berger and Luckmann), identity has long been an artifact of social context86 rather than a fixed sense of self. In other words, the idea that identity is inherently varied existed long before the advent of the Internet: The point taken in this article is that Internet [sic] does not radically alter the social bases of identity or conventional constraints on social interaction, although it certainly will provide openings for variations based in the new opportunities made available. The issues that arise can be addressed as questions of emerging structures of interaction and reorganization of social boundaries that can occur in any medium of communication.87 Wynn and Katz begin their critique by reviewing works of social theory that outline concepts of self that involve contextual definition, rather than the dichotomous split between essential and multiple as postulated by Stone and Turkle. Pointing out that there is a disconnect between cybertheory and previous work in the social science, the authors criticize cybertheory for generalizing based on small groups of users (MUDders, etc), assuming that the prevailing conception of identity is essentialist, and, most of all, conceptualizing self as discontinuous and a creation of the individual.88 Before the authors outline ideas of self as contextualized and variable, they point out that since humans create social order and meaning through constructing discourses (and routine), there is an overwhelming social need for people to tell stories of their lives within metanarratives (as discussed earlier in this chapter). Thus, the authors call into question the idea that fragmentation of self would ever be the basis for cultural change.89 However, they conceded that the way that people construct order changes depending on
86 87

Wynn and Katz, 301. Wynn and Katz, 298. 88 Wynn and Katz, 301. 89 Wynn and Katz, 303.

39 context. This is similar to Goffmans dramaturgical metaphor, which would see place, time, audience, etc. as part of the staging of any particular identity performance. Nevertheless, the ability of internet actors to create entirely new, disembodied performances is limited by the confines of the medium (judgments regarding peoples email addresses, typing skills, for example). This point is particularly salient when we consider that this article was written in 1997, and internet speech has become more styled than it was seven years ago: linguistic conventions, such as chatspeak or the shorthand encouraged by text messaging, have further limited peoples performance choices. I argue later in this thesis that the privileging of a certain commodified presentation of self will further erode these abilities. Next, Wynn and Katz turn to the particular context of internet technologies. They point out that pre-internet discourses of technology and the divide between technology and social exist previous to people interacting with individual technologies. Thus, individual expressions of self are limited by discursive constructions. The internet is a social construct/context in which the self operates, not a place in which the self is created.90 Finally (for our purposes), the authors point out that the internet is bounded by real machines in real, physical geographies. They also call attention to the fact that these machines are supported by military, educational, and commercial interests. Given this, the authors claim that the social context of the internet can never inherently be a neutral, pre-discursive space. They finish by re-iterating the idea that Turkle and Stones concept that escape from the physical person is a desirable and rewarding activity that will set a

90

Wynn and Katz, 306.

40 cultural trend toward the decentralized text91 is flawed. This is a remarkably discerning piece, and one that Lori Kendall would draw from five years later for her similar critique of liberatory cyberidentity theory. Lori Kendalls 2002 book Hanging out in the Virtual Pub: Masculinities and Relationships Online is a thorough and pointed critique of the notion furthered by Turkle and Stone that participating in new media technologies encourages people to view themselves in less unitary and more multiple ways. I want to discuss this book in some depth, as it furthers a number of ideas that are key to re-conceptualizing online identity beyond the first wave of cyberculture studies. First, Kendall cites Goffman to remind us that despite the ability to adapt our presentation of self to accommodate different social situations, people resist viewing the self as performative.92 Not only is this true in terms of social co-creation and emphasis on shared narratives, the shift to essentialist, fundamentalist concepts of national identity outlined in the first section of this chapter would seem to make this equally, if not more, salient than before. People both feel personally more comfortable with concepts of themselves that rely on unitary or fixed ideas, and are structurally encouraged to think this way. No matter how disparate events in a persons life may be, the temptation to organize them within a stable, narrative structure is enticing. Likewise, while people constantly engage in self-presentation strategies that vary based on audience and context, they still tend to perceive their identities and selves as integral and continuous. They persist in describing themselves in essential, unchanging terms.93 If Turkle was correct, and the rise in information technology that encouraged multiplicity also encourages
91 92

Wynn and Katz, 324. Kendall, 8. 93 Kendall, 9.

41 people to see themselves as multiple, it seems likely that the rise in popularity of internet technologies in the seven years between Turkle and Kendalls books would have shown a similar rise in such conceptualization of self. Kendall goes on to critique the second way in which CMC is seen to be liberatory: through the decoupling of body and mind. She cites Barlow: We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force or station of birth. Rather than a bodiless world in which all become equal, Kendall points out that the internet maintains gender inequalities,94 and that this utopian vision of the world assumes that people do not play themselves authentically. If a woman offline performs as a female character online, we know quite clearly that she may suffer from harassment online. Normativizing maleness as the only way females can de-couple from sexism would seem to foreground sexism, rather than eradicate it. In environments like the one that Kendall was studying a MUD called BlueSkythe level of trust implicit in person-to-person interactions implies a certain degree of authenticity among peoples self-presentations. I would extend this to social networking, blogging and journaling websites, which may encourage certain types of identity work that is clearly playful (for instance, fake celebrity journals on LiveJournal or community profiles on Friendster) but discourage blatant lying about oneself. Thirdly, it is the very nature of the medium as performative which encourages people to see gender-switching as only a performance and not something deeper. Kendall writes:

94

See Cherny, L. Gender Differences in Text-Based Virtual Reality. Proceedings of the Berkeley Conference on Women and Language. April 1994, <http://bhansa.stanford.edu/ %7Echerny/genderMOO.html> (28 January 2004).

42 The electronic medium that makes gender masquerade possible and conceivable for a wider range of people also enables both the masqueraders and their audiences to interpret these performances in ways that distance them from a critique of real gender. The understanding that the limitations of the medium require performance allows online participants to interpret online gender masquerade selectively as only performance.95 This paragraph is very important. Online mediums (particularly the type of sites that Turkle studied) lend themselves very easily to performance, and, in some cases, are designed specifically for performance. To use current terminology, if a person playing a Massively Multi-Player Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG) pretends to be a Arthurian warrior princess riding a giant tiger, whether or not that person is authentically female or male is secondary to the playful, performative nature of the space which encourages people to experiment with their characters. Furthermore, performance in text-based communication is necessary in order to convey personality in almost any extent. This means that anyone who engages in gender play is seen, not as someone who embodies multiple genders and thus disrupts the gender binary (i.e. Butler, Stone, Haraway), but as someone who is merely, and strategically, performing. Kendall next turns to privilege to demonstrate how notions of cyberspace as somehow transcending racism or sexism are incorrect. She points out that the belief in the liberatory power of cyberspace96 assumes that sexism and racism are based on individual prejudice rather than structures of inequality. In other words, if you cant see skin color or gender, you wont be prejudiced against someone, as prejudice cannot operate without a visual. This notion not only assumes that race and sex are based on physical differences (thus setting up White Male as normative, and all else as Other), it
95 96

Kendall, 107. Kendall, 220.

43 implies that the responsibility of changing ones perceptions and behavior is placed on the Other rather than the Norm. This is a discourse of color-blindness that familiarly serves to encourage people who do not fit into normative categories to masquerade as normative in order to take advantage of privilege, thus re-inscribing these privileged categories and maintaining hierarchies of inequality. Finally, Kendall reiterates the distinction between identity online and online identity. She points out: The representation of online identity performances as qualitatively different from and more fluid than offline identity performances reproduces an understanding of offline identities as incrementally changing, integrated wholes. In such accounts, the technological mediation of online performance changes identity to something more fluid and exchangeable, suggesting that participants previously stable identities have been disrupted solely by the capabilities inherent in online communication.97 Like Thurlow, Lendal and Tomic, Kendall critiques the idea that online communication is so uniquely different from any other type of communication that it has effects that other changes or contextual cues, such as multiple audiences, the telephone, the television, inherent contradictions and observations of gender masquerades (all examples Kendall herself mentions) have not been able to create. Turkles observation that the experience of performing alternate or multiple genders or personas can profoundly change the way that people think about not only their identity online, but offline as well, seems somewhat specious when we consider that other types of communication changes have not lead to similar differences. The second type of critique focuses on issues of difference that were not addressed by the original wave of cyberculture theorists. I have previously discussed the
97

Kendall, 221-222.

44 concept of popular cyberculture, journalism and punditry characterized by utopian/dystopian views of technology. However, as the previous section shows, the second wave of cyberculture theory was just as prone to hyperbole as their more mainstream counterparts. Additionally, while wearing the mantle of academia, many theorists ignored inherent structural inequalities in internet technologies that broke down across lines of gender, race, and class. Ellen Ullman is a programmer who wrote two very influential pieces during the mid-90s that critiqued the overwhelmingly male perspective of the programming industry. In her 1995 essay Out of Time: Reflections on the Programming Life, Ullman analyzes her experience working as an engineer within the social structures in Silicon Valley, which de-emphasize cooperation and sociability in favor of solitude, focus and slightly veiled contempt. She points out that the vision of the user as imbecile98 (142) is built right into the code of many programs. Taking this one step further, any assumptions made by the programmers will be visible in the structure of the software. In a slightly later essay, Come In, CQ: The Body on the Wire, Ullman poetically describes how the alienating culture of programming leads to a schism in self, with the result that programmers, cut off from the real body construct a substitute body: ourselves online.99 While her argument often relies on essentializing notions of men and women (there is, therefore, a usual gender-role reversal in the way men and women use the internet),100 she overall maintains that this re-constructed body online resides in a space designed for information exchange101 and not relationships. The inherent
98

Ullman, E. Out of Time: Reflections on the Programming Life. in Resisting the Virtual Life. Eds. Brook, James and Iain A. Boal. (San Francisco: City Lights, 1995) 142. 99 Ullman, E. Come In, CQ: The Body on the Wire. in Wired Women: Gender and New Realities in Cyberspace. Eds. Cherny, L. and Weise, E. R. (Seattle: Seal Press, 1996):12. 100 Ullman, 10, 1996. 101 Ullman, 15, 1996.

45 nature of online communication, then, is structured to emphasize the hegemonic masculine tradition of communication within engineering. Beth Kolkos 2000 essay Erasing @race: Going White in the (Inter)Face makes analogous claims about the way interface design privileges and encourages normative whiteness. She analyzes the experience of race in text-based virtual worlds in terms of the frequently missing @race property, the ability for users to set their race as they would their gender or mood. The lack of such a property, Kolko argues, assumes that cyberspace is de-raced: Because of the context of the world and the cultural position it occupies, the default race of the environment is assumed to be white; given a default, why choose to mark the property? An attitude that race is one of those things that purportedly can stay behind in the real world prevails; marking race online comes to be read as an aggressive and unfortunate desire to bring the yucky stuff into this protoutopian space.102 This recalls Kendalls discussion of presumed color-blindness online; not only does the presumption of the internet as inherently liberatory ignore structural (as opposed to individual) prejudices, the very interfaces with which users interact map hegemonic conceptualizations of race onto online experience. Kolko summarizes: The lack of an @race property means that the MUD is an environment where race is presumed to be either irrelevant or homogenous The assumed homogeneity within cyberspace studies and cyberspace itself is staggering, as is the prevalence of we vocabulary. And, quite simply, the lack of a writeable @race speaks volumes about the assumptions designers have, assumptions that tangibly affect the trajectory of technological development.103 It would seem impossible, then, for us to experience identity online in a way that does not reproduce or, indeed, reinforce systemic hierarchies of race and gender.
102

Kolko, B. E. Erasing @race: Going White in the (Inter)Face. In Race in Cyberspace, Kolko, B. E., Nakamura, L., & Rodman, G. B. eds. (New York: Routledge, 2000): 216. 103 Kolko, 217-218.

46 Lisa Nakamuras work on racial representation in text-based virtual words extends Kolkos critique. While she affirms the idea of erasing race as simply another way of situating whiteness, she strongly critiques the idea of racial identity play as liberating. Nakamura examines identity tourism, the phenomenon of people consciously performing races other than their own, typically white men performing Asian men or women. Unsurprisingly, the majority of people playing a different race other than their own are drawing from a series of racist tropes that simply reinforce hegemonic, white supremacist notions of race as identity. She writes: the choice not to mention race does in fact constitute a choice; in the absence of racial description, all players are assumed to be white. This is partly due to the demographics of Internet users (most are white, male, highly educated, and middle class). It is also due to the utopian beliefsystem prevalent in the MOO. This system, which claims that the MOO should be a free space for play, strives towards policing and regulating racial discourse in the interest of social harmony. This system of regulation does permit racial role playing when it fits within familiar discourses of racial stereotyping, and thus perpetuates these discourses.104 It is precisely the idea of the internet as liberatory and utopian that facilitates and perpetuates racist identity play. While an Asian-American performing as in a nonstereotypical, non-racist way would be seen by the typical users of the MOO as an unnecessary and possibly threatening emphasis on race, thus violating the norm of utopia, white users creating Asian characters that draw on stereotypes like the passive geisha or the stoic samurai are viewed simply as playful. The discourse of the MOO as a utopian environment makes it impossible for users to critique and counter such racism. The arguments advanced by Ullman, Kolko, Nakamura and other like-minded theorists illustrate the perfunctory nature of arguments that online interaction may de104

Nakamura, L. Race in/for Cyberspace: Identity Tourism and Racial Passing on the Internet. Cyberreader. V.J. Vitanza, ed. (Needham Heights, MA: Longman, 1995) 442-453.

47 stabilize problematic concepts of gender or race. Rather, hegemonic concepts of hierarchical identity structures appear in online environments as systemic. It will take more than playing characters in a game to dismantle racism or sexism.

Authenticity

The search for authenticity is never ending, but always expresses a fantasy that the experience of an idealized reality might render our lives more meaningful.105 As the idea of the essential self has been re-configured to something more flexible and historically situated, so has the idea of authenticity. 106 Authenticity is a problematic concept as it works in both theoretical and popular discourse. Like identity, authenticity is a current, widely-held concept when it comes to the idea of a real me; we also speak of authentic experiences, artifacts, and people. However, recent scholarship around authenticity problematizes these ideas and points out that the authentic is just as much a localized, temporally situated construct as identity, self, gender, and the like. In popular discourse, the essential self goes hand-in-hand with the authentic self, or the real which is expressed accurately. This authentic self is valued as honest, truthful, and, above all, single. Even turning to the multiple self, we often see conceptions of multiplicity in which one of the multiple personae is authentic and the others are playful variants of the truthful, fixed person at the core. For example, Kendall interviews several MUDders who play their own, correct gender while simultaneously maintaining an

105 106

Grazian, D. Blue Chicago. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003) 240. While I do not place authentic in quotes elsewhere in this chapter, it remains a problematic concept and one I do not view as either monolithic or given.

48 alternate persona that is differently gendered. If, as Turkle claims, the construct of gender itself can be de-stabilized through such role-playing, we would also need to de-seat the authentic. Otherwise, we see multiplicity as just a series of (untrustworthy) masks that cover up the unitary self, one that presumably maintains a stable, fixed gender and sexuality. In order for any concept of multiplicity of self to truly be liberatory (even given critiques outlined elsewhere in this essay), the concept of authenticity has to be deconstructed and de-centered, outside of the singular Self. David Grazians 2003 study of blues bars in Chicago does just this, defining authenticity as conforming to an idealized representation of reality. The authentic is always manufactured, and always constructed in contradistinction to something else.107 In other words, in order for something to be held up as authentic, something else must be labeled as equally inauthentic. However, this dichotomy is false when we note that both the performance of authenticity and inauthenticity are equally constructed by discourse and context. Like Gupta and Ferguson, Grazian points out that despite the constructed nature of authenticity, it can and does have real-world effects (Foucaults regime of truth returning): Although it remains a figment of our collective imagination, we still continue to employ the concept of authenticity as an organizing principle for evaluating our experiences in everyday life, and that makes it significantly meaningful and, in many ways, real. In this manner, authenticity shares a similar place in our hearts as love or beauty; it is an old wives tale we tell ourselves over and over again until we believe it to be true, and as a result it gains a certain kind of power over us.108

107 108

Grazian, 13. Grazian, 16.

49 It is the constant re-inscription of authenticity that maintains its social power and salience. Not only is authenticity a construct, it is a construct that constantly changes. What is authentic continually differs, and what symbols or signifiers mark a thing as authentic or inauthentic change contextually. Simultaneously, for each individual, the definition of authenticity varies depending on where the speaker lies within it. The acceptance of ones own self as authentic depends on ones personal definition of what authentic seems to be. This will have greater or lesser salience to an individual depending on his or her (sub) cultural identifications; Grazian is studying blues musicians, who have a professional and personal stake in inscribing themselves within a larger cultural narrative that puts a great deal of value on authenticity. Regardless, all around us we see definitions of authenticity constantly being manufactured and redrawn, even re-inscribed on the body through the use of cultural markers (similar to Woodwards discussion of representation). The symbolic stake (160), for each of us, rides on widespread acceptance of your definition of authenticity and by proxy your inclusion within it. Returning again to Woodward, Vincent Cheng explores why we might have an increased stake in authenticity. In his 2004 book Inauthentic, Cheng notes that contemporary first world cultures are marked with anxiety over authentic cultural identities. Contextualized within a metanarrative of globalization and world progress that assumes our current epoch is one of great cultural change and diffusion, Cheng posits that authenticity, much like nation, operates as a quasi religious locus of transcendence.109 In other words, we are fixed on the authentic as we fear losing everything that makes us
109

Cheng, V. J. Inauthentic: The Anxiety over Culture and Identity. (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2004) 5.

50 distinct. Again, Cheng is replicating discourses of the McDonaldization of world cultures, which assume that American-based megacorporations will homogenize more traditional (and, indirectly, authentic) foreign cultures. Thus, the yearning for the authentic is completely historically situated, and the authentic identities themselves are just as much as social construct as are inauthentic identities. Following Cheng and Grazier, we can conceptualize authenticity as a series of signifiers that appeal to a legitimate, unitary self, thus helping to establish contextual trust. These signifiers, or the very concept of authenticity itself, become commodified and rendered a thing. Authenticity thus starts as personal capital, becomes cultural capital and finally is reborn as literal capital. Conclusion While the temptation to view the internet as a unique space in which our very actions can change the social world around us is compelling, it is no longer useful. Postmodern conceptions of identity continually de-seat and deconstruct the idea of ourselves as fixed and bodily situated, but this is countered by the environments and social contexts in which we move. Social actors are constantly bounded by discourses of authenticity, essentialism, race, gender, sexuality and the like which emphasize fixity, unity and, above all, hegemony. In the next chapter of my thesis, I discuss the internet as an increasingly commodified space in which these emphases are quite clearly and strategically carried out by commercial actors in order to maximize profit and transform users into consumers.

51

Chapter Two: Internet Commercialization and Identity Commodification

Introduction The internet today is massively different from the networks that predated it. Users of the networks that existed during the 1970s and 1980s communicated primarily with groups of academics, scientists, and government employees through textual interfaces. Although the internet user base broadened in the early 1990s, most online experiences remained textual110 until the advent of the World Wide Web111 and subsequent launch of Mosaic, the first popular Web browser.112 With the development of the first graphical web browser and rapid increase in internet usage that followed, two major changes occurred. First, the internet changed from purely textual to multi-modal, incorporating music, video, animation and images. Second, the rapid and massive increase in internet users caused a shift in internet content and culture. Whereas the preweb internet was, by design, created and populated almost entirely by academics and engineers, and the early, pre-boom web by hobbyists and geeks, the current internet has been colonized by major media and software companies and is used by close to a billion people worldwide.113
110

The interfaces of pre-web internet applications like FTP, IRC, Gopher, email and USENET consisted entirely of ASCII text. 111 The World Wide Web was invented by Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau at CERN in late 1990. See Stewart, Gillies, J. and Calliau, R. How the Web Was Born. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 172-201; Johnson, S.P. Internet History/Timeline. Ethernet Guide. 20 November 2000, <http://www3.baylor.edu/~Sharon_P_Johnson/etg/inthistory.html> (1 May 2005); Naughton, J. A Brief History of the Future: From Radio Days to Internet Years in a Lifetime. (New York: Overlook Press, 2000), 229-239; Berners-Lee, T. Weaving the Web: The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web. (New York: HarperCollins, 2000). 112 The Mosaic browser was invented by Marc Andresson at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). See Johnson 2000; Abbate, J. Inventing the Internet. (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1999), 217; Segaller, S. Nerds 2.0.1. (New York: TV Books, 1998), . 296-297. 113 It is notoriously difficult to measure how many people are using the internet at any one time. The website Internetworldstats.com uses data from a variety of sources and estimates the April 2005 usage

52 Despite these enormous changes, contemporary conceptualizations of online identity are still heavily influenced by previous scholarship focused on user selfpresentation solely within text-based applications and interfaces.114 This is problematic as the shifts in modality, technological sophistication, and user base have all had profound impacts on the ways that application designers and users express and think about identity. Consequently, work on identity online must incorporate an understanding of the contemporary commercial, multimedia internet. In this chapter, in order to demonstrate the gradual commercialization of the internet, I trace the historical transformation of the internet from government project, to research tool, to mainstream utility controlled primarily by corporate America. The contemporary internet, of course, encourages quite different types of presentations than did the pre-commercial internet, primarily due to profit motives. I analyze how and why this commercial internet manages and views identity, concentrating on shifts in technology and user base. Finally, I return to theories of identity and commodification to trace the inherent linkages between the two, and to emphasize the necessity of incorporating an analysis of commercialization into any academic discussion of online identity.

statistics at 888 million people worldwide. See Miniwatts International. Internet Usage Statistics - The Big Picture. Internet World Stats. 2005, <http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm> (1 May 2005). The majority of internet users are located geographically in North America, Asia, and Europe. 114 Chapter one provides a detailed review of previous work on identity online. For examples of scholarship that examines identity within the context of text-based internet applications, see Campbell, J.E. Getting It On Online: Cyberspace, Gay Male Sexuality, and Embodied Identity. (Binghamton, NY: Haworth Press: 2004); Baym, N. Tune In, Log On: Soaps, Fandom, and Online Community. (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2000); Kendall, L. Hanging out in the Virtual Pub: Masculinities and Relationships Online. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); and Turkle, S. Life on the Screen. (New York: Touchstone, 1995).

53 Internet History My focus in providing a history of the internet is not to duplicate the extensive work that has already been done in this area.115 Rather, I wish to trace two developments: first, the gradual transfer of internet technology and ownership from public interests (governmental, military, and academic) to private companies, and second, the technological developments in the early 1990s that allowed the modal change in computer-mediated communication from textual to multimedia. I want to disclaim that several of the following dates and milestones are contested. Like any technology, the fact that many people were involved in the development of the internet makes the formulation of an authoritative history beyond the scope of this chapter. In order to trace the development of the internet, it is necessary to discuss in some detail the logistics of internet infrastructure, which originated deep in the militaryindustrial complex of the Cold War. In 1957, the USSR launched the first artificial Earth satellite, Sputnik. This triggered widespread concern that the USA was falling behind the Soviet Union in technological development, which was subsequently used rhetorically to justify increases in military and scientific spending.116 In response, the Department of Defense launched the Advanced Research Project Agency (ARPA) in 1957, with the aim of increasing the United States competitiveness in scientific research. ARPA, conceived as a blue-sky lab that would sponsor high-risk, high-gain research,117 began to fund projects at many independent sites, with the goal of developing computer technology
115

For far more comprehensive histories of the internets origins, see Segaller, 1998; Hafner and Lyon, 1996; Abbate, 1999; Gillies and Calliau, 2000 and Naughton, 2000. 116 One school of thought holds that the US government exaggerated the Soviet threat in order to maintain high military expenditures and boost the post-WW2 economy. See Paterson, T.G. The Cold War Begins. In A History of Our Time: Readings on Post-War America. W.H. Chafe, ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 10. 117 Hafner and Lyon, 22; see also Gillies and Cailliau, 12.

54 useful to the military.118 ARPA was tasked with [coming] up with uses for computers other than tools for numerical scientific calculating.119 At the same time, forward-thinking computer scientists were researching technologies that would lay the groundwork for the precursors to the internet. For example, by 1962, the RAND Corporation had begun to research distributed communication networks, culminating in the development of packet-switching. Packetswitching, which facilitates decentralized data handling and is fundamental to contemporary protocols like TCP/IP, was conceptualized by Paul Baran120 and further developed by Leonard Kleinrock at MIT.121 This collaboration of research efforts by the military, the academy, and private interests would characterize the development of the internet well into the current era. Two concerns fueled government development of core technologies that would become instrumental in developing the internet. First, the Department of Defense was apprehensive about mass centralization of information and wanted a more distributed system in the case of a possible Soviet attack. Secondly, American scientists were looking for easier ways to collaborate and share data and research information.122 As a result, in 1968, the Department of Defense issued a request for quotations to 140 companies to build interface message processors, or IMPs. An interface message
118

Gillies and Cailliau, 11-16; see also Abbate, 1999, 8-11; Stevenson, J. H. (De)Constructing the Matrix: Toward a Social History of the Early Internet. Contextualizing the Internet 1995: Essays. 2001, <http://www.tranquileye.com/netessays/de_constructing_the_matrix.html> (1 May 2005). 119 Hafner and Lyon, 37. 120 Abbate, 10-21; Johnson, 2000. 121 Stevenson, 2001; Segaller, 66-69. 122 There is some debate over this issue. Most internet historians maintain that ARPANET was a direct response to possible nuclear threat; others, most notably Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon (authors of When Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet) take the position that the goal of ARPANET was purely peaceful and developed purely for researchers to share resources and data (Hafner and Lyon, 54). However, Paul Baran, the Rand Corporation researcher who conducted significant early work on packetswitching, was certainly concerned with nuclear attack and his research was a direct response to that threat (Galloway, A. Protocol. (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2004), 5; see also Abbate, 10).

55 processor connects two or more hosts through telephone lines via dial-up and allows for message exchange between them.123 This concept was developed by Lawrence Roberts at Lincoln Laboratory in Massachusetts and Wes Clark, and would become fundamental to the first generation of network hardware and software. The IMP contract was awarded to Bolt Beranek and Newman (BBN), a well-known technology company specializing in defense work and the former home of J.R. Licklider, a visionary computer scientist and the original director of ARPAs Information Processing Techniques Office.124 BBN would later be responsible for a variety of innovations including the modem, the @ symbol in email addresses and the first text-based game, Colossal Cave Adventure.125 The first IMP was installed at the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1969. Three more IMPs were established at the Stanford Research Institute, UCSB and the University of Utah, each the recipient of a US government research contract.126 BBN purchased dedicated 50KPBS from AT&T in order to link the four sites.127 The resulting system was known as ARPANET and was an immediate success, growing rapidly in the early 1970s, primarily connecting research universities. ARPANET, unlike the internet, was a single network connecting many computers. It allowed users, primarily computer scientists and ARPA researchers, to share resources, find users to test software, arrange collaborative projects, and conduct large-scale data processing.128

123

InetDaemon Enterprises. History of the Internet. InetDaemon.com. 7 December 2004, < http://www.inetdaemon.com/tutorials/internet/history.html> (1 May 2005); Sheldon, T. Internet History. Tom Sheldons Linktionary.com. 2001, <http://www.linktionary.com/i/internet_history.html> (1 May 2005) ; Abbate, 56-58. 124 Gillies and Caillaiu, 12-13. 125 Wikipedia contributors. "Bolt, Beranek and Newman." Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia. Wikimedia Foundation Inc. 25 June 2005, <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plagiarism> (1 July 2005). 126 Gillies and Caillau, 28-29; Sheldon. 127 Inetdaemon. 128 Abbate, 96-104.

56 Although the ARPANET had been specifically designed for sharing technical papers and scientific data, the instantaneous, non-geographically bound communication medium quickly lent itself to non-academic, non-governmental use. Despite the strict stipulation that these networks should only be used for research or government-related purposes, the ARPA administrators turned a blind eye to the development of discussion groups129 and email.130 By 1973, 75 percent of the traffic on what was now known as DARPANET131 consisted of email, mostly between academics and researchers.132 Discussion groups called listservs (the progenitors to Usenet) focused primarily on relevant topics, but the two most popular listservs were devoted to science fiction and, interestingly, email itself. Griffith writes that the latter, known as human-nets, was devoted to the social implications of the e-mail medium itself, and it helps define the moment when the e-mail users began to realize the full implications of the communication tool they were using.133 DARPANET quickly extended beyond the use for which it was designed and became a source of both entertainment and metatextual discussions about technology (something that has characterized the internet ever since!). However, despite the broadening of topics and interests on the DARPANET to include those that were outside the strictly scientific or academic realm, the user base still consisted, in Griffiths words, of elite defense and communication scientists in institutes
129

Griffiths, R. T. Chapter Three: History of Electronic Mail. History of the Internet, Internet for Historians (and just about everyone else). 11 October 2002, < http://www.let.leidenuniv.nl/history/ivh/chap3.htm> (1 May 2005). 130 Email was invented by Ray Tomlinson in 1971. See Segaller, 104-106. 131 ARPANET was renamed DARPANET in 1971. The Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) was a separate entity from the Department of Defense until the late 1960s, when the DOD took over ARPA and all its administered projects. Therefore, ARPANET was renamed DARPANET (Defense Advanced Research Projects Network). I use ARPANET consistently for simplification purposes until the mid-80s (1984-1986), when the NSF took over DARPANET and the network was expanded, re-architected and named the NSFNet. (see Sheldon; Johnson; Galloway 5; Gillies and Calliau, 77-80). 132 Sheldon. 133 Griffiths.

57 whose membership of the net was dependent [sic] their role as ARPA (sub-) contractors.134 In fact, it is not a stretch to say that users of DARPANET and most of the other networks (BITNET, CSNET, DECNET and UUCP)135 were exclusively academics, computer scientists, and military personnel. Indeed, DARPANET was configured so that only people in these occupations could gain access. ARPANET had been designed specifically to allow scientific and military researchers to share data and access computers remotely, and so only universities that received government funding could connect. 136 As the network developed, the number of academics using DARPANET greatly increased. By the early 1970s, more than half of the connected hosts were universities.137 At this point, the Department of Defense declined to continue fully supporting DARPANET, maintaining that it had grown beyond its military origins, and the National Science Foundation took over the funding of many network-related projects. The NSF founded CSNET in 1981 with the explicit purpose of connecting computer scientists working at universities nationwide. The NSFs Brief History of the NSF and the Internet states: In 1985, NSF considered how it could provide greater access to the highend computing resources at its recently established supercomputer centers. Because NSF intended the supercomputers to be shared by scientists and engineers around the country, any viable solution had to link many research universities to the centers.138
134 135

Ibid. These different networks were funded by various other entities besides the Department of Defense. BITNET was founded at the City University of New York, DECNET at the Digital Equipment Corporation, CSNET by the National Science Foundation and UUCP at Bell Labs. There were several other networks in existence at the time besides these four; see Gillies & Cailliau, 74-79 for more information. 136 Johnson. 137 InetDaemon. 138 Hart, D. A Brief History of NSF and the Internet. NSF Fact Sheet. National Science Foundation Office of Legislative and Public Affairs. August 2003, <http://www.nsf.gov/od/lpa/news/03/fsnsf_internet.htm> (26 April 2005).

58 In 1983, the DOD created MILNET for exclusively military uses and essentially left DARPANET to the academics.139 The user population of what would become the internet was almost exclusively academics, scientists, and researchers. At the same time, computers were becoming more accessible to Americans than they had ever been. The personal computer revolution of the late 1970s and early 1980s brought desktop PCs (single-user computers) into the homes of thousands of average middle-class Americans140 while arcade and console-based video game systems enjoyed a huge rise in popularity.141 Independently run dial-up networks, like UNIX-based computer conferencing and bulletin board systems (BBS) devoted to hacking and gaming, proliferated across the US.142 Two Duke University post-graduate students invented Usenet, an independent discussion network, in 1981.143 Despite these advances in popular technology, DARPANET remained a rarified sphere with access limited to engineers, academics, software developers and a few students. The National Science Foundation took over DARPANET in 1985, christened it the NSFNet, and began slowly moving towards privatization. At first, the NSFNet simply expanded the DARPANET to connect more colleges and universities using dedicated circuits provided by MCI and packet switches made by IBM.144 In order to open the NSFNet to regional access providers (universities and private corporations that provided increased local access), four Network Access Points (NAPs) were created which, while controlled by the NSF, were managed by Merit, a consortium made up of IBM, MCI, and
139

Irvine, M., Drake, W., and Dowdy, E. Internet Industry History and Background. 1999, <http://cct.georgetown.edu/curriculum/505-99/internet3.html> (26 April 2005); Sheldon. 140 Abbate, 186-187. 141 Kent, S. The Ultimate History of Video Games. (Roseville, CA: Prima Publishing, 2001). 142 Naughton, 186-189. 143 Griffiths; Abbate 201-202. 144 InetDaemon; Abbate 191-194.

59 Michigan universities.145 These NAPs formed the backbone of the NSFNet. Despite these transitions, users were still limited to government and organizations that received government research funding.146 In 1991, two major changes occurred which opened the door to widespread commercialization and, consequentially, a wider user base. First, the NSF rescinded the acceptable use policies, permitting the use of the internet for commercial gain.147 Second, the NAPs and future expansion of the internet were appropriated by the three major commercial long distance networks of the time: MCI, Sprint, and AT&T.148 The apocryphal claim attributed to Al Gore that he invented the internet149 turns out to have a basis in truth, as Gore was responsible for the wordily named 1991 High Performance Computing and National Research and Education Network Act (NREN). The primary goal of NREN was to further educational and research applications of the NSFNet, but it had the effect of opening the door to further commercialization.150 In 1993, the NSF fully ended its subsidy of the backbone and sold the four NAPs, in a closed bid without public debate, to Sprint, Pacific Bell, Ameritech, and MFS.151 This prompted the launch of thousands of small, local internet service providers (ISPs).152 The same year, the NCSA

145 146

Sheldon. InetDaemon. 147 Johnson; Sheldon. 148 InetDaemon. 149 Gores actual words were I took the initiative in creating the Internet, which, if not precisely true, is certainly true enough. Gore was a strong advocate of the early Web, and his accomplishments included sponsoring the 1986 High Performance Computing and Communications Conference, which called for connecting supercomputers with high-speed fiberoptic networks (see Sheldon), securing funding at MIT for the CERN web team, and requiring that every US Government office had a website. See Rosenberg, S. Did Gore Invent the Internet?. Salon. 5 October 2000, < http://dir.salon.com/tech/col/rose/2000/10/05/gore_internet/index.html> (26 April 2005). 150 Irvine, Drake and Dowdy. 151 InetDaemon. 152 Abbate, 197-200.

60 released the immensely popular browser Mosaic, facilitating access to the World Wide Web, and the internet, as we think of it today, was born.153 Several years before the advent of the World Wide Web, a number of proprietary commercial and nonprofit networks introduced Americans to the concept of going online. Services like America Online (AOL), Prodigy, and CompuServe connected users via modem to walled computer systems, where people could shop, post on message boards, play games and chat with other users within the system. Although these networks would not link to the larger internet until the 1990s, they familiarized their users with applications like e-mail, newsgroups, and chat programs.154 Other, volunteer-run networks such as the Whole Earth Lectronic Link (the WELL), IRC servers and local BBSs provided means for people to meet like-minded others and communicate over modem lines without paying subscription fees.155 By the time that Mosaic launched, these early services had helped to set the groundwork for a fairly significant portion of the population to be comfortable with online communication. Early Internet Culture Due to the academic and scientific roots of networking technology and the strict prohibition of commercial activity in the internets formative years, online culture during these early years of commercialization was rooted in the hacker, academic, and hippie ethics of the homebrew computer scientists and open-source developers who populated it. Early internet adopters were highly educated and relatively young with above average
153

Other proprietary commercial networks existed, including AOL, CompuServe, MSN and Prodigy. These networks were, at the time, closed systems without access to the larger internet. 154 I was a Prodigy subscriber starting in 1988 and have very fond memories of chatting with other users who lived across the world. See Abbate, 203-204 for more about the various pre-internet networks that allowed people to communicate with each other via modem. 155 Abbate, 203-204. For the history of IRC, see Stenberg, D. History of IRC (Internet Relay Chat). Daniel.haxx.se. 24 September 2002, < http://daniel.haxx.se/irchistory.html> (11 July 2005).

61 incomes,156 but, more importantly, many of them were deeply invested in the anticommercial nature of the emerging internet and the information wants to be free hacker ethos. Any attempted use of the network for commercial gain was highly discouraged, particularly uses that violated netiquette, the social mores of the internet. For example, on April 12, 1994, a law firm called Canter and Siegel, known as the infamous Green Card Lawyers, sent the first commercial spam email to 6,000 USENET groups advertising their immigration law services. This inspired virulent hatred, which seems inconceivable in todays spam-ridden climate. Internet users organized a boycott, jammed the firms fax, email, and phone lines and set an autodialer to call the lawyers home 40 times a day.157 Canter and Siegel were kicked off three ISPs before finally finding a home and publishing the early e-marketing book How to Make a Fortune on the Information Superhighway.158 Despite these dubious successes, the offense was seen as so inappropriate that Canter was finally disbarred in 1997, partially due to the e-mail campaign; William W. Hunt III of the Tennessee Board of Professional Responsibility said, "We disbarred him and gave him a one-year sentence just to emphasize that his email campaign was a particularly egregious offense."159 As the internet moved beyond its academic origins, these types of conflicts multiplied. Users coming from large commercial ISPs like AOL and CompuServe were viewed pejoratively as newbies who did not take the time to learn the particularities of
156

Neustadtl, A., and Robinson, J. P. Social Contact Differences Between Internet Users and Nonusers in the General Social Survey. IT & Society 1 no.1 (2002): 73-102. 157 Campbell, K.K. A Net.Conspiracy So Immense...Chatting With Martha Siegel of the Internet's Infamous Canter & Siegel. Toronto Computes. 1 October 1994, < http://www.kkc.net/cs/> (26 May 2005). 158 Rowland, R. CBC News Indepth: Spam. CBC News.12 March 2004, < http://www.cbc.ca/news/background/spam/>. 159 Wikipedia contributors. Canter & Siegel. Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. 19 June 2005, < http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canter_%26_Siegel> (1 July 2005); Craddock, A. Spamming Lawyer Disbarred. Wired. 10 July 1997, < http://wired-vig.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,5060,00.html> (1 July 2005).

62 netiquette and were subsequently flamed or told rudely to RTFM.160 September of 1993 was viewed as the September that never ended the Internet Jargon file defines this term as follows: One of the seasonal rhythms of the Usenet used to be the annual September influx of clueless newbies who, lacking any sense of netiquette, made a general nuisance of themselves. This coincided with people starting college, getting their first internet accounts, and plunging in without bothering to learn what was acceptable. These relatively small drafts of newbies could be assimilated within a few months. But in September 1993, AOL users became able to post to Usenet, nearly overwhelming the old-timers' capacity to acculturate them; to those who nostalgically recall the period before, this triggered an inexorable decline in the quality of discussions on newsgroups.161 Nowadays, of course, anyone who was posting on Usenet in 1993 would be considered an internet veteran! My point is that there was a cultural clash between the old school of internet users, many of whom had been online long before the invention of the web, and the new breed of internet users. Most of the early users were white, middle to upper middle class males who partook in stereotypical geek activities and interestsscience fiction, coding, technological tinkering, and video gamesand adhered to the precommercial philosophy that the internet was a space where knowledge and information were freely shared for the greater good. (Witness early users who spent hours creating elaborate Frequently Asked Questions files who did not expect to get paid.)162 Stevenson summarized the cultural shift as the internets user base became increasingly mainstream: This sudden and profound shift in the matrixs user base, from researchers, academics, students and hackers to a large number of computer-savvy consumers and business people, is transforming the core dynamic of the Internet to one of a relationship between consumer and service provider.
160

RTFM translates to Read The Fucking Manual or Read the Friggin Manual for the less coarsely inclined. 161 September That Never Ended. The Jargon File Version 4.4.7, ed. Eric Raymond. 29 December 2003 < http://catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/S/September-that-never-ended.html> (28 April 2005). 162 See Constant, D., Sproull, L., and Kiesler, S. The Kindness of Strangers. Organizational Science 7 (1996): 119-135.

63 The co-operative, do-it-yourself philosophies of the hacker which have been embodied in the very technology of the net are becoming a smaller and smaller part of the Internet development process.163 Mosaic and the Expansion of the Internet Tim Berners-Lee and his team at CERN, the European Particle Physics Library, invented the World Wide Web in 1990. The web was originally conceptualized as a common information space which would link disparate forms of information together using hypertext164 while connecting the various distinct networks that existed at that time.165 The first web server, hypertext editor, and line mode browser166 were released publicly in 1991,167 but the web did not really catch on in popularity until 1993, when Marc Andresson and a group of students at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) invented the Mosaic browser.168 Mosaics simple, graphical interface made it much easier for non-programmers to use the internet. Although earlier technologies like Gopher and Archie had increased the accessibility of the web, Mosaic enabled people without any particular technical knowledge to easily browse the World Wide Web. In 1993, this consisted of approximately 100 different websites serving two hundred thousand documents.169
163 164

Stevenson. Berners-Lee, T. Weaving the Web: The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web. (New York: HarperCollins, 2000) 5, 17, 20; see also Berners-Lee, T. The World Wide Web: A Very Short Personal History. Tim Berners-Lee. 1998, <http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/ShortHistory> (26 April 2005). 165 Besides NSFnet, there was BITNET, UUNET and so on. 166 A line-mode browser allows people to surf the web completely textually, which is useful for the visually impaired or people who have slow dial-up connections. Lynx is one example of a line-mode browser. Bolso, E.I. 2005 Text Mode Browser Roundup. Linux Journal 8 March 2005 < http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/8148> (1 July 2005). 167 Berners-Lee. 168 The NCSA is a public institution housed within the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and although it partners with many private research firms, the majority of its funding comes from the National Science Foundation. 169 Farber, D. [farber@central.cis.upenn.edu]. How Big is the Web? In [interesting-people-list], 15 Dec 1993, Internet. <http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/199312/msg00068.html> (26 May 2005); Gray, M. Web Growth Summary. Growth of the Web. 1996,

64 At this point, the web was not particularly different from the textual internet. This was mainly due to the restrictions inherent in Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), the code in which most web pages are written,170 since the first version of HTML allowed users to include only text and hyperlinks in web pages. Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of HTML, based it on the concept of hypertext, which had existed conceptually since the term was coined by Ted Nelson in 1965,171 and in software (like HyperCard for the Macintosh) since the 1980s.172 HTML was designed to be a simple document markup language which would be compatible with the diverse array of operating systems and types of computers connected to the internet. In keeping with the scientific and academic origins of the web, Berners-Lee based HTML on the already-existing Standard Generalized Markup Language, or SGML.173 Since it was a markup language, the first version of HTML allowed users only to divide a document up into headers, paragraphs, list items, and so on. However, while computer scientists and researchers (many of whom would later become part of the W3C consortium, which governs online standards) were debating how to implement new features in future versions of HTML, software developers were circumventing official channels and building new features directly into browser software. For example, while the WWW-Talk listserv was quarrelling over the best way to include images in HTML documents, Marc Andresson went ahead and created the <img> tag, which could be read by the Mosaic browser. (This tag would become part of the official HTML specification
<http://www.mit.edu:8001/~mkgray/net/web-growth-summary.html> (26 April 2005). 170 HTML was used almost exclusively for web authoring until the advent of ASP, PHP and other dynamic languages. 171 Gillies and Cailliau, 100 172 Gillies and Cailliau, 127-129. 173 Longman, A. W. A History of HTML. Raggett on HTML 4. Harlow, England: Addison Wesley Longman Limited, 1998. <http://www.w3.org/People/Raggett/book4/ch02.html> (1 May 2005).

65 in later versions.) Mosaic included other non-official features like unordered lists and forms,174 often in response to user requests. As HTML evolved, more features became available to document authors, most of which were contested by the argumentative web community. For example, in 1995, browser developers unveiled new HTML tags that allowed authors to create colored backgrounds and wrap text around images. Members of the academic community protested that these features did not belong in a document markup language.175 The schism was deepening between the old guard of internet users, who wanted to reserve the internet for purely scientific research, and the increasing number of people using the internet for recreational or entertainment purposes. Unfortunately, this led to a widening gap between the official HTML specifications and HTML as it was implemented by software developers, with both Microsoft and Netscape creating proprietary HTML tags that were incompatible with rival browsers. As a result, todays web developers know the difficulty involved in trying to code pages that look the same in every browser. Other technologies besides HTML expanded the scope of web documents. Macromedias Flash software, formerly FutureWaves FutureSplash, was released as a browser plug-in in 1996, enabling page authors to create more complicated interfaces and embed animations in web pages.176 Other developments made distributing audio and video much easier for the average user.177 Streaming technologies including RealPlayer, Quicktime, and Windows Media enabled users to view video clips online, while
174 175

Ibid. Ibid. 176 Flashmagazine. The Flash History. Flashmagazine. 31 July 2002, < http://www.flashmagazine.com/413.htm> (25 April 2005). 177 It was possible to distribute audio and video through binary files that could be downloaded from USENET or IRC and then decoded; however, this process is not easy for technologically unsophisticated users.

66 streaming audio and the MP3 format made it easy to distribute and share audio files. When HTML 4.0 was released in 1999, the invention of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) gave web developers almost complete control over the placement of elements within web pages.178 The web had transcended its origins as a purely textual platform designed solely for the distribution of scientific documents to become a medium through which visual, aural, video and interactive media were freely available to produce, distribute, and consume. The Boomtime The internet grew exponentially during the 1990s, which can be attributed to two factors. The development of usable browser technology, combined with increased opportunities to access the internet, greatly decreased the barrier to entry for average people. Prior to Mosaic, most internet applications were solely textual and, furthermore, required some degree of familiarity with fairly sophisticated technology to use properly. Email, for example, was primarily accessed through Unix or VAX/VMS systems and required users to learn unintuitive, non-user-friendly commands. Mosaic, on the other hand, was simple to use and free to download.179 Simultaneously, the NSFs rescindment of the ban on commercial internet use opened the door for thousands of commercial ISPs to provide cheap dial-up connections, many of them cheaper than the proprietary AOL and CompuServe networks.180 And even as home use was increasing, schools and workplaces were beginning to offer internet connectivity as a matter of course.

178

WC3. HTML 4.01 Specification. W3C Recommendation. 24 December 1999, < http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/> (25 April 2005). 179 Segaller, 295-296. 180 Segaller, 297; Abbate, 197-200.

67 As a result, the number of internet users increased exponentially during every year of the late 1990s.181 In 1997, which marked the real beginning of the boom, the number of websites grew from 640,000 in January to 1.7 million in December. By the end of 1998, there were more than 300 million websites.182 (As a point of comparison, as of today, July 16, 2005, Google is indexing more than 8 billion web pages, and it is likely that there are many more that Googles bots are unable to reach.)183 The dot.com boom is a catchall term used to describe the internet fad that spread through the United States and across the world in the late 1990s. While the experience of the boom differed by location, in the United States it can be characterized by several factors. The medias fervent emphasis on internet technology, combined with the glamorization of internet companies, a stock speculation bubble that turned a visible and vocal minority of young technology workers into millionaires, and a rapid increase in useful internet applications, created a sort of optimistic frenzy and contributed to the general assumption that that the internet was a foolproof way to make money and improve life.184 The idea that the web was a path to certain wealth was eagerly spread by Wall Street to maintain consumer interest in dot.com stock.185 Brick and mortar companies186 viewed the internet as a crucial marketing tool. Many traditional businesses scrambled to move online or created engaging websites to capture customer attention.187 Other

181

Coffman, K.G. and Odlyzko, A.N. Internet Growth: Is there a Moores Law for Data Traffic? In J. Elli, P. M. Pardalos, and M. G. C. Resende, eds. Handbook of Massive Data Sets. (Norwell, MA: Kluwer, 2001) 47-93; Johnson. 182 Sheldon. 183 Google. Google.com. 2005, <http://www.google.com>, (16 July 2005). 184 Kuo, D. J. Dot.Bomb. (New York: Little, Brown and Co, 2001), 21-22. 185 Cassidy, J. Dot.con: The Greatest Story Ever Sold. (New York: Harper Collins, 2002) 135-136. 186 Brick and mortar is dot.com slang for a business with a physical storefront. 187 Kuo, 41.

68 dot.coms conducted business entirely over the internet, including virtual stores like Amazon and Pets.com, and services from grocery deliveries to errands to video rentals staffed by bicycle messengers.188 Amazon, Yahoo, and eBay became household names and stock soared, regardless of the actual profits of the companies involved. Stories abounded of companies with flawed business models or non-existent paths to profitability receiving venture capital and subsequently launching huge initial public offerings. The corporate culture of the dot.coms, distinguished by young employees, frat house-like offices and lavish marketing expenditures, was fetishized by the media189 and young college graduates flocked to the centers of the new economy: San Francisco, Seattle, Austin and New York.190 The boom reached its apex on March 10, 2000, when the NASDAQ composite index hit a high of 5048.62, more than double the year before.191 The crash began slowly and picked up speed. On March 11th, the market dropped 2 percent, and 4 percent the next day. Six months later, in October 2002, the NASDAQ had dropped 78 percent.192 The cultural impact of the dot.com crash was very significant. Thousands of companies closed their doors, many technology workers were left unemployed, and the media had a field day heaping scorn on 30-year-old former CEOs. The giddy optimism and sense of possibility of the era were over, replaced with an economy in recession, a new president, and a sense of wary conservatism.
188 189

Cassidy, J., 135. Cassidy, 166-181. 190 In the interest of self-disclosure, I should point out that I was very much a part of the dot.com boom. I began working at software companies in 1995, and by 1998 was working as a project manager at a web services firm. I experienced much of the stereotypical dot.com culture first hand. Regrettably, I did not manage to retire in my mid 20s. 191 Wikipedia contributors. Dot Com. Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia. Wikimedia Foundation Inc. 9 July 2005, < http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot_com> (14 July 2005). 192 Alden, C. Looking Back on the Crash. Guardian Unlimited. 10 March 2005, < http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/story/0,3605,1433697,00.html> (11 July 2005).

69 Despite the crash, the effects of the boom were not entirely reversed. During the dot.com frenzy, people had become accustomed to the internet, seeing it as a utility rather than a novelty. The contemporary internet had been transformed again, this time into a ubiquitous presence in the life of middle class Americans. Contemporary Internet Era The massive commercialization of the internet did not begin with the dot.com boom. Recall that the NSF had already quietly sold the backbone of the Internet to the major American telecommunications companies.193 Additionally, the free access that characterized university connections and Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) of the 1980s had been replaced almost entirely by paid access.194 The power of the independent service providers had decreased and most Americans now accessed the internet through their cable or telephone companies.195 As a result, American media conglomerates already controlled most of the internets network infrastructure before the boom began. The dot.com boom did, however, greatly affect the content of the internet, or more specifically, the content of the World Wide Web. Nowadays, when a typical user goes online, he or she is most likely looking at internet sites created and maintained by major media and software companies. The parent companies of the most popular websites in the United States as of April 18, 2005, according to the Nielsen/NetRatings company, are Microsoft, Time Warner, Yahoo!, Google, eBay, the US Government, RealNetworks, United Online, and Ask Jeeves. Time Warners sites, which include
193 194

Abbate, 196-197. Kessler, M. Pay-as-you-surf Internet Access Takes Off. USA Today. 4 December 2003, D1. 195 Mark, R. Court Backs Cable in Brand X Case. Internet News. 27 June 2005, < http://www.internetnews.com/bus-news/article.php/3515801> (1 July 2005). There are still noncommercial structures such as free wireless internet access, local freenet ISPs and the like, but they are used by a minority of internet users.

70 Entertainment Weekly, America Online, CNN, Netscape and People, have the highest sticky time (amount of time a single user spends on a site in one sitting) at one hour and 32 minutes per person.196

Parent Name Microsoft Time Warner Yahoo! Google Ebay United States Government RealNetworks United Online Ask Jeeves Amazon

Unique Audience (000) 53,318 50,110 47,753 32,524 17,537 13,000 11,293 9,592 9,274 9,142

Reach % Time Per Person 50.06 00:39:53 47.05 01:32:53 44.84 00:48:26 30.54 00:10:02 16.47 00:47:50 12.21 00:11:19 10.60 00:20:56 9.01 00:28:04 8.71 00:10:00 8.58 00:10:45

Figure 1: Top 10 Parent Companies of Popular Websites in the United States, Home Panel197

This is not to say that media corporations own or control all online content. To the contrary, there are still millions of independent websites. Moreover, in the last few years there have been some encouraging recent developments in online culture that point to as possible trend away from corporate control. Although it is out of the scope of this thesis to discuss many in depth, I would like to touch on two in particular: the Free Culture movement, and the rise of communally-created and organized content. The Free Culture movement attempts, broadly, to counter the influence of major media companies over copyright law in the United States and worldwide. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act and a
196

NetRatings, Inc. United States: Top 10 Parent Companies, Week of April 18, 2005, Home Panel. Nielsen//Netratings 18 April 2005, <http://direct.www.nielsen-netratings.com/news.jsp? section=dat_to&country=us> 21 April 2005. 197 Ibid.

71 variety of other proposed and pending laws have resulted in an atmosphere where certain types of technology and art, including certain research projects, are illegal to create or distribute.198 Digital copyright activists point to the role of big media (namely the Recording Industry of America and the Motion Picture Association of America) in the creation of these laws, maintaining that the regulations prioritize corporate profitability over the public interest.199 A variety of organizations like Downhill Battle, the Gutenberg Project, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation work together to educate the public about copyright and internet law, undertaking activist campaigns, launching websites, archiving public domain content, and developing software that protects individuals from litigious corporate entities. An alternative to restrictive American copyright law, the Creative Commons license series enables content creators to release creative works or inventions with custom copyright notices. These allow creators to specify various degrees of fair use, including attribution, non-commercial distribution, and share alike, which allows for the remixing of works without fear of litigation.200 The great majority of these innovations are occurring online, paving the way for online media that is not controlled by major media companies. Secondly, collaborative content creation tools like Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, and the social bookmarking site del.icio.us, which uses a folksonomy model, point to a renewed interest in independent internet content that resides outside of

198

See Lessig, L. Free Culture. (New York: Penguin, 2004) 183-207. Examples of innovation or creative products which are currently illegal under US copyright law include the Beastie Boys Pauls Boutique, Danger Mouses The Grey Album, the DVD decryption program DeCSS, etc. For more on how current copyright law stifles scientific innovation, see Samuelson, P. Anticircumvention Rules: Threat to Science. Science 293 issue 5537 (14 September 2001): 2028-2031. 199 Green, H. Are The Copyright Wars Stifling Innovation? Business Week. 11 October 2004, < http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/04_41/b3903473.htm> (1 July 2005). 200 Creative Commons. CreativeCommons.org. 2005, < http://creativecommons.org/> (1 July 2005).

72 the control of the Big Five media companies.201 Wikipedia, which is a very comprehensive encyclopedia that can be written and edited by anyone, is an example of the type of resource that can be created by a great many people working together for a common goal; the Wikipedia model is similar to that of open-source software development. As a result, Wikipedia has become the #2 reference site on the web.202 (I cite several Wikipedia articles in this thesis and have found it to be very useful when researching internet-specific topics. For example, the Wikipedia entry on Canter and Siegel is very comprehensive, whereas the infamous legal team does not appear anywhere in the Encyclopedia Britannica.) The Wikipedia is based on the wiki source code, which makes it easy for people to organize and publish content without knowing a great deal of HTML. The wiki source code is available for free, and is used by individuals and businesses for a variety of organizational needs. Similarly, sites such as Flickr and del.icio.us let users tag and organize content, 203 a bottom-up taxonomic scheme known colloquially as folksonomy. This user-organized content relies on an informed and engaged user base and has become very popular with early adopters. There will always be independent content on the web, and I could point to a host of other encouraging trends. Weblogs, frequently updated personal pages that discuss current events or particular topics, have gained rapid popularity in the last few years. Blogs have created a potential space for resistance to the mainstream news media, as

201

Hammond, T., Hannay, T., Lund, B. and Scott, J. Social Bookmarking Tools: A General Overview. DLib Magazine 11 no. 1 (April 2005), <http://www.dlib.org/dlib/april05/hammond/04hammond.html> 26 May 2005; Pink, D. The Book Stops Here. Wired 13 no. 3 (March 2005): < http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.03/wiki.html> (1 July 2005); Rose, F. Big Media or Bust. Wired 10 no. 3 (March 2002), < http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/10.03/mergers.html> (1 July 2005). 202 Burns, E. Wikipedias Popularity and Traffic Soar. ClickZ. 10 May 2005, < http://www.clickz.com/stats/sectors/traffic_patterns/article.php/3504061> (1 July 2005). 203 Hammond, T., Hannay, T., Lund, B. and Scott, J.

73 bloggers analyze, pick apart, and investigate mainstream news stories for themselves.204 The free, non-profit classified advertising site Craigslist has become a serious competitor to more elaborate corporate sites (that charge users to place ads) by adopting a simple, text-based interface that allows for low bandwidth and hosting costs.205 Peer-to-peer applications like BitTorrent and BlogTorrent let users distribute content to potential audiences of millions.206 In terms of network infrastructure, free wireless internet has become popular in densely-populated urban areas. Even the open-source web browser Firefox is rapidly gaining market share against Microsofts Internet Explorer.207 These developments, while covered in depth by the technology press and online pundits, are still confined to early adopters of technological innovations. And the majority of commercial applications do not have a non-commercial alternative. Commodification of Identity Having traced the transformation of the internet from a network created and populated by academics, scientists, and computer homebrew hobbyists to a mainstream, commercial application, I must now re-locate identity within this altered, contemporary internet. Given the commercial nature of the internet, what does it mean to express identity online when compared to previous scholarship on the topic? Is there a difference in how identity operates online nowadays, compared to the way identity operated in the early, hobbyist days of the internet? I maintain that the increase in corporate control of the internet means that most of the spaces where identity is expressed are commercial
204 205

McGregor, J. Its a Blog World After All. Fast Company 81 (April 2004), 84. Kornblum, J. Web Board Craigslist Makes a Name For Itself. USA Today. 28 September 2004. 206 Dvorak, J.C. The Scheme to Discredit BitTorrent. PC Magazine. 20 June 2005, < http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,1829724,00.asp> (1 July 2005). 207 Mossberg, W. Security, Cool Features Of Firefox Web Browser Beat Microsoft's IE. The Wall Street Journal. 30 December 2004, < http://ptech.wsj.com/archive/ptech-20041230.html> (14 July 2005).

74 structures and, consequentially, companies now use identity to generate revenue. This process isnt singular or monolithic; rather, it is a combination of market trends and technological developments that have facilitated user tracking while necessitating increased revenue generation. In this section, I use several examples to show how these processes work, why corporations view identity as an asset, and how companies have leveraged identity for their own purposes. In the pre-commercial internet, identity expression generally took place in two forms: through communicative interactions, and within static spaces. In the first, people performed their identities through active interaction with other people in locations like chat rooms, bulletin board systems, and message boards. This interaction didnt necessarily need to be synchronous- a user could post a USENET message and receive a reply a week later. However, these types of applications required users to perform their identity consciously. Although one could make presumptions and inferences about a users identity from his or her vocabulary, style of typing, and use of jargon, most scholarship concludes that people presented their identity by typing self-descriptions or deliberately role-playing.208 Since these applications were generally entirely textual (some let users send pictures or audio files back and forth, but this was rarely easy and usually limited to, say, binary transfers within IRC), people were limited to text when describing themselves. Textual self-descriptions are inherently performative. Its very difficult to convey visual information textually without a certain amount of verbal verve and creativity, or at least without thinking strategically about what information you would like to present. Also, many of these applications replicated real world features like
208

See footnote 3 for a few citations, particularly Kendall, 2002 on masculinity in chat rooms; Campbell, 2004 on gay sexuality in chat rooms; and Turkle, 1995 on general issues of selfhood and identity in MUDs and IRC.

75 rooms, bars, clothes, and furniture. In order to use these features, users had to pretend to some extent or another that they were actually interacting with a room, object, piece of furniture or whatnot, which is a strategic, imaginative, and theatrical type of performance.209 It is no wonder that work on identity online during the 80s and 90s focused on role-playing and deceit. When limited to text, it is relatively easy to perform in a manner that is not entirely accurate. As a result, in earlier scholarship, there are many instances of chat room users representing themselves inauthentically and the resulting fallout. Turkle devotes a great deal of Life on the Screen to users who switched genders or created entire false personas,210 while Stone includes a chapter on The Cross Dressing Psychiatrist, which references interactions that took place within a CompuServe group in the early 1980s.211 In Campbells Getting it on Online, which follows the interactions between participants in a gay male chatroom focused on bodybuilding, one of the main characters presents himself as an extremely muscular hunk, who is revered by other chatters as a paragon of fitness and source of expertise. Campbell eventually discovers that the person behind this character is actually an overweight security guard living with his parents.212 A certain amount of performance is required to present ones identity within textual applications, and this presumably made it tempting to role-play other characters or to present in different ways. Identity expression also took place in static, textual areas of applications that had not been designed to include frivolous or extraneous information. For example, within
209

For more on these types of interactions, see Correll, S. The Ethnography of an Electronic Bar: The Lesbian Caf Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 24 no. 3 (1995): 27098. 210 Turkle, 210-232, as well as throughout the volume. 211 Stone, A. R. The War of Desire and Technology. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1995, 65-81. 212 Campbell 2004.

76 UNIX and VAX-based email systems, the finger command allowed users to check whether another user was online.213 Users could create a text file called a .plan which displayed if another user typed finger username. Plans originally existed to display useful information like office hours and telephone numbers, but quickly became a free space for quotes, stories, epigrams and other ASCII objects that reflected the personality or mood of the user. Likewise, email and USENET users often appended their messages with signature files, or sigs. A signature file is typically four or so lines of text that includes the users name, email address, affiliation, and a pithy quote, song lyric, piece of ASCII art, or other textual object that reveals an aspect of the users personality. Signature files and .plans gave users a certain amount of personal agency within media that were designed and built principally for academic and professional uses.214 Today, internet users can express themselves through many different media, in an enormously varied number of ways. Besides text-based chat applications like instant messenger and IRC, voice-over IP (VOIP), microphones, and webcams allow aural and visual chat. People can talk to each other while playing games, working on documents, or using applications. Weblogs, personal homepages, online journals and profile-based sites such as social networking services and personal ad networks allow people to present themselves in more static ways that may also allow for interpersonal interaction. I am particularly interested in the ways that corporate-owned structures like profile-based sites encourage users to express themselves, since much online selfexpression takes place within applications or websites owned by large corporations rather
213

The finger command is obsolete today. It may be possible to find a system that still allows open fingering, but it is no longer familiar to internet users. 214 Within more recreation-oriented textual sites such as MUDs, users can enter a description of themselves that will appear when the look charactername command is entered. Since people in MUDs are often playing particular characters within the game, however, this is less analogous to profile-based sites.

77 than independent entities. Social networking sites like Friendster, MySpace, and Facebook, which are discussed in depth in the next chapter, require each user to create a structured personal profile. The site then asks the user for the email addresses of their friends, so that they can be persuaded to join the site as well. Online personals, one of the few consistently profitable non-pornographic internet content genres, encourage individuals to use marketing techniques to appeal to their target audience. Even independent media is often reliant on corporate structures. Blogs, which have been widely touted as an answer to corporate media consolidation, typically use technology developed and deployed by large corporations. Google owns Blogger and former rival BlogSpot,215 while SixApart owns Moveable Type, LiveJournal and TypePad, and is beginning to roll out contextual advertising on TypePad-created blogs.216 Similarly, Yahoo owns Flickr, a folksonomic photo-sharing site that is currently experimenting with the implementation of contextual advertising throughout.217 In Nancy Bayms pioneering 2000 study of identity presentation in USENET, she concluded that peoples ability to shape their identity is influenced by the medium (a point that is discussed in greater detail in the next chapter).218 Beyond the question of how corporate sites encourage identity presentation when compared to non-corporate sites, which is outside the scope of this thesis, I am interested in how peoples expressions of identity are commodified by corporate sites. Obviously, corporate sites, as well as many independent sites, need a profit model in order to operate. But most of them

215 216

Gallagher, D. Deals: Blogging Start-Ups Join Forces. The New York Times. 6 January 2005, C3, 9. Bradley, E. SixApart and Kanoodle Launch Contextual Blog Ads. SearchViews. 23 June 2005, < http://searchviews.com/archives/2005/06/six_apart_and_k.php> (1 July 2005). 217 Baker, L. Flickr Testing Both Google AdSense and Yahoo Contextual Ads. Search Engine Journal. 7 July 2005, < http://www.searchenginejournal.com/index.php?p=1892> (15 July 2005). 218 Baym.

78 dont sell subscriptions or charge a monthly usage fee.219 How can sites like Friendster continue to provide free content to millions of users? The answer lies in the particular ways in which corporate sites value their users. Increasingly, the specific value that users bring to popular websites is located in their profiles, the spaces where users are encouraged to construct public personas. Other sites use data provided by users when they sign up, move through the site, or contribute content. Like television programs, which exist chiefly to appeal to particular user demographics in order to sell commercials,220 many websites exist primarily to harvest data from targeted user bases. The primary revenue stream for these sites is generated by the sale or corporate use of individuals online identity information. Ones personal data is monetized and ones identity becomes capital. This is a stark contrast to previous conceptions of online identity as personally liberatory and happens in a variety of ways. First, within individual internet applications, user information can be data-mined for particular keywords and pieces of information. These trigger particular responses from the system and allow for very direct marketing strategies. For example, Googles popular email service, Gmail, provides users with two gigabytes of storage space. In exchange, users agree to let Google mine their email for marketing purposes. As Gmail users send and receive emails, keywords found in their emails are tracked and used to display individually targeted advertisements.221 The user becomes a target market of one,

219

The major exception being online personal sites, which are the most lucrative non-pornographic websites online. In 2003, they made $418 million dollars. See Egan, J. Love in the Time of No Time. The New York Times Magazine. 23 November 2003, 66-128. 220 Byars, J. and Meehan, E.R. Once in a Lifetime: Constructing The Working Woman Through Cable Narrowcasting. Camera Obscura 33-34 nos. 1-2 (1994-1995): 13-41. 221 Glasner, J. What Search Sites Know About You. Wired. 5 April 2005, <http://www.wired.com/news/privacy/0,1848,67062,00.html> (1 May 2005); Mehta, A. et. Al. AdWords and Generalized On-line Matching. Stanford Operations Research Colloquia. 9 February 2005 < http://scholar.google.com/url?sa=U&q=http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~saberi/adwords.pdf> (1 July 2005).

79 and his or her interests can be determined on a much more granular level than would be possible otherwise. For example, Friendster provides fields for users to write in their favorite bands, movies, and television shows. If a user loves The Sopranos and Scarface, the data-mining application integrated into Friendster could display an advertisement for the DVD box set of The Godfather.222 The knowledge that this Friendster user likes gangster movies is a much more sophisticated piece of demographic information than would typically be captured by user-completed forms, and is subsequently more valuable. Secondly, the number of users to a site becomes an enticement to attract advertisers. A site with millions of users can charge potential advertisers more per media buy than a site with thousands of users, subsequently making more money. Even more valuable than a site with a million users is a site with a million users who each spend an hour on the site.223 Thus, websites who make money from advertising revenue are encouraged to track both the site visitors and the length of time each visitor spends on the site. This generally requires implementing cookies. In addition to tracking this data for internal use, websites can and do collect information about their users and sell it to firms that compile lists of potential customers for direct marketing companies. Opt-out marketing, where users are added to marketing lists by default and have to specifically request removal, is illegal in many countries, and sites that operate there are required to get explicit permission from users before selling their name, email address, income, or any other potentially profitable personal details. This is not the case in the United States, and even reputable internet
222

Friendster, Inc. Friendster Privacy Policy. Friendster.com 2005, < http://www.friendster.com/info/privacy.php> (1 July 2005). 223 This is known as sticky time or stickiness. See Mulcahy, S. Sticky Is as Sticky Does. ClickZ Experts. 20 December 2001, < http://www.clickz.com/experts/media/agency_strat/article.php/943401> (1 July 2005).

80 companies such as Yahoo! often boost profits by selling customer information to other companies.224 Third, as people are encouraged to convert their offline social network into online data, users become assets as they provide access to their contacts. The internet today is clearly a site of increased convergence. Technologies allow users to merge their mobile phone books, instant messenger buddy lists, email contact lists, and friend lists on social networking services and journaling sites. Information that formerly did not exist in a codified, structured form, such as a persons offline social group of friends and contacts, or information that existed in disparate, non-internet connected devices, like the contact list on a mobile phone or PDA, will increasingly be aggregated, organized, and transferred online. This transfer is being handled by corporate sites. For example, BT Wholesale and Phonesync offer subscribers the option to pay monthly to back up their phone books online in case of phone loss or damage.225 SMS.ac, Playtxt and FriendX are services that facilitate social networking based on location; in order to do this, they mine a users email address book, coordinate it with their mobile phone book, and email every contact encouraging them to sign up for the service.226 Friendster users can import their e-mail contact list from Hotmail or Yahoo! mail; contacts already on the service are automatically added, and those who are not are sent a prompt to join.227 Many cell phones now allow you to send instant messages to people on your buddy list, and likewise many
224

The Internet sells its soul. The Economist. 16 April 2002, <http://www.economist.com/agenda/displayStory.cfm?story_id=1085967> (1 May 2005). 225 Miles, S. Losing Your Mobile Phone Contacts Maybe a Thing of the Past. Pocket-Lint. 5 March 2004, < http://www.pocket-lint.co.uk/news.php?newsId=236> (15 July 2005). 226 Terdiman, D. MoSoSos Not So So-So. Wired News. 8 March 2005, <
http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,66813,00.html?tw=wn_1culthead> (13 July 2005).
227

Friendster, Inc. Import E-Mail Addresses. Friendster. 2005, < http://www.friendster.com/invite.php? statpos=invitefriends> (1 July 2005).

81 instant message programs allow you to send messages to people on their cell phones.228 Dodgeball, recently purchased by Google, 229 combines mobile phone books and social networking sites (mobile social-software services, or MoSoSos)230 to create a service that lets users send text messages to everyone in a group of friends through located nearby.231 These types of applications are a lucrative opportunity for mobile providers as the mobile content market, which also includes games and ring tones, is predicted to triple its yearly revenue to $9 billion by 2006;232 the current generation of MoSoSos will bring in $215 million a year by 2009.233 Finally, a users personal information is valuable insofar as it enables companies to create detailed demographic profiles for individual users. Increasingly, corporations are using aggregate data trackers to combine information for a single user from multiple sources.234 Google might find it useful to track popular searches, but Amazon might find this information even more useful, as it can be used to target particular products based on those searches. This is distinct from the targeted keyword advertising described earlier as it spans multiple sites and, as a result, the user is often unaware that his or her actions are being tracked. Large interactive advertising agencies like Doubleclick, Gostats and Hitbox track user movement through cookies that are placed by advertisements; however,
228

SMS is Passe- Get Ready for the Mobile Instant Messenger Revolution. eWeek. 22 November 2004, < http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1731081,00.asp> (1 July 2005). 229 Kharif, O. and Elstrom, P. Connections, the Wireless Way. BusinessWeek Online. 29 June 2005, < http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/jun2005/tc20050629_3438_tc024.htm?chan=db> (15 July 2005). 230 Terdiman 2005. 231 Kandel, E. A Mobile Link for 90 Mutual Friends. The New York Times. 13 May 2004, <http://tech2.nytimes.com/mem/technology/techreview.html? res=9506E7DD113CF930A25756C0A9629C8B63> (1 May 2005). 232 Freidman, M. Mobile Content Market Will Triple by Next Year: Survey. Information Week 7 July 2005, <http://informationweek.networkingpipeline.com/165700445> (15 July 2005). 233 Kharif and Elstrom. 234 The Internet sells its soul.; Safire, W. Goodbye To Privacy. The New York Times. 10 April 2005, <http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C06E3D7133FF933A25757C0A9639C8B63> (1 May 2005).

82 since advertisements served by these companies appear on a wide variety of sites, it is possible to track a users path as he or she surfs the internet.235 For example, Microsofts Passport, which is discussed in depth in the next chapter, tracks users across any Microsoft web site while the user is logged in. These sites include Hotmail, MSN, MSN Instant Messenger, Xbox, Microsoft.com, and many other segments of Microsofts online sphere.236 Even more worrisome, many of these aggregators are merging information tracked online with information tracked offline. Others are collaborating with governmental sources. As Kim Zetter wrote last year in the online version of Wired magazine: Data aggregatorscompanies that aggregate information from numerous private and public databasesand private companies that collect information about their customers are increasingly giving or selling data to the government to augment its surveillance capabilities and help it track the activities of people. Because laws that restrict government data collection don't apply to private industry, the government is able to bypass restrictions on domestic surveillance.237 For example, information on citizens in Mexico, Nicaragua, Costa Rica and seven other Latin American countries was collected by a data aggregation company called ChoicePoint, who then sold it to the United States government in order to verify the identities of Latin American nationals accused of committing crimes in the United States and help in the larger effort to find potential terrorists.238 ChoicePoint, which claims to
235

Dixon, P. Consumer Tips: How to Opt-Out of Cookies that Track You. World Privacy Forum. 26 April 2005, < http://www.worldprivacyforum.org/cookieoptout.html> (1 July 2005). 236 Slemko, M. Microsoft: Passport to Trouble. 2001, <http://alive.znep.com/~marcs/passport/> (28 June 2005); Kormann, D. P. and Rubin, A. D. Risks of the Passport Single Signon Protocol. Computer Networks 33 (2000): 51-58; and Opplinger, R. Microsoft .Net Passport: A security analysis. Computer, 36, no. 7 (2003): 29-35. 237 Zetter, K. Big Business Becoming Big Brother. Wired. 9 August 2004, <http://wiredvig.wired.com/news/conflict/0,2100,64492-2,00.html?tw=wn_story_page_next1> (28 May 2005). 238 Paul, P.C. and Ferris, S. Mexico Claims ChoicePoint Stepped Across Line. Atlanta JournalConstitution. 27 April 2003, < http://www.ajc.com/business/content/business/0403/27privacy.html? UrAuth=%60N%5CNUOcNVUbTTUWUXUTUZT[U_UWUbU%60UZUaUbUcTYWYWZV> (28 May

83 have a record on every single American consumer,239 maintains an internet marketing business called DirectLink which, according to their website, links persistent individual, household and address level identifiers with all input data sources.240 It is not out of the realm of possibility that independent sites might use some or all of these techniques. However, having a single, non-profit web proprietor mining email or collecting personal information is distinctly different from an enormous corporation having access to the same data, especially considering the impact of media consolidation on the parent companies of major websites. Jupiter Media Metrix estimates that from 1999 to 2001, the total number of companies that control 60 percent of all minutes spent online dropped from 110 in March of 1999 to 14 in 2001.241 Software companies, who own many very popular websites, are undergoing similar changes; Adobe and Macromedia recently merged, resulting in the dominance of the graphics software market space by a single company.242 Similarly, Microsoft is famous for buying smaller software companies as soon as they exhibit particular innovation in any area: examples include WebTV, Great Plains, Navision, and Groove Networks.243 These trends suggest that major websites will merge just as offline media has done. Regardless, if independent websites do start to adopt corporate tactics in order to remain competitive in the market sphere, it makes it even more crucial that we develop a sophisticated understanding of
2005).; Zetter, K. Brave New Era for Privacy Fight. Wired. 13 January 2005, < http://www.wired.com/news/privacy/0,1848,66242-2,00.html?tw=wn_story_page_next1> (28 May 2005). 239 Sullivan, B. Database Giant Gives Access to Fake Firms. MSNBC.com 14 February 2005, < http://msnbc.msn.com/id/6969799/> (14 May 2005). 240 Choicepoint Asset Company. ChoicePoint Precision Marketing. Choicepoint.com. 2004, <http://www.choicepoint.com/industry/telecom/direct_1.html> (1 May 2005). 241 Shah, A. Media Conglomerates, Mergers, Concentration of Ownership. Corporate Influence in the Media. 15 April 2004, < http://www.globalissues.org/HumanRights/Media/Corporations/Owners.asp> (1 May 2005). 242 Taft, D. K. Will Adobe-Macromedia Merger Kill Competition? eWeek. 25 April 2005, < http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1789283,00.asp> (1 May 2005). 243 Microsoft Corporation. Microsoft Investments and Acquisitions. Microsoft.com 2005, < http://www.microsoft.com/msft/InvestmentandAcquisitionsList.mspx#ACQ_2005> (1 July 2005).

84 these techniques in order to ensure that users maintain online privacy and control over their personal data. Given that the modern internet has been transformed from a free space for selfexpression into one in which identity presentation is encouraged along bounded, revenuegenerating lines, I want to return to theories of identity to properly contextualize this understanding of commodification.

Identity and Commodification The link between identity and commodity is neither new nor confined to the internet space. Although the transformation of peoples personal information into corporate assets has only recently become widespread both online and offline, scholars have long understood identity formation in the context of commercialism. In what Anthony Giddens refers to as late modernity, ones identity is no longer fixed or inherent. Instead, identity is created by the individual, and becomes a series of complex and changing negotiations between the use and consumption of products that function as symbolic markers (and whose meaning is fixed by social contexts). This process is still more complicated by the fact that people are increasingly encouraged to construct and position their own identities as commodities to be consumed by others. The concurrent transformation of identity into commodity and impetus for self-commodification makes it even more crucial that we analyze the structures through which self-presentation takes place. Before moving on to case studies of particular internet applications, I want to delve into the links between identity and commodification to locate these discussions within previous scholarship.

85 Giddens provides a useful structure to discuss the way that people form their identities in contemporary society. He maintains that the major identifying characteristic of late modernity is a turning away from traditions and toward reflexiveness, the process by which people consider and make decisions about how to behave in society.244 Giddens late modernity is an ideal, not a fixed descriptor of Western society in the 21st century; however, the fact remains that most people no longer base their social roles on what is traditionally expected of them by virtue of their class, ethnicity, family, nationality, and the like (of course, all of these things come into play during the process of identity construction). Rather, people in late modernity are required to formulate their own social roles and identities. The self is not only a project to be worked on, but a project that must be worked on; it is the modern citizen-consumers responsibility to choose a lifestyle, career, set of relationships, style and other such signifying characteristics in order to compose his or her identity and thus define him or herself to the world. This process often takes place through consumption.245 So how does the average person in late modernity construct an identity? Recall the discussion of Kathryn Woodward in the first chapter. Identity is marked by difference, and difference is likewise signified through symbolic markers. Symbolic markers, material objects that denote particular meanings, are given import within social contexts. Bordieu maintains that consumption is specifically used to mark social difference; in other words, consumption becomes a class marker.246 But this is not limited to class. For example, within the Byzantine social systems of teenagers, a particular brand
244

Giddens, A. Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Modern Age. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991) 32; see also Gauntlett, D. Media, Gender and Identity: An Introduction. (New York, NY: Routledge, 2002) 96. 245 Giddens, 81-83; Gauntlett, 102. 246 Storey, J. Cultural Studies and the Study of Popular Culture: Theories and Methods. (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1996), 115-116.

86 of sneakers can convey infinite hipness (and social capital), while a different brand can mark the wearer as hopelessly out of touch with fashion, style, and what is cool. The sneakers themselves remain just sneakers; their meaning only exists within the shared understanding of the group. And this meaning can change rapidly and significantly. A few years later, the reviled inferior brand may be dragged into the light by retro revivalists and displayed as an even more potent symbol of coolness. Hebdige writes that subcultures communicate through commodities even if the meanings attached to those commodities are purposefully distorted or overthrown.247 In the case of the retro revivalists refashioning a formerly uncool brand into something avant-garde, the meaning is completely detached from anything that the sneaker manufacturer or other social groups may intend. The point is that difference, and therefore identity, is signified through the use of a neutral object that is given a particular definition through social interaction and understanding. The ideology of consumerism can be boiled down to this: that the meaning of life is found in what we consume rather than what we produce.248 In late modernity, almost any aspect of ourselves we might want to convey our sexuality, intelligence, education, political beliefs, nationality, hobbies can be marked through consumption. Identity is thus transformed into lifestyle. People are encouraged to express themselves by purchasing particular objects that are given meaning within social contexts, subcultures, and networks. This process, however, is not completely one-sided. Notably, consumption can be viewed as an active process in itself, what de Certeau calls secondary production.249 In other words, the way that products are used and are given meaning is a
247 248

Hebidge, D. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. (London: Routledge, 1979) 95. Storey, 114. 249 Storey, 126

87 constant negotiation between the understanding of the dominant culture and the appropriation/reinterpretation of meaning by individual or subcultural consumers. For example, in Williams recent study of players of Magic: The Gathering (a competitive fantasy card game), he concludes that owning valuable Magic cards was only one aspect of the players identities; other cultural practices, such as sharing, treating other players well, good sportsmanship and skills were more important in formulating player identity. In fact, the players who spent lavish amounts on Magic cards but did not demonstrate other values important to the community were looked upon derisively.250 Formulating identity is a complicated negotiation that should not be reduced to simple buying and selling of lifestyles. Two contemporary examples should suffice to demonstrate the complex relationship between consumption and the construction of identity. Witness the hipster archetype, which originated in the independent music scenes of minor American cities, the trappings of which were quickly co-opted and marketed to teenagers. Cultural practices such as rejecting expensive microbrews in favor of the cheap American beer Pabst Blue Ribbon251 and wearing trucker hats for ironic, kitsch affect were transformed into symbolic markers, easily purchased at mall stores, which indicated that the practitioner was hip and cutting edge. As this trend-to-market252 time decreases, subcultural denizens are beginning to circumvent the process by creating their own artificially marketed lifestyles. The electroclash movement of 2002 was created by Larry Tee, a Williamsburg, Brooklyn DJ who packaged bands (synthpop and electronic
250

Williams, J. P. Consumption and Authenticity in the Collectible Games Subculture. The Georgia Workshop on Culture and Institutions, 21 January 2005, Athens, GA, 25-26. 251 Walker, R The Marketing of No Marketing. The New York Times. 22 June 2003, Section 6, p. 42. 252 This is retail jargon for the amount of time it takes a company to observe a trend, capitalize on it, and sell it in stores. The teen-targeted alternative store Hot Topic owes much of its success to its extremely low trend-to-market time and constant turnover of merchandise.

88 acts who drew on 1980s new wave for inspiration), fashion (neon colors and early 80s kitsch) and drugs (cocaine) into a wholly artificial subculture that was promoted through his successful Electroclash Tour of the early 00s. Many of the bands involved did not write their own music or even perform live; Fischerspooner and W.I.T (a band made up of three models who lipsynched and danced in public) delivered their overproduced synthpop to the public with a heavy dose of irony. The idea of authenticity was completely, strategically, and purposefully turned on its head. Electroclash was created specifically as a marketable gimmick and fittingly burned itself out in less than two years.253 The idea that people find their identities through consumption is nothing new, and neither is the cooptation of authentic or underground lifestyles by corporate interests. As of now, the only entities literally buying and selling the identities of others are corporations, but there are larger, subtler ramifications. Increasingly, people strategically formulate and present their identities to convey particular messages or to position themselves for consumption by others. What is the impact of people viewing their own identities as commodities and presenting themselves accordingly? The spread of the business fad branding to the interpersonal realm demonstrates this shift. A highly influential boom-time article,The Brand Called You,254 instructed dot.com workers and freelancers to construct the self as a brand, or something to be consumed. Much as people in late modernity construct their identity based on the products they consume, the economic boom-time, with its emphasis on flexibility, job253

See Easton 2003 for a somewhat precious take on this topic. Easton, A. Electroclash: The Filth and the Dispassion. Stylus Magazine. 11 August 2003, <http://www.stylusmagazine.com/feature.php?ID=61> (1 May 2005). 254 Peters, T. The Brand Called You. Fast Company 10 (1997): 83-92, <http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/10/brandyou.html> (1 March 2004).

89 switching and freelance career-building, necessitated self-promotion, thereby encouraging consumption of self on a larger scale. Independent professionals were told You're every bit as much a brand as Nike, Coke, Pepsi, or the Body Shop. To start thinking like your own favorite brand manager, ask yourself the same question the brand managers at Nike, Coke, Pepsi, or the Body Shop ask themselves: What is it that my product or service does that makes it different?255 Recently this branding ideology has been extended to dating. Coupland locates written personal ads within a cultural narrative of commodification by which the self and the wanted other become products in the marketplace.256 In other words, in writing a personal advertisement, the author presents herself as a product, using words or photographs that convey a particular, presumably appealing message, such as a hypothetical athletic, professional blonde. Simultaneously, the writer describes the wanted other as a product- tall, dark, handsome, and rich. Personal ads show the presentation of identity as a confined series of self-selected, packaged, and marketable aspects. Rachel Greenwald, in her popular 2003 self-help book How To Find A Husband Over 35 Using What I Learned At Harvard Business School, explicitly encourages women to brand themselves to appeal to potential romantic interests. She writes A personal brand is a must-have for every woman who is single and over 35Your future husband may be someone you meet on a chance basis whereby he will take only a few moments to decide if you are someone he wants to get to know. Its better that you help him see what you want him to seeyour brandthan allow him to make snap judgments
255 256

Ibid. Coupland, J. Dating Advertisements: Discourses of the Commodified Self. Discourse and Society 7 (1996):187-207.

90 that may not be in your favor.257 Branding positions self-commodification as an active process in which people strategically construct their identities in order to sell themselves to potential customers: business contacts and romantic partners. Given that identity is marked through consumption, it isnt surprising that we see personal ads that tout favorite movies, books, and brands of cars and clothing as personality or identity signifiers. As companies commodify the identities of individual users, individual users are likewise encouraged to strategically and proactively position themselves as objects to be consumed. Furthermore, the late-modern individual both constructs and presents identity through demonstrably buying and using particular marketized products and services. Commodification and identity are inextricably linked, and, unsurprisingly, these processes are remarkably in line with the interests of corporations. A sophisticated understanding of the negotiations involved is absolutely crucial to referencing the operation of identity online and the possibility of providing a space for resistance to these processes. The Digital Divide Before moving on in the next two chapters and discussing the specifics of how commodification operates online today, I would like to disclaim that although it is easy to universalize the impact of internet technology, it is dangerous to do so without qualifiers. The Digital Divide generally refers to the gap in access to internet technology. During the late 1990s, this gap followed lines of race, gender, and class, but recently, although there are still disparities in access to the internet, the lines of race and gender have all but
257

Greenwald, R. How to Find a Husband Over 35 Using What I Learned at Harvard Business School. (New York: Ballantine Books, 2003) 83.

91 disappeared.258 Currently, the most important United States factors are geography259 and class260. Additionally, 99 percent of public schools have internet access261 and 87 percent of teenagers have regular (weekly or daily) access to the internet.262 These figures would imply that for the younger generations of Americans, internet access has become almost universal and is likely to increase. The digital divide is still significant internationally. Although North Americans make up only 5 percent of the worldwide population, they comprise a quarter of all internet users. Europe and Australia are similarly overrepresented, while Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America are significantly underrepresented online. Asia currently makes up 56% of the world population and 34% of the internet population, and this number is rapidly increasing as internet access in China and Southeast Asia continues to rise exponentially.263 It is likely that we will see major changes in internet traffic patterns

258

The racial gap closes as household income increases. See Pearson Education, Inc. Percent of Households with Internet Access, 2001. Information Please Database. 2005, <http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0880773.html> (1 April 2005). Very recently the amount of women online exceeded the number of men. See Chabrow, E. More American Women than Men Go Online. InformationWeek. 7 April 2005, <http://informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml? articleID=160502074> (25 May 2005). 259 Geographic lines would include rural vs. urban populations, depending on the infrastructure, for example, households that can subscribe to high-speed DSL lines or cable modems. See Parker, E. Closing the Digital Divide in Rural America. Telecommunications Policy 24 (2000) 281-290. 260 Class might include statistics such as the percentage of households who can afford to have a computer in the house and pay for internet access, but also includes factors such as education. See Robinson, J., DiMaggio, P and Hargittai, E. New Social Survey Perspectives on the Digital Divide. IT & Society 1 no.5 (Summer 2003) 1-22. 261 National Center for Education Statistics. Internet Access. NCES Fast Facts. 2003, < http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=46> (1 May 2005). 262 Pew Internet and American Life Project. Girls lead the way in using the internet to hunt for colleges and other schools. Pew Internet and American Life Project. 23 March 2005, < http://www.pewinternet.org/press_release.asp?r=102> (1 April 2005). 263 BBC News. Nets Spread. The iGeneration: Bridging the Digital Divide. 2003, < http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/spl/hi/pop_ups/03/technology_digital_snapshots/html/2.stm> (26 April 2005).

92 as the rate of access across the world increases.264 In summary, we should not fall into the trap of believing that the internet experiences of Americans can be universalized. Conclusion The development of internet technology has reached a point where greater multimedia integration and personalization are available than ever before. Simultaneously, corporations have access to sophisticated surveillance and tracking tools that make privacy online a pressing concern. The increased commodification of internet space combined with these technological advances make it crucial that we understand the implications of expressing and presenting identity online. The next two chapters offer case studies of particular internet structures which exemplify the conflict between the way that corporations manage and handle identity, and the way that identity has been characterized in the cyberculture literature.

264

This will have significant, and interesting impacts, including the decrease of English as the online lingua franca, and possible conflict between non-English speakers and English speakers, who are used to being the majority online.

93 Chapter Three: Self-Presentation Strategies in Social Networking Sites

Introduction There are very real conflicts between the ways that users understand their identities online and the expression encouraged by commercially-driven applications. Software typically shapes and privileges self-presentation in particular ways, often limiting or encouraging users to shape their identity expression along commercially acceptable lines. The specific mechanisms by which this is accomplished are most easily understood by placing particular online spaces under the microscope. In this chapter, I undertake a thorough examination of social networking sites265 (SNSs) such as Thefacebook, MySpace and Friendster. My goal is to show both how people choose to present themselves through profile-based sites and how site structures privilege certain types of identity presentation. In this chapter, I introduce social networking services and briefly discuss the foundational theories of social network analysis that have influenced the design of these applications. I look particularly at the spaces extant within these sites for user selfpresentation and identity expression, and the problematic assumptions supporting these structures. Despite these inherent problems, users have adopted a variety of creative strategies to circumvent the limitations of the technologies. Next, I situate social networking sites within the larger context of the commercial internet, as discussed in the previous chapter. Thus, the application assumptions are predicated on the for-profit nature of the sites, and the ways in which identity is commoditized are fundamentally linked to the specifics of revenue generation.
265

SNS can be used to refer to either social networking sites or social networking services.

94 Social Networking Services In the last three years, SNSs have rapidly grown in popularity among internet users worldwide. Friendster, the original social networking application, was founded in 2002, has a current user base of seventeen million people,266 and has subsequently spawned a small industry. Some of these websites, such as MySpace and Thefacebook, have surpassed Friendster in popularity by targeting particular populations and incorporating new features on a regular basis. Others, like Microsofts Wallop, Rojo, and Yahoo!360, combine social networking with additional sociable functionality like RSS feeds, blogs and picture sharing. Overall, there are several hundred SNSs online today, including Tribe.net, Jobster, Dogster and Orkut.267 All these applications are generally based on a common idea drawn from social networking analysis: that publicly articulated social networks have utility. That is, enabling actors to codify, map and view the relational ties between themselves and others can have useful and positive consequences. SNSs are designed specifically to facilitate user interaction for a variety of goals, mainly dating, business networking, and promotion. However, I maintain that the current generation of social networking software is problematic in several ways, particularly in the types of self-presentation privileged within the applications. The types of self-presentation strategies that the applications

266

This statistic is according to the Friendster corporation. The homepage of Friendster claims 17 million as of May 25, 2005. Friendster, Inc. Friendster. 2005, <http://www.friendster.com/> (25 May, 2005). However, Friendster has recently been overtaken by competitors such as MySpace and Thefacebook; the CEO of Friendster quit on May 25th, and MySpace now claims 9 million unique visitors a month and has 7th highest number of page views a month. See MySpace Ranks Seventh in List of Domains with Highest Number of Pageviews. WWWCoder. 14 March, 2005. <http://www.wwwcoder.com/main/parentid/472/site/4544/266/default.aspx> (3 May 2005). Like most internet statistics that are provided by proprietary sources, these should be viewed as questionable without independent corroborating data available. 267 Meskill, J. Home of the Social Networking Services Meta List. The Social Software Weblog. 14 February 2005, <http://socialsoftware.weblogsinc.com/entry/9817137581524458/> (30 June 2005).

95 allow are directly influenced by the sites commercial purposes rather than user needs. As a result, users deploy a variety of strategies in order to increase the utility of the networks and circumvent these commodified assumptions. It is important to keep in mind that SNSs are an immature technology. Amin & Thrift write about the invisibility threshold of a technology, or the point where it is used without thinking.268 For example, when we change the television channel, we dont think I am going to pick up and use the remote control which will change the channel using infrared transmission; rather, we think only of the function, changing channels. The technology that facilitates this process has become invisible. In contrast, users of social networking sites are generally focused on the use of the applications, rather than their utility. It remains to be seen whether SNSs will outlive their novelty and become a useful part of internet users social structures. Social Network Analysis A social networking service allows users to publicly articulate and map their relationships between people, organizations, and groups. Although there are differences between the various social networking applications, they tend to have a basic structure in common. A new user begins by creating an account, filling out a profile, searching for other users, and adding people to his or her list of friends. Once people have established a network of friends, they become connected to a larger network of friends-of-friends. Depending on the SNS, users can browse through the profiles of other individuals (some sites restrict your ability to browse to profiles in your extended network, or people separated from you by a predefined number of degrees). To find specific people, users
268

Amin, A and Thrift, N. Cities: Reimagining the Urban. (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Polity, 2002), 58.

96 can search profiles by name or email address or browse the network by a particular set of criteria (high school name, single people under the age of 30 in Memphis, people who like David Bowie). Within the website, users can send messages to each other, chat, post on bulletin boards, and write testimonials for their friends. Most SNSs include community features that allow users to converse about shared activities or interests, and others have incorporated weblogs, journals and photo sharing into their feature set. Before delving into the particularities of identity presentation, I would like to situate SNSs within social network analysis (SNA), which allows researchers to study micro-level social patterns by relating them to macro-level social theories.269 Garton, Haythornthwaite, and Wellman define a social network as a set of people (or organizations or other social entities) connected by a set of social relationships, such as friendship, co-working or information exchange.270 Social network analysis involves mapping and measuring relationships between network nodes, or people, entities and groups, to examine information flow across ties. SNA allows researchers to view networks both visually and mathematically271 to predict information flow, friendship networks, and behavioral patterns. Researchers who use network analysis to study human behavior generally assume that the ways in which actors, or nodes, behave is dependent on their relationships (ties) and social patterns (structures). When using network analysis

269

Granovetter, M. The Strength of Weak Ties. The American Journal of Sociology 78, no. 6 (1973), 1360-1380. 270 Garton, L., Haythornthwaite, C., and Wellman, B. Studying Online Social Networks. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 3 no.1 (1997), <http://www.ascusc.org/jcmc/vol3/issue1/garton.html> (18 February 2003), 2. 271 Krebs, V. How to do Social Network Analysis. Orgnet.com. 2004, < http://www.orgnet.com/sna.html> (18 February 2004).

97 to study, for example, historical events or movements, cultural, political and normative structures are generally set aside in favor of looking closely at mapped networks.272 For instance, Granovetter uses social network analysis to predict how two people, each connected to a third by a strong tie, will behave towards each other. Note that the strength of a tie is determined through a set of criteria that includes the amount of time two people spend together, their intensity of emotion, amount of intimacy and reciprocal services which characterize the tie.273 Take Kristy, an actor, or node, in a social network, and her two closest friends, Claudia and Mary Anne. Granovetter makes the argument that Claudia and Mary Anne will have at least a weak tie to each other due to their mutually strong ties to Kristy. Moreover, it is likely that Claudia and Mary Anne will have a strong tie to each other, as an adversarial relationship between the two would strain each womans strong tie with Kristy. Thus, the most important factor in predicting Claudia and Mary Annes behavior toward each other is their role in the network that connects them to Kristy. At this point it is useful to distinguish community from a social network. The key element in the social network is the network itself, which may be made up of many communities linked together, or disparate elements that are linked by a single weak tie. Communities, on the other hand, imply a group of people linked by some shared interest

272

Emirbayer, M., and Goodwin, J. Network Analysis, Culture, and the Problem of Agency. American Journal of Sociology 99 (1994): 1411-1454. 273 Reciprocal services include conversational reciprocity, favors, and the like; see Granovetter, 1361.

98 or commonality.274 Although communities may be social networks, social networks are not communities. With this in mind, how does social network analysis approach online interaction? Can it include virtual communities or actors whose primary relationships may be conducted online? Garton, Haythornthwaite, and Wellman argue that social network analysis can easily be applied to social interactions that take place online.275 For example, SNA can be used to study patterns of information flow, particularly forms that are highly effective online (viral or memetic information flow, for example). Second, the authors posit that online networks are highly useful for establishing weak ties, since the social overhead associated with contacting weak ties is lower online than that in real life. In this way, online social networks may actually be easier to bridge than real-life social networks, allowing information to be transferred to larger, broader groups of actors. Finally, online social networks allow people to interact who are separated by physical spatiality or distance,276 and, may, in some cases, allow people to bridge social hierarchies as well. Not only is social network analysis useful for looking at online

274

Obviously the definition of community is contested. The traditional definition of community could be paraphrased as solitary groups of densely-knit neighbors located in a common geographical space (see Wellman, 1997 for similar definitions). Rheingold defines virtual community as social aggregations that emerge from the Net when enough people carry on those public discussions long enough, with sufficient human, feeling to form webs of personal relationships in cyberspace. See Rheingold, H. The Virtual Community: Homesteading On the Electronic Frontier, revised edition. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000, xx. A more inclusive conception of community that can apply to either online or offline communities is Wellmans 2001 definition: Networks of interpersonal ties that provide sociability, support, information, a sense of belonging and social identity. See Wellman B. "Physical Place and Cyberplace: The Rise of Personalized Networking". International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 25 no. 2 (June 2001): 245. 275 Garton, Haythornthwaite and Wellman, 1997. 276 Note that Granovetter did not take distance into account when formulating his theory of weak ties insofar as predicting actors behavior. Kristy could have very strong ties to both Claudia and Mary Ann, but if the latter two actors are located geographically in disparate areas, they may not know each other regardless of their relationship to Kristy. It is interesting to contemplate this conundrum when looking at online social networks, as they can and do span physical distance. Whether online interaction solves this problem is unclear.

99 interactions, online interactions are particularly suited for establishing and using social networks.

Social Networking Sites Given that online social networks can be subject to the same forces studied by social network analysts in offline social networks, the impetus behind the creation of formal social networking sites is to harness these forces (e.g. information flow) for instrumental good. It is important to note that both formal and informal social networks already exist online; online communities exist in an immensely diverse array of sites, ranging from networked video games and chat rooms to fan bulletin boards, professional listservs and informal networks of artists who collaborate on digital music and video. However, SNSs originated both in the theories of Granovetter and his ilk and the business worlds emphasis on networking. Whereas the founders of some services (Wallop, for example) claim a great influence from social network analysis, and others (like Jonathan Abrams, the founder of Friendster) claim complete ignorance of theory,277 the commonality is the use of a social network for a particular purpose. Namely, the current social networking sites aim to increase the ability of users to find jobs, dates, new friends, apartments and the like through extended networks of friends. Information spread within social networking sites works in two ways. First, weak ties are the most effective way of gathering and disseminating information. Weak ties function as bridges to populations outside ones immediate social circle and connect disparate groups. Granovetter writes:
277

boyd, d. ::cringe:: Jonathan Abrams did not invent social networks.. Apophenia.16 March 2004, <http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2004/03/16/cringe_jonathan_abrams_did_not_invent_social_n etworks.html#004071> (31 May 2005).

100 Whatever is to be diffused can reach a larger number of people, and traverse greater social distance (i.e. path length), when passed through weak ties rather than strong. If one tells a rumor to all his close friends, and they do likewise, many will hear the rumor a second and third time, since those linked by strong ties tend to share friends.278 Social network sites increase the bridges to groups other than ones close friends by facilitating the friending of both strong and weak ties. Additionally, the ability to post messages on bulletin boards that reach everyone on ones friends list allows this extended network to be utilized for instrumental good. Likewise, messages posted to bulletin boards and blog services from both strong and weak ties can be viewed.279 Secondly, the overall goal of social networking sites is to facilitate users making new connections through the service.280 SNSs are predicated on the idea that meeting new people and increasing ones social network is useful and beneficial to all parties in the network. The services, then, make it easy for users to directly contact people outside their immediate network. If users are looking for a specific person, such as an old friend from college, they can search by name or email address. Less formally, users can browse and view the profiles of other users, even if they are not friends. The profiles available for the user to view depends on a variety of factors, including how many degrees of separation there are between both people and the privacy options available (while some social networking sites allow users to view the profile of anyone on the network, others,

278 279

Granovetter, 1366. Note that strong and weak ties are not conceptualized the same way within social networking services and the social networking analysis literature. Every friend within a social networking service is considered a strong tie, and every friend-of-friend (or contact separated by a mutual relationship) is, more or less, considered a weak tie. However, ones SNS Friends can range from a best friend, sister, or roommate to a vague acquaintance from a decade ago both strong and weak ties. Likewise, a weak tie is not necessarily one that you are connected to through a friend. See Donath, J. and boyd, d. Public displays of connection. BT Technology Journal 22 no. 4 (October 2004): 72. 280 Donath and boyd, 77.

101 like Thefacebook, have sophisticated privacy options that let the user choose who has access to their personal information). It is important to note that there is a presumption of trust involved with social networking sites that is somewhat different than it might be on, say, online personal services. Danoth and boyd identify a number of features of social networking sites that contribute to this. First, social networking sites publicly display participants connections to others as a key part of their profile. These connections can, first, help identify the participants identity as authentic, as contextual information can be gathered from the publicly articulated network. Second, the availability of the network of friends can provide a check to people misrepresenting themselves in their profile, as they are less likely to blatantly lie in the context of their offline social network. Thirdly, the visible network allows users to check up on potential dates or business partners; if there is a mutual friend (or even friend-of-friend) in common, users can send them a message and check that John Doe is actually the nice guy that he appears to be.281 Unfortunately, the strictly binary (friends or not friends) trust ratings built into social networking sites are not sufficient to accurately determine whether ones ties can be trusted.282 Furthermore, in my own experience I have found that my students are likely to present very personal information (phone number, dorm room location, and class schedule) within the popular college social networking site Thefacebook, as it restricts its user base to students from certain colleges by verifying correct *.edu email addresses.

281 282

Donath and boyd, 73-76. Golbeck, J. and Hendler, J. Inferring Trust Relationships in Web-Based Social Networks. Submitted to Association for Computing Machinery Transactions on Internet Technology, January 2005.

102 Students trust the application as they believe (erroneously) that their information can only be viewed by undergraduate students from their own college.283

Self-Presentation in Social Networking Sites Identity presentation within social networking applications takes place primarily within highly structured, multi-modal user profiles. In order to fully understand this presentation, it is useful to refer back to Goffmans theories of front stage and backstage identity performance, as discussed in the first chapter. 284 Front stage performances, in Goffmans analysis, consist of scenarios in which a face is presented publicly, such as a waiter working in a restaurant waiting on customers. Back stage performances, on the other hand, take place in private spaces reserved for group members, such as the restaurant kitchen. Students might present a front stage identity in class, but present backstage while hanging out with other students afterwards at happy hour. In SNSs, front stage performance of identity takes place through profiles, while additional identity information may be conveyed through private messages, emails, or personal meetings. However, because this information is backstage, it is not available to the casual observer or researcher. Information about the users identity can also be gleaned contextually from the other members of the users publicly articulated network, but this is dependent both on the information that the other members of the network make

283

Thefacebook does allow students to restrict the viewing of their profile to certain groups of people. Ive found, though, that most undergraduates dont know about these options and dont know how to configure them to protect their privacy. 284 Goffman, E. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. (New York: Anchor Books, 1959), 22-30, 111140.

103 public, and how the observer reads the network. Hence, user self-presentation is limited to profile construction.285 The specifics of profiles differ slightly across applications, but they follow a generally codified structure with three parts: text, pictures and testimonials. The textual aspect consists of profile information that is written by the user and chosen according to the fields provided by the site, generally name, age, geographical location, likes and dislikes, About Me and Who Id Like to Meet. The second part, typically labeled a Photo Album, allows users to upload and display digital pictures. Finally, testimonials, originally conceived of as a reputation system, are short messages written by the users friends that appear on the users profile, and are in practice a generally open space for varied commentary by others. Looking at the most popular social networking services, MySpace allows users the most customization, as users can configure their page by changing colors, images, and fonts. Some users choose to embed audio and video clips. Friendster recently launched a feature that allows users to choose from a variety of preset color schemes for their profile, including Acid Wash, Bad Attitude and Marshmallow Peeps. In the last year or so, most of the SNSs have added features such as blogging and RSS feeds; currently, these are primarily used by early adopters. It will be interesting to see whether these increased outlets for self-presentation influence user strategies. Overall, however, all social networking sites limit the user to an identity presentation that is both highly pre-structured and singular.

285

Note that in this section I am drawing examples primarily from Friendster, MySpace, Orkut, and Thefacebook. These services were chosen primarily based on popularity; however, there are hundreds of social networking services and it is outside the scope of this thesis to analyze each one. Although the great majority of social networking services follow the same structure, it is likely that there will be slight differences across applications; these differences are expected and should not contradict the conclusions I come to in this chapter.

104 This is problematic on three levels. First, the rigid profile structure encourages the user to present him or herself in a way that is partly constructed by the application, not the user. Whereas the agency of a person to self-represent is limited in face-to-face communication by social context, power structures, and so forth, there are still a variety of flexible presentation strategies available. For example, accent, body language, speech patterns, linguistic choice and appearance are all user-configurable facets of selfpresentation. Social networking sites limit identity presentation to a singular, fixed profile, and most services do not provide users with configuration or customization options to choose their own particular representation strategies.286 MySpace allows customization options to a point, but still only allots one profile per user and provides a set series of fields. Secondly, the way that profiles are structured is not neutral; rather, power is embedded throughout the applications in a variety of ways. Generally, the user is portrayed not as a citizen, but as a consumer. All three applications encourage people to define themselves through the entertainment products they consume: music, movies, books, and television shows. Although both Orkut and Thefacebook include political ideas, both sites define politics as simply ranking oneself on a spectrum of political identity (very liberal, liberal, moderate, conservative, and very conservative). Not only are users treated as consumers, they are encouraged to consume others in a concept of networking that privileges social capital over friendship or community building. Networking, in business terms, is a goal-oriented process in which ones social circle is constantly expanded in order to connect with as many people as possible, in order to gain business advantages. Many professional organizations have networking evenings where
286

See Orkut, Friendster, and Thefacebook for examples.

105 members can quickly meet-and-greet a variety of people in their field who may be able to connect them to useful information or resources, or vice versa. Networking ideology commodifies relational ties and encourages amassing as many contacts as possible without deepening connections between actors in order to bridge disparate networks. It is this aspect of social networking that social networking applications are attempting to capture and apply across a larger set of social phenomena, including business, but extending to friendship, romantic relationships, and community activities. Third, SNSs inherently exclude certain segments of the world population. For instance, the majority of sites are American applications that attract primarily US users.287 Orkut has a very high percentage of South American, Middle Eastern and Asian users, presumably due to its ties to Google, a site that is localized for international use and boasts an enormous international user base. Additionally, since all SNSs require internet access, their user base is inherently limited to a certain segment of the population, cutting non-Internet users out of the network completely. We could apply this criticism to all internet applications, but I think it is particularly egregious in social networking as the utility of the network is diminished as non-internet enabled individuals are excluded completely. Even if these people may be fully integrated into an offline social network, such as place of business or group of friends, once that network is shifted to the online sphere, they are excluded. (Following the discussion in the last chapter regarding the ever-increasing impetus for offline social networks to move online, this is likely to increase). Finally, none of the most popular social network sites have a profile field for racial or ethnic identity. Although this means users have agency over how they wish to
287

Thefacebook limits its user base to particular colleges. Right now the great majority of the colleges on the network are American, although there are a few universities in the U.K. and Canada. It is likely that more colleges outside the US will be added in the future.

106 represent their ethnic background, it may set up whiteness as normative, given that within American culture, white ethnic identity is usually privileged as normal. Recall the work of Kolko as considered in the first chapter: when race is erased from the online landscape, it is usually replaced by a presumption of whiteness. None of these cultural assumptions are addressed or discussed within social networking applications. Authenticity Social networking sites overall presume that each user has a single authentic identity that can be presented accurately. As Ill discuss later in this chapter, Friendster, for example, strongly discourages any profiles that they deem to be inauthentic, and subsequently purged a great many of them from the site in 2003.288 Likewise, Thefacebook requires users to provide a working, current *.edu email address to verify that the user is a student at a particular university. But what is the authentic? Presumably, it is a truthful and real picture of oneself, with accurate information as to ones name, age, sexuality, hometown, likes, and dislikes. Other social applications do not limit their users in the same way; online personal sites, for example, allow each user to create multiple profiles so they can present themselves in different ways. SNSs, in contrast, allow one profile per email address, and limit the users ability to change it based on audience. This fixity can be quite difficult to navigate when one is used to representing him or herself in multiple ways. This becomes most problematic when considering a completely exposed, articulated public network. The persona one presents for a family member or professional colleague differs greatly from the way ones identity operates in,
288

Mieszkowski, K. Faking Out Friendster. Salon.com. 14 August 2003, <http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2003/08/14/fakesters/print.html> (7 May 2005).

107 for example, a romantic context. Consider the concept of passing, discussed in the first chapter. Passing assumes that one chooses to reveal certain aspects of his/her identity at a particular time, often for reasons of safety. An openly gay man, for example, may use Friendster to look for possible romantic partners. However, as open as he may be in his personal life, he may not be completely out in his professional life, or to his parents or hometown contacts. Revealing his queerness becomes a strategic move, depending on context. Social networking applications remove this option, resulting in a lack of agency that can have real-world implications (losing a job, a friend, or parental approval). In the first chapter, I outlined the concept of identity play, the idea that expressing identity online is liberatory, revealing, and somehow unique to the internet realm. Juliet Davis further critiques this view of technology as a utopian playground in which identity can be freely played with and transgressed. She writes this idea follows the form-as-substance myth: i.e., that we can simply leave our history and cultural trappings behind and take on a new nature merely by taking on its visual form; that virtual reality provides the phenomenological experience necessary to approximate constructions of those identities in socially resonant ways. 289 She is discussing virtual reality, but her ideas apply to social networks as well. Identities do not change just because they are expressed through software; they are still subject to the same power relations and problems that they are in the real world. Limiting each person to a single profile and treating each in the same way ignores the fact that people live in a contextualized world, with implications to match. Instead of idealized sites where power is non-existent and all people are treated equally, a new type of power is re-inscribed

289

Davis, J. Myths Of Embodiment And Gender In Electronic Culture. 2004, <http://www.julietdavis.com/VC/paper.html> (1 June 2004).

108 within technology: the problem of visibility and policing, and the fact that the technology is not at all neutral.

User Presentation Strategies While these applications severely limit the ways in which users can express identity, we should be careful not to disregard user agency. On the contrary, in order to navigate the assumptions built into social networking sites, users adopt a variety of selfpresentation strategies. While the majority of users present in an authentic manner, others obfuscate information by presenting themselves in an ironic fashion, or by creating a false or alternate profile (known informally as Fakesters). I maintain that these differences in self-presentation are based on two overall factors. First, the lack of contextual presentation within social networking sites requires savvy users to control the amount of information presented in order to avoid conflicting self-presentation. Second, both the social context in which the user is located and the assumptions of the application itself influence each persons self-presentation choices. I spent some time evaluating profiles on Friendster, Orkut, and MySpace to examine the different ways that users choose to create profiles and present themselves within social networking services.290 Overall, I found that the majority of profiles could be divided into three categories, what I call Authentic, Authentic Ironic, and Fakesters.

290

200 profiles were analyzed from the three main services. See Marwick, A. "I'm a Lot More Interesting than a Friendster Profile": Identity Presentation, Authenticity and Power in Social Networking Services. To be presented at Association of Internet Researchers Conference (AOIR 2005). Chicago, IL, USA, 5-9 October 2005, 2004.

109

Figure 2: Example of an Authentic profile

An Authentic profile is one in which the user includes legitimizing personal information and characteristics such as their real name and location to further the perception of authenticity. The great majority of profiles fall into this category, since most users create profiles in ways intended by the application. These users enter their (presumably) real names, pictures, and identifying information, and do not attempt to play fictional characters, celebrities, things, groups, or communities. It is important to reiterate, as discussed in the first chapter, that authenticity is a problematic concept, and, like identity, varies based on context. However, the users who present in this authentic manner are presumably making self-presentation decisions based on their assumptions of context and audience. Furthermore, it is likely that the majority of users will not run into problems within social networking applications. However, as discussed in the last chapter, convergence between online and offline social structures is likely to

110 increase; similarly, structures of conflict (or applications that attempt to configure the user291 in manners that are personally or socially problematic) will multiply as this process continues.

Figure 3: Example of an Authentic Ironic profile

A subgroup of the Authentic profiles, the Authentic Ironic profile is one in which a user is generally performing as themselves, but uses sarcasm, irony, or satire as a modifying strategy. For example, the user may use a funny picture of a celebrity as their default photograph, identify themselves with a pseudonym, or state that they are a hundred years old. However, the user is still themselves. In other words, their friends will know to look for them under this profile, and usually their testimonials will bear this out by including their real name. Most Authentic Ironic profiles include a mix of authentic and ironic information, for example using a name like GreenpotBluepot
291

Danah boyds terminology. See boyd, d. Friendster and publicly articulated social networks. Conference on Human Factors and Computing Systems (CHI 2004). Vienna: ACM, April 24-29, 2004. Please also note that danah boyd does not capitalize her name.

111 but including accurate pictures, or stating ones occupation as sheepherder while maintaining that their location is Manhattan. Users may create an Authentic Ironic profile for a variety of reasons, including amusing their friends, trying to act cool (if such profiles are normative within their larger social structure), for fun, or in order to mask their true information from people they may not want viewing it (their parents, for example).

Figure 4: Example of a Fakester profile

Profiles that are clearly non-Authentic can be labeled as Fakesters. Into this category fall profiles that purport to be celebrities, objects, places, activities, and obscure in-jokes. This category has a wide variation, ranging from profiles that serve as substitute communities (such as a college dorm) to Fakesters designed as promotions for dance club nights or magazines. It is important to note that Friendster, when originally launched, had

112 no community features built into the application.292 As a result, some users created Fakesters in order to compensate for this lack. For example, fans of the television show Alias might create a Fakester profile so that people who liked the show could friend it and thus meet each other. At the same time, sites such as MySpace and Thefacebook built community into the site very early, so Fakesters were far less common. Currently, creating a site-sponsored Fakester profile on Friendster or MySpace has become a popular marketing technique with television shows, movies, and musical acts targeting the Gen X and Gen Y consumer.293 Erving Goffman wrote that the two primary factors influencing self-presentation choices and strategies were context and audience.294 As previously discussed, people change their dramaturgical performance based on who they are interacting with, and the context (environment, social structure) in which the interaction takes place. These factors are equally applicable to online environments, and, in fact, help to explain why users might choose to create a type of profile that either obfuscates their authentic identity or presents but a single facet of what is a truly multifaceted personality. Within social networking services, the audience is not immediately apparent. Users construct even an authentic profile based on their assumptions about the audience, which might include people who they already know within the network, or their friends who are active internet users. More savvy users understand that there is no way to determine who might see their profile, and so creating a fake or deliberately abstruse profile may be a way to circumvent
292

Whereas some might argue that all of Friendster is community based, it lacked the ability to create groups such as professional associations, alumnae, cat lovers, etc. These features were built into MySpace and Tribe from the beginning. See Hirashima, T. Yahoo 360. Straight, No Chaser. 29 March 2005, < http://www.straightnochaser.org/MTArchives/2005/03/yahoo_360.php> (1 July 2005). 293 Terdiman, D. Friendsters Fakester Buddies. Wired News. 12 July 2004, <http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,64156,00.html> (7 May 2005). 294 Goffman, 239-240.

113 potential conflicts with audience. Since most social networking sites lack the functionality that allows users to manage multiple profiles or vary information based on the viewer, Fakesters and authentic/ironic profiles are creative ways to manage necessary multiplicity in self-presentation. For example, using a nickname that is familiar only to ones core group of friends prevents the user from being found by people outside that group. We can understand context in social networking sites in three different ways. First, the architecture or construction of the application has a great deal of influence over the self-presentation strategies available for the user. MySpace, for example, has advanced customization features which allow for a much wider variety of selfpresentation options than do Thefacebook or Friendster. As a result, MySpace profiles differ in terms of embedded multimedia, additional functionality (animated cursors or JavaScript calls), supplemental images, and the like. Similarly, Friendsters early lack of community features led some users to create Fakester profiles in response. Secondly, different applications have different instrumental uses and thereby encourage particular types of singular self-representation. SNS that are specifically designed for job searching, such as LinkedIn, Ryze, or Jobster, encourage (explicitly or implicitly) highly professional self-representation, while users of Thefacebook, which is targeted towards college students, tend to create playful, humorous profiles. Thirdly, locating the user within a particular network of other users can provide clues to their self-presentation strategies. Browsing a social networking service, one can see commonalities between groups of friends: some post primarily sexy pictures of themselves, while other groups create deliberately abstruse profiles that function as social capital within their peer group

114 or contain specific symbolic markers. Self-presentation strategies are influenced by both the applications structure and the influence of ones social group. Application Assumptions Given that some users clearly want the ability to present themselves in ways viewed by social networking sites as inauthentic, why do the services privilege authentic identity expression? How do they privilege authenticity, and under what assumptions do they classify a profile as inauthentic? The answer to the first question is twofold. During Friendsters 2003 purge of Fakesters from the network, Jonathan Abrams, the founder of the site, discussed the Fakester phenomenon in an article for Salon magazine: Fake profiles really defeats the whole point of FriendsterSome people find it amusing, but some find it annoying. And it doesnt really serve a legitimate purpose. The whole point of Friendster is to see how youre connected to people through your friends.295 In an interview for the San Francisco Weekly, Abrams reiterated The whole point of Friendster is that youre connected to somebody through mutual friends, not by virtue of the fact that you both like Reeses Peanut Butter Cups.296 Abrams, and by virtue the Friendster corporation, believed that Fakesters were somehow less legitimate than more authentic profiles. Connections through communities were besides the point of Friendster, which was ostensibly to meet people for dating and networking through already-existing social channels. This is a curious view of networking; in both the business and social world, people certainly meet other people through similar interests. Think of the possibilities inherent in a UNIX user group
295 296

Mieszkowski. Anderson, L. Attack of the Smartasses. SF Weekly. 13 August 2003, <http://www.sfweekly.com/issues/2003-08-13/news/feature_print.html> (7 May 2005).

115 for an IT administrator looking for a new employee, or a single medieval enthusiast meeting her future partner at a Society for Creative Anachronism event. Moreover, Abrams believed that even people who posted pictures of things other than their own faces were disobeying the rules of the network. The pictures are supposed to be a means of identifying you, Abrams insisted in the SF Weekly interview.297 The idea of the internet as providing any degree of anonymity was eclipsed by Friendsters need to authenticate identity. Presumably, the reliability of the network was threatened by any idea of false or inauthentic identity even a user innocently adding a picture of Angelina Jolie or Homer Simpson to her profile. The idea that an authentic identity is a trustworthy one is common within social software. Returning to Amazon.coms Real Name service discussed in the introduction, Amazon assumes that a user using his or her legal name is equivalent in trustworthiness to reputation networks built up over time. In this case, Amazon allows users to rate reviews as helpful or unhelpful; a reviewer with many helpful reviews has a better reputation on the site than one who posts unhelpful, inane, or irrelevant comments. The idea that a person should be trusted simply because they choose to use their real name, rather than judged on any contributions they have made to community maintenance or embedded knowledge, is based on these presumptions of authenticity. Think of eBay: sellers can use any name they wantmost people dont use real names on eBay. EBay shoppers determine whether or not they can trust a seller based on the feedback system, which can encapsulate the experiences of thousands of people and transactions. This seems to be a far better indication of trust than whether or not someone is using a legal name which, surely, can be faked or falsified.
297

Anderson.

116 This is compounded by the fact that social networking sites already have reputation systems built in. As discussed earlier in this chapter, the presumption of trust comes from testimonials and connections to other users. A person who fakes a picture or obscures their information but has ten friends in common with you and many positive testimonials would probably be viewed as more trustworthy than someone with a completely authentic profile who has no friends or testimonials (or friends and testimonials that you dont like or find off-putting). So the trust reason doesnt really make sense within the context of social networking sites. I maintain that the real answer lies squarely in the commercial aspect of the sites. In the previous chapter, I discussed a variety of ways in which individual user identities become commodified assets. Social networking sites are clearly commercial sites, and, as their operating costs are high, and signing up is free, revenue must be generated in ways other than charging users for accounts (the personal ad model). However, SNSs, most of which have many users who spend a lot of time on the site, can be very valuable to potential advertisers as a way to deliver a particular target audience. Recall from the last chapter that within many corporate sites, individual user identities are transformed into corporate assets. As a result, SNSs have experimented with a variety of profit models, including classic ad banner advertising, mining user profiles for keywords for targeted text ads, and allowing companies to sponsor their own Fakester profiles. This last technique has been used on many social networking sites, but it is particularly ironic on Friendster considering the controversy over 2003s Fakester purge.298 A Friendster PR rep made the distinction:

298

Terdiman.

117 The issue here is actually about consumer protection We do, as a policy, strongly discourage fake profiles. A rogue user hiding behind a Jesus profile, for example, has the potential to abuse the service or users in many ways. In case of the Anchorman [DreamWorks film that purchased Friendster space as part of its marketing campaign] characters, DreamWorks owns the right to the characters and there is nothing fraudulent about it.299 In other words, fake profiles purchased by movie studios are funny and lighthearted, whereas Fakester profiles are potentially fraudulent and dangerous to the user. Clearly it is unlikely that a Dreamworks-sponsored character would attempt to abuse users. However, it is equally unlikely that users would place more trust in a user who created a profile of Jesus. Abrams belief that the utility of the network is compromised by Fakester profiles would seem to apply equally to corporate-sponsored profiles. Overall, it is in social networking services best commercial interest to limit a user to one profile in order to more clearly determine that users demographics. A user with ten profiles, all with differing information, is much harder to turn into a series of marketable demographic categories than is a single authentic profile. Friendster is partnered with DoubleClick,300 who, as described in Chapter Two, place aggregate advertising cookies on users computers. A user who is constantly logging in and out of Friendster with different usernames would make the cookie less valuable, as the user could not be as easily tracked between sites. Although MySpace, Tribe, and the like all disclaim in their privacy policies that data transmitted to third-party advertisers is nonpersonally-identifiable, the fact is that the data in question includes IP address, profile information, aggregate user data, and browser type.301 This information is much more
299 300

Lisa Kopp quoted in Terdiman. DoubleClick Signs Friendster for Online Ad Management. Internet Ad Sales.com. 20 January 2005, <http://www.internetadsales.com/modules/news/article.php?storyid=4452> (5 May 2005). 301 See the MySpace privacy policy at MySpace.com "Privacy Policy." Myspace.com. 25 February 2005, <http://www.myspace.com/misc/privacy.html> (15 March 2005) and the Tribe.net privacy policy at Bean, W. "Tribe Networks Privacy Policy." _Tribe.net_. 1 June 2004, <http://seattle.tribe.net/template/pub

118 valuable to advertisers and data aggregators if it can easily be linked to a single user, even if the granular details of that single users profile are not available. Almost all the major social networking sites also use targeted advertising based on keywords in users profiles and search results. MySpace, Tribe and Friendster all employ Google AdWords, which mine individual data (such as email or profile information) and display text ads targeted to particular keywords in the data. For example, searching MySpace for cats brings up a search results page that shows mostly Sponsored Results (including Cat Items on eBay, the Cat Companion DVD, and Touring Broadway: Cats), with the non-sponsored Search Results (MySpace pages that include the keyword cats) given minor real estate on the page (See Figure 4). Moreover, this type of data mining takes place in profiles as well; on Tribe.net, looking at a Seattle-based profile will bring up the text ads Traveling to Seattle and Seattle Apartment.

%2CPrivacy.vm?r=10302> (15 March 2005). Tribes privacy policy is far more specific to the site and in general Tribe is much better about disclaiming how personal information is actually used. Regardless, Tribe uses both third party advertisers who collect aggregate information and Google AdWords.

119

Figure 5: Ad placement based on search results on MySpace

The current emphasis on unitary identity presentation in social networking applications is clearly problematic for users. Users need to be able to present in diverse, multiple, and particular ways, or else obfuscate their data so they can contextualize selfpresentation in much the same way as they might do offline. I had an experience while interviewing for PhD programs in which a member of my future possible cohort had found my profile on Friendster. This profile was designed to appeal to my friends, and it had not been edited or modified for professional self-presentation. I was embarrassed and edited it immediately upon returning home. While this was a fairly innocuous incident, it is not difficult to imagine instances in which this type of conflict would have more momentous consequences. Moreover, application design in an ideal world would

120 prioritize how users are actually using an application or how users want to use an application over the types of application user that will generate the most revenue. Conclusion Social networking sites currently function as structures of conflict. Users both require and desire the ability to vary their self-presentation, which takes place within profiles, based on both context and audience. This need fundamentally conflicts with the aims of application designers and parent companies, who emphasize the creation and maintenance of authentic identity presentation. This authenticity is rhetorically presented as necessary to proper functioning of a social networking service based on trust and replication of offline social networks. Simultaneously, singular identity presentation is required in order for companies to generate revenue based on targeted ad words and demographic aggregators. This conflict illustrates the inadequacy of conceptualizing online identity without taking into account the particular ways in which singular identity is privileged by commodified corporate structures.

121 Chapter Four: Xbox Live and the Political Economy of Video Games Introduction In cyberculture scholarship, video games have traditionally been viewed as sites where self-expression is a playful exploration of alternate roles and identities. Much of this work has analyzed either completely textual worlds (MUDs, MOOs) 302 or massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs).303 In this chapter I begin with the understanding that neither MUDs nor MMORPGs represent the gameplay experience of the majority of people, as console games are both more popular and mainstream than either textual chat-based worlds or PC games. Therefore, in order to accurately discuss current identity expression in gaming, we must examine console games. However, until very recently, consoles did not have the technological capacity to afford multiplayer online gaming and subsequent geographically distributed communication, making it difficult to research identity expression through gameplay interaction. This has changed with the current generation of systems that combine console gaming with internet connectivity. Given that console users play within proprietary, closed systems, I maintain that identity in these environments is subject to the same market forces that affect other commodified online realms. In contrast to previous portrayals of identity in gaming as uniquely flexible, todays systems favor a unitary, authentic presentation of self that
302 303

MUD stands for Multiple User Dungeon; MOO stands for MUD, Object Oriented. See Turkle, S. Life on the Screen. (New York: Touchstone, 1995); Sunden, J. Material Virtualities. (New York: Peter Lang, 2003); Mortensen , T. Playing With Players: Potential Methodologies for MUDs. Game Studies 2, no. 1 (July 2002); Filiciak, M. Hyperidentities: Postmodern Identity Practices in Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games. In The Video Game Theory Reader, ed. J.M.P. Wolf and B. Perron, 87-102. (New York: Routledge, 2004); Steinkuehler, C. A. Massively Multiplayer Online Videogames as a Constellation of Literacy Practices. Paper presented at the 2003 International Conference on Literacy, Ghent, Belgium, 22-27 September 2003; McBirney, K. Nested Selves, Networked Communities: A Case Study of Diablo II: Lord of Destruction as an Agent of Cultural Change. The Journal of American Culture 27, no. 4 (December 2004): 416-431; Ducheneaut, N., and Moore, R.J. "Let Me Get My Alt: Digital Identiti(Es) in Multiplayer Games. CSCW 2004 workshop on Digital Identities, Chicago, Illinois. 6 November 2004.

122 encourages both sociability and, as we saw in the second chapter, increased profits for console manufacturers. Looking specifically at Microsofts Xbox and even more specifically at the Xbox Live system, I argue that the use of Gamertags within Xbox Live and their integration with Xbox.com exemplifies the way in which identity singularity is emphasized within gaming systems in order to generate revenue for the parent company. Given that Xbox 360, Microsofts next generation game system, will maintain and extend these capabilities, it seems clear that this trend will continue. While this move towards monetized singularity can be both beneficial and problematic for users, it is crucial to contextualize future work around identity and gaming within current business practices associated with the game industry, so as not to idealize gaming as the last remaining site for postmodern identity variance. In this chapter, I trace the origins of Microsofts Xbox system and situate it within the contemporary video game industry. I analyze in depth the differences between PC and console gaming in order to demonstrate the limitations of previous identity work based on either online role-playing games or text-based chat worlds. Returning to identity theory, I complicate previous work by identifying seven different ways in which users may negotiate their identity while gaming. The final section of this chapter looks at Xbox Live in detail, examining how the system handles identity, the strengths and limitations of this strategy, and how it is likely to evolve in the next generation of consoles. I conclude with a call to action for future games researchers to look beyond MUDs and EverQuest and ensure that the economy of gaming is integrated into any analysis of identity expression or self-presentation within interactive entertainment.

123 Introducing the Xbox Last year I went to E3, the video game industrys yearly exhibition and one of the biggest trade shows in the United States. The LA Convention Center was completely filled with enormous displays from game developers, hardware manufacturers and software publishers. The major companies booths cost several million dollars304 and the most popular featured booth babes, female models dressed as scantily clad game characters who posed for pictures with the overwhelmingly male conventioneers. The spectacle was immense, as is fitting for an industry that currently grosses more than 10 billion dollars a year in the US alone305 and 28 billion a year worldwide.306 Millions of game consoles have been sold in the United States since the late 1970s and, in the current market, hotly anticipated releases like Halo 2 can sell up to 2 million copies on their first day of release.307 Overall, the video game industry grosses about half as much as the film

304

Figures are not publicly available, but according to an editor roundtable at gaming fansite 1up.com, the 2004 Sony booth cost $15 million dollars. See E3 2004 Roundup. 1up.com May 2004, <http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_zd1up/is_200405/ai_ziff127423> (12 June 2005). 305 Marriot, M. In Console Wars, Xbox is Latest to Rearm. The New York Times. 13 May 2005, <http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/13/technology/13xbox.html> (13 May 2005). 306 This figure is in US dollars. See Lowenstein, D. Electronic Entertainment Expo 2005 State of the Industry Address. Speech presented at Electronic Entertainment Expo 2005, Los Angeles, California. 13 May 2005. 307 Halo 2 broke all records in this department, earning $125 million on its first day of release, beating Spider Man, the record holder for films, which earned $114 in its first three days of US release. See Becker, D. Halo 2 Clears Record $125 Million in First Day. ZDNet News. 10 November 2004, <http://news.zdnet.com/2100-1040_22-5447379.html> (May 15, 2005) In fact, the Spider Man II video game has sold 7 million units worldwide. Spider Man II sales figures from Activision Investor Relations. Interview by author, 16 May, 2005, Seattle. Telephone call. See also Activision, Inc. Activision Reports Record Third Quarter and Nine Month Fiscal 2005 Results. Activision Investor Relations. 7 February 2005, <http://investor.activision.com/ReleaseDetail.cfm? ReleaseID=155092> (16 May 2005).

124 industry,308 almost as much as the music industry,309 and continues to grow; worldwide revenues are projected to hit $41.4 billion in 2009.310 Within this heady market, Microsofts Xbox console has been a surprise contender in the market space. Although Sonys PS/2 has sold about 85 million consoles, compared to about 20 million Xboxes and roughly 18 million Nintendo Gamecubes, the numbers have evened out in the last year.311 Microsofts recent announcement of the Xbox 360 next-generation system, due to premiere a full year before Sonys PS/3 and Nintendos Revolution, has set off another round of PR rivalry between the three major manufacturers. The console wars, as the battle for clear market dominance is known, are likely to persist for the immediate future. For a company with a reputation among hardcore hackers and geeks for being the evil empire, Microsofts move into the gaming sphere was risky. At the time of the Xbox launch, Sony dominated the home market: the PS/2 had been out for a year and had shipped 20 million units worldwide.312 This market dominance was exactly what had Microsoft worried. Before the PS/2 launched, Sony hyped it as a Trojan horse which users would initially purchase to play games, but end up using as a living-room
308

Lowenstein. Youll often see the fact cited that the video game industry grosses twice as much as the film industry; this assumes sales of both hardware and software, which is like comparing apples to oranges. The film industry does not take into account sales of hardware like DVD players and home theatre systems; Lowenstein maintains that that the video game industry shouldnt either. The figures cited in this paragraph are based on sales of games alone. 309 The music industry sold about $33 billion (US dollars) in physical product in 2004 compared with $28 billion in video games. International Federation of the Phonographic Industry Global Music Retail Sales, Including Digital, Flat in 2004. IFPI.org. 22 March 2005, <http://www.ifpi.org/sitecontent/publications/rin_order.html> (12 June 2005). 310 Including online and portable game revenues. DFC Intelligence DFC Intelligence Releases New Market Forecasts For Video Game Industry. DFCint.com. 22 September 2004, <http://www.dfcint.com/news/prsep222004.html> (12 June 2005) 311 The PS/2 was released a year prior to the Xbox, so the comparison is not necessarily accurate. These sales figures also seem to include the first version of the PlayStation, which was released in 1995. Teather, D. Sony Unveils PlayStation 3. The Guardian. 18 May 2005, <http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/news/0,12597,1486489,00.html> (24 May 2005). 312 Becker, J. and Wilcox, J. Will Xbox Drain Microsoft? C|net News. 6 March 2001, http://netscape.com.com/Will+Xbox+drain+Microsoft/2100-1040_3-253654.html (15 May 2005)

125 entertainment center, taking the place of both the television and home PC.313 Microsoft execs worried that a cheap web-enabled game console could both supplant their dominance in the home PC market, and establish Sonys market lead in a space where Microsoft was lacking a presence.314 The awareness of this threat coincided with the aggressive evangelism of several Microsoft employees who worked on DirectX, Microsofts core authoring tool for multimedia application environment. They saw the DirectX technology as something that could enable more sophisticated and technologically advanced gameplay than was available on the PS/2.315 Microsoft already had a games division. The company wasnt seen as a major player in the gaming industry, but flagship titles like Flight Simulator constituted a steady revenue stream and were popular and well respected. But all of Microsofts game business was PC based. The major problem with programming for PC games is that there is no hardware consistency in the user base. Users have a huge variety of hardware and software configurations, ranging from hardcore gamer geeks who update their video and audio cards every year to casual gamers who use their six year old PC primarily for word processing and emailing Grandma. Anyone who has spent several hours tinkering with hardware and software just to run the latest version of Office knows that there is an almost infinite array of things that can go wrong with PC configuration.

313 314

Takahashi, D. Opening the Xbox. (Roseville, CA: Prima Publishing, 2002), 17 Kent, S. The Ultimate History of Video Games. (Roseville, CA: Prima Publishing, 2001), 574-575. 315 DirectX is Microsofts core technology for multimedia application development for the Windows platform and is used in authoring games, video players, and the like. See Microsofts page on DirectX: Microsoft Corporation. Microsoft DirectX Technology Overview. Microsoft.com. 18 March 2002. <http://www.microsoft.com/windows/directx/default.aspx? url=/windows/directx/productinfo/overview/default.htm> (12 June 2005). A comprehensive discussion of the creation of the Xbox by Microsofts Seamus Blackley and his team of wunderkinds is told in depth in Dean Takahashis Opening the Xbox.

126 Consoles, on the other hand, are a fixed platform. Apart from moddershardware hackers who modify chipsets and console hardware in order to run Linux, emulate archaic consoles, play extra-regional DVDs and other such murkily legal activities316 every Xbox is exactly the same. Every Playstation is exactly the same. In other words, a company creating a game for the Nintendo GameCube only needs to program and test on the GameCube, not on a hundred different varieties and flavors of the GameCube. However, this standardization also ensures that the best console hardware is always technologically behind the best PC hardware. A PS/2 is based on the hottest technology of 1999, not 2005. The Xbox combined PC parts with a fixed environment that would allow game companies to develop for a relatively simple hardware platform while incorporating technology that was more powerful than the PS/2. It wouldnt solve the problem of immediate obsolescence, but it would ensure that the Xbox would be more powerful than its direct competitor. Not only would the Xbox launch an entire year later, with the advances in technology that the year would surely bring, its PC-based hardware would be inherently more powerful than Sonys proprietary components. Four years later, the Xbox has not yet caught up to Sonys initial market lead. Regardless, the platform remains popular with game developers and players, and the sequel to Microsofts flagship title, Halo II, stands as the best-selling game of all time.317 It remains to be seen who will be victorious in the next round of the Console Wars, which will be fought between Sonys PS/3, Nintendos Revolution, and Microsofts Xbox 360.318
316 317

Greenberg, D. Xbox Enthusiasts Discover its Versatility. The Washington Post. 30 January 2005, F07. Becker. 318 Marriott.

127 Ms Pac Man to MMOs: A Highly Abbreviated Video Game History Turning away from the Xbox for a minute, I want to contextualize Microsofts offering within the video game industry as a whole. How did the video game industry become such a major player in American entertainment? After all, it was not so long ago that video games were dismissed as a short-lived fad, another Pet Rock or Spice Girl. This is largely because the early 1980s saw a highly dramatic rise and fall in the popularity of arcade games, a time period that is nostalgically referred to as the Golden Age of Arcade Games. This historic era began with Ataris first coin-op title, Pong (ported to Home Pong, a very early console system, in 1975) and Taitos Space Invaders, which launched in the US in 1978. The success of these two titles opened the door to the Golden Age, which was characterized by coin-operated stand-up game consoles, packs of teenagers racking up high scores on Asteroids and Ms. Pac-Man, and media-fueled parental hysteria around possible negative effects of arcades.319 By 1981, Americans were spending, per year, 8 billion dollars on arcade games and 1 billion on home video game machines.320 The game industry was earning more than double the amount of all of Nevadas casinos combined, twice as much as the film industry, and triple the TV revenues and gate receipts of major league football, baseball, and basketball.321 The novelty hit Pac Man Fever hit the top of the charts,322 cult Disney movie Tron was
319

A 1981 Newsweek story typifies the controversy: Critics contend that they [arcade games] squander allowances and study time, glorify violence and encourage everything from compulsive gambling to tendonitis (Space Invaders wrist). Taking a cue from the pool-troubled elders of the mythical River City, communities from Snellville, Ga., to Boston have recently banned arcades or restricted adolescent access; one legal challenge to the ordinances will be heard by the Supreme Court this week. Langway, L. Invasion of the Video Creatures. Newsweek. 16 November 1981, 38-40. For more entertaining hyperbole, the website Gamearchive.com has an excellent selection of early 1980s articles on video games. Hart, C. Arcade Games in the News! Gamearchive.com. 15 January 2004. http://www.gamearchive.com/General/Articles/index.html (12 June 2005). 320 Harmetz, A. Video Arcades New Hope. New York Times. 20 January 1984, D1. 321 Skow, J. Games that play people. Time. 18 January 1982, 50-58. 322 Buckner and Garcia, the artists behind Pac Man Fever, have a web site extolling their virtues at http://www.bucknergarcia.com/. They have recently re-released their original album which includes classic

128 released and stand-up arcade machines appeared in restaurants, hotels, and even doctors offices. Kent writes that in 1982 the Hilton Hotel in Rye Town, New York, opened Bagatelle Place. Named after the forerunner of pinball, Bagatelle Place was a formal arcade with thirty-three video games, a cappuccino bar, and a strictly enforced dress code.323 The popularity of arcade games collapsed as quickly as it had risen. By mid-1982, the arcade business had stopped growing2000 arcades closed in 1983324and the fall of the stand-up industry spread to the home market. Atari lost $356 million in 1983 and was forced to lay off 30 percent of its employees; similar cuts took place at Mattel, Activision, and Bally.325 Pundits blamed market saturation, over-zealous arcade operators, unexciting games and the fickle whims of teenagers.326 Manufacturers hoped that two highly anticipated games, Ataris home port of Pac Man and the over-hyped E.T. cartridge, would revive the industry, but each sold far fewer copies than anticipated. Kent writes: Atari was stuck with enormous inventories of worthless game cartridges. With no hope of selling them, Atari dumped millions of cartridges in a landfill in the New Mexico desert. When reports came out that people had discovered the landfill, Atari sent steamrollers to crush the cartridges, then poured cement over the rubble.327 The collapse of the game industry sent smaller companies into bankruptcy, forced larger companies to look elsewhere for profits, and made retailers and customers suspicious of

game-related songs like Froggy's Lament, Ode To A Centipede, Do The Donkey Kong, Hyperspace, The Defender, Mousetrap, and Goin' Berzerk. 323 Kent, 167. 324 Alexander, C. Video Games go Crunch! Time. 17 October 1983, <http://www.time.com/time/archive/preview/0,10987,952210,00.html> (1 June 2005). 325 Ibid. 326 Kleinfeld, N.R. Video Games Industry Comes Down to Earth. The New York Times. 17 October 1983, A1. 327 Kent, 240.

129 new video game-related product launches. The home market would not fully recover until 1986, when Nintendo launched the Nintendo Entertainment System, the American version of the incredibly successful Famicom.328 The success of the NES began the Console Wars, which were fought between Sega, Nintendo, and a host of secondary companies throughout the 1980s and 1990s. In chronological order, the Sega Genesis, Nintendo Game Boy, SNK NeoGeo, Super Nintendo, Atari Jaguar, Sega Saturn, Sony Playstation, Nintendo 64 and the Sega Dreamcast each pushed console capabilities in terms of graphical sophistication, hardware power and playability. In 2000, Sony launched the Playstation 2, the first of the current generation of game consoles. It was followed in 2001 by Nintendos GameCube and Microsofts Xbox.329 It is important to remember that while all this console brouhaha was going on, PC games were similarly increasing in sophistication. Hugely successful titles like Myst, Doom, and Quake made headlines and sold in the millions. Since consoles cannot generally be upgraded without voiding the warranty and PC hardware advances in capability very quickly, PC games typically have superior graphics and sound than console games. Computer games also tend to be much richer in terms of interactivity since the PC has a larger variety of input devices (primarily the keyboard) than the console system (which is usually restricted to a hand-held controller). This means that PC games can easily incorporate chat and sophisticated commands like Look under rock and Say xyzzy, whereas console game actions are limited to those that can be conveyed by pushing a button.
328

Pollack, A. Video Games, Once Zapped, In Comeback. The New York Times. 26 September 1986, A1. See also McGill, D. Nintendo Scores Big. The New York Times. 4 December 1988, C1. 329 Lewis, L. Telecoms Media Technology: In the Killer Game for Three Players, Only One Will Win. The Independent on Sunday. 8 December 2002, B7.

130 Despite this, PC gaming has slowly become a niche market. Like wireless providers, console manufacturers subsidize the cost of hardware in order to attract customers, meaning that the actual cost of an Xbox with a $200 price point might be twice that. The result is that a powerhouse gaming PC can cost four times as much as a console, prohibitively expensive for most people.330 Another major selling point of consoles is the ability to play with friends in a living-room environment rather than alone at a desk.331 Consider the numbers. The console gaming market is enormous when compared to the PC market. In 2004, the PC market brought in $1.1 billion US dollars and made up 15 percent of the overall gaming market, while console software made $5.2 billion US dollars (not counting console hardware costs).332 The entire video game market in the United States generated almost 10 billion dollars in 2004,333 but the vast majority of this revenue was due to console gaming. PC games currently lead in the massively multiplayer online game market, but this is likely to change as the next generation of consoles becomes more sophisticated in terms of textual input ability and internet connectivity. Microsofts Xbox Live, although currently only boasting about 1.4 million subscribers,334 is being carefully watched to see if console gamers, who tend to be more casual than PC gamers, will pay a monthly subscription fee in order to play with other people.

330

Carnoy, D. Xbox 360 and PS3: Death to PC Gaming? C|net Reviews. 2 June 2 2005, <http://reviews.cnet.com/4520-6449_7-6233821-1.html> (12 June 2005). 331 Wingfield, N. Trends (A special report): Videogames; New Games, New Machines, New Winners and Losers. The Wall Street Journal. 31 January 2005, R4. 332 ZDnet $5.2 Bln [sic] of Console Games, $1.1 Bln of PC Games and $1.0 Bln of Portable Games Sold in 2004. IT Facts. 3 March 2005, <http://www.itfacts.biz/index.php?id=P2726> (1 June 2005). 333 Marriott. 334 According to Microsoft. See Shih, P. Limelight Delivers Content for Xbox Live. TheWHIR.com. 4 May 2005, <http://www.thewhir.com/features/limelight-xbox.cfm> (16 May 2005).

131 We can take away three key points from this abbreviated history. First, we must distinguish between PC and console games. PC games are played on a home computer, use a wide variety of input devices and take advantage of the latest innovations in hardware and software. Console games are far more popular, run on proprietary hardware that is less powerful than the current generation of PC technology, and rely on game controllers for input. The second key distinction is between networked games, which allow gamers to play with other people, and non-networked games, which dont. It is only recently that console games have become internet-enabled, while variants on networked PC games have existed for decades. The final, blurriest distinction is between role-playing games and non-role playing games. This is far less dichotomous, but generally role-playing games are networked and involve players creating original characters who advance through various levels of the game by improving their skills, acquiring possessions, achieving in-game goals, and the like. These are usually referred to by the acronym MMORPG, for Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games, or just MMO for the less Dungeons-and-Dragons themed games. Players dont win an MMORPG like they do a conventional game like Grand Theft Auto: Vice City; instead, the game is open-ended and relies on the players themselves for much of the drama. Of course, there are open-ended games that are not multiplayer, and there are multiplayer games that are not open-ended. But generally MMORPGs like EverQuest, World of Warcraft, City of Heroes, Star Wars Galaxies and Lineage are PC-based, multiplayer games that allow for a great deal of interaction and creativity on the part of the user. These distinctions will become more salient as we

132 examine how identity has been understood until now within different gaming environments. Identity Presentation in Gaming Environments Now that we understand the history and contemporary climate of the video game industry, I want to return to identity as it pertains to gaming. The early work on identity presentation in games focused particularly on the elements of role-playing, with a particular emphasis on gender switching. Stone included several such anecdotes in her 1995 work on cyberidentity The War of Desire and Technology, including the crossdressing psychiatrist (a male psychiatrist posing as a woman within a CompuServe chat room) and users of Lucasfilms Habitat choosing avatars of the opposite sex.335 Similarly, Turkle writes: Gender-swapping is an opportunity to explore conflicts raised by ones biological gender. By enabling people to experience what it feels like to be the opposite gender or to have no gender at all, the practice encourages reflection on the way ideas about gender shape our expectations. MUDS and the virtual personae one adopts within them are objects-to-think-with for reflecting on the social construction of gender.336 In the mid to late 1990s, MUDs and other gaming environments were viewed as a particularly fertile site for imaginative play that liberated users, allowing them to construct and play out alternate personas. Indeed, it was presumed that most people would choose to play characters that were different from their real-life selves. Disembodiment from a gendered, raced physical body ostensibly allowed players to experiment with a host of alternate identities, adopting and disregarding alts in a completely free environment. The implication (implicitly or explicitly) was that this
335 336

Stone, A. R. The War of Desire and Technology. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995). Turkle, 213.

133 experimentation would lift the curtain on the users real gender, placing it alongside the playful identities adopted in-game as just another construct. Regardless of the validity of this idea, it is crucial to remember that Stone and Turkle were writing about environments that were purely textual and, more importantly, non-commercial. The internet user base during the early to mid 90s was far less mainstream than it is today,337 and any evidence of this type of play is more anecdotal than actual. Despite the dissimilarities to contemporary gaming, this concept of identity has been remarkably persistent. Indeed, Halloran, Rogers and Fitzpatrick, even while looking at the contemporary Xbox Live in 2003, write: Research into text-based MUDs has important implications for social experience. According to this, people can create parallel identities that enable them to construct and experiment with sexuality, race, gender and power. These identities may be validated online in ways which make the social experience powerfully attractive. However, here, the construction of identity becomes less an artifact of the attenuation of cues in face to-face communication, and more a complete departure from what might hold in face to- face reality.338 The idea that games are a site where unique, experimental identity play takes place is current and powerful. In the first chapter of this thesis, I discussed the move away from characterizing online identity as something remarkably different and towards contextualizing identity online within the exploration of identity offline. The online sphere is generally regarded as one of many sites for self-presentation rather than a unique space where identity plays out in ways that it never does in real life. Miller and Slater argue that we need to treat Internet media as continuous with and embedded in other social spaces, that they [media]

337 338

See Chapter 2 for a detailed discussion of these differences. Halloran, J., Rogers, Y. and Fitzpatrick, G. From Text To Talk: Multiplayer Games and Voiceover IP. In Proceedings of Level Up: 1st International Digital Games Research Conference. 2003, 132.

134 happen within mundane social structures and relations that may transform but that they cannot escape into a self-enclosed cyberian apartness.339 The point is that internet communication is located within offline social contexts and structures. While identity presentation may change slightly when expressed through online media, as it may change within any communication technology, it does not exist in a vacuum, removed completely from any traces of ones offline realm. Furthermore, the rapid convergence of online and offline social networks means that completely alternate internet identities are increasingly rare, often confined to subcultures, and even regarded as somehow unsavory or untrustworthy.340 Even within environments that are set up specifically for role-playing, users tend to express themselves in manners similar to their offline identity. Filiciak, examining gaming, writes, The presentation of ones own persona on the Internet resembles to some extent the users real-life identity.341 Thus, we now understand identity online as in part an extension of identity offline. This is augmented in gamespaces since interactions and presentations within games, particularly online games, are not confined to the games themselves. In MMORPGs such as Lineage, EverQuest, and World of Warcraft, gaming involves or even requires communication, cooperation, team-building, competition and so forth with other players. This communication often bleeds over into real world collegiality or friendship, and the distinction between identity in-game and out-of-game becomes increasingly blurred. Steinkuehler writes, What is at first confined to the game soon spills over into the virtual world beyond it (e.g. websites, chatrooms, email) and even life
339 340

Miller, D. and Slater, D. The Internet: An Ethnographic Approach. (New York: Berg, 2000), 5. See Chapter 2. 341 Filiciak, 91.

135 off-screen (e.g. telephone calls, face-to-face meetings), and collections of in character playmates likewise expand into real-world affinity groups.342 Steinkuehler is looking specifically at Lineage, a PC-based MMORPG, but her statement is increasingly true for console games as well. Internet-enabled services such as Xbox Live or the PS/2 Network Adapter allow online game play and interaction. Bulletin boards run by major game publishers and hardware manufacturers create spaces where gamers can discuss strategies and hints, join gamer clans and simply socialize with other gamers. Gamer clansgroups of gamers who play together at LAN parties or over the internetoften extend their friendships through their own websites, real life meetings, conventions or phone conversations. The dichotomy of online and offline communication has become a continuum that includes many different mediums and technologies. Obviously we must complicate our understanding of how identity functions within gaming environments. Rather than a simple, singular way to conceptualize selfunderstanding or self-presentation within games, I have identified seven ways in which a gamer may experience herself or her character. These understandings are complicated and overlapping, and a gamer can experience one or many simultaneously. Players may role-play an elf or ork within a game, but their sense of self within the game, created and maintained through the gaming environment and in relations to other players, may be quite different. For example, an EverQuest player can have personal relationships with her teammates in which she performs an identity closer to her authentic offline self than a completely divergent, role-played character. This is a complex situation that cannot be explained within the current concept of gaming as identity play. I want to

342

Steinkuehler, 7.

136 discuss all seven of these understandings in order to complicate self-expression within games and reveal how necessary it is to create new theoretical conceptions of identity. The first two ways to understand identity relate to ones avatar or character. First, there is the experience of playing a pre-set avatar or character created by the game developers or publishing company, such as Lara Croft, Mario, or Ms. Pac-Man. The gamer can interpret this identity however she wants, from imagining herself as the character to disregarding it completely. Second, more sophisticated games allow the creation of custom characters or avatars. Within EverQuest, for example, a player creates her avatar by choosing from thirteen races and fourteen classes (roughly equivalent to jobs: magician, warrior, bard), setting the characters wisdom, strength, charisma (and so forth), picking a name and selecting facial features and costume.343 In-game interaction also helps us to understand identity. Third, within the game, a gamer may have a sense of identity as a member of a gaming tribe (i.e. A citizen of Narrath, the fictional EverQuest country), similar to a geographic or ethnic identity. Ito discusses how locality can be dis-associated from physical geography and instead apply to communities that are not physically located in a specific place. Thus, a person who identifies with a particular online community (game or non-game) may understand themselves in affiliation with that community as location. 344 This identification may exist solely during gameplay, or overlap into out-of-game activities. Fourth, in-game, the gamer may understand her own identity differently based on the games context,345
343

Sony Computer Entertainment America EverQuest Frequently Asked Questions. EQLive. 2004, <http://eqlive.station.sony.com/library/faqs/faq_eqlive.jsp> (10 June 2005). 344 Ito maintains that games can constitute virtual geographies; players may identify in similar ways to gamespaces that they do to localities. Ito, M. Network Localities. Presented at the 1999 Meetings of the Society for the Social Studies of Science, San Diego, California. 1999, <http://www.itofisher.com/PEOPLE/mito/locality.pdf> (May 5, 2005). 345 Mortensen.

137 discourse(s), 346 or the players teammates. In other words, in-game identity shifts and changes based on audience and context just as offline identity does, regardless of character or role-playing. Fifth, the gamer may consider separately in- and out-of-game identities. While playing, Joe may think of himself as an avatar or character, but this may simultaneously co-exist with Joes sense of himself out of the game. At the same time that Joe is sitting on his couch playing Grand Theft Auto, he may think of himself as the games main character, Tommy Vercetti, but distinguish this identity from the real self who is currently sitting in his living room playing a game. The sixth possible identity position involves a situation in which a gamer is not actually playing a game, but is engaging in game-related communicative activities like chatting, talking to other gamers in person or on the phone, or posting on game-related bulletin boards. In this sense, this location is not clearly in-game or out-of-game but somewhere in the liminal middle, meaning that it is impossible to generalize about how this position operates. Seventh and final is the gamers sense of identity outside the game while she is not engaging in game-related activities: the real world self, which, as we know, is complicated enough. These different identity presentations and conceptions constantly overlap, shift, and change and, as a result, each persons management of these presentations can be incredibly complex. A single gamer may present his or her identity, or think about his or her identity, in one or many of these ways simultaneously. For example, while playing Tomb Raider, my identity may be a complicated set of negotiations between my identification with Lara Croft, my sense of myself as a gamer, and my sense of myself

346

Steinkuehler.

138 when I am not playing games. McBirney describes her own negotiation in multiplayer RPGs: When I play Diablo II, I am negotiating several plastic identities: my real life identity, Thelestis (my moniker on the Amazon Basin, a gaming community and forum); my account name on http://www.battle.net; and Duessa (a level eighty-six Frozen Orb/Hydra sorceress). The RL [Real Life] self controls these alternative identities, but the alternative identities are not merely circumscribed within the borders of the RL self.347 This complexity makes it very difficult to generalize at any time about how a particular gamer thinks of their self, much as it is difficult to generalize about how a non-gamer may present their identity. Murphy concludes her sophisticated study of how console gamers bodies interact physically with their avatars virtual physicality by admitting that the process is very intricate: Gamer identification fuses or to borrow a term from film theory sutures the gamer to the game. In doing so, the gamer and the game being played become intertwined while this interaction might be more fluid than filmic or televisual spectatorship allows for, it is also grounded in interactivity (instead of passivity), in a combination of simulated and actual movement, and in a fundamentally different relation to media as user, inter-actor and not spectator or consumerthe ways in which gamers interact with video games and the phenomenological and philosophical ramifications of that process are very complex. 348 It is beyond the scope of this chapter to make broad claims on gaming and identity; rather, I prefer to focus on the types of identity presentations that are privileged by console gamespaces. In summary, we can use a more sophisticated model of understanding identity in gaming that allows for interactions between authentic and inauthentic, between online and offline and between real and virtual. We can no longer assume that

347 348

McBirney, 416. Murphy, S. Live in your world, play in ours: the Spaces of Video Game Identity. The Journal of Visual Culture 3 no. 2 (2004): 235.

139 gamespaces inherently encourage self-expression that is separate and different from what takes place in offline or non-gamespaces. Indeed, we cannot even assume that there is a singular type of presentation in these spaces. I will now shift to a contemporary gaming system, Xbox Live, which, as a networked gaming space that is located squarely in the mainstream, we can use as one of Turkles objects to think with when exploring how certain types of identity presentation are privileged within the context of commodified gaming environments. Xbox Live Why pick Xbox Live to analyze the workings of identity in todays mainstream gaming systems? Like Turkles MUDs and todays MMORPGs, Live users are networked; like Lucasfilms Habitat and Sonys EverQuest, Live games portray fully graphical worlds. But, unlike MUDs or role-playing games, the majority of users play games on consoles. While Live is still a niche market, it is a niche market of about 2 million subscribers, making it about equal to the most popular PC-based MMO. Microsoft is aiming for an eventual consumer base of about 20 million349 and has made Xbox Live a key feature of Xbox 360, their next generation consoleall 360 users will have access to a basic version of Live by default.350 Live is a networked, graphical system that affords a great deal of inter-user communication, but is nevertheless firmly located within mainstream console gaming. Xbox Live is a subscription-based add-on for the standard Xbox console which allows players to game with others through Microsofts proprietary Live network. Users
349

Allard, J. The Future of Games: Unlocking the Opportunity, Keynote address to Game Developers Conference, San Francisco, California. 7-11 March 2005, <http://www.xbox.com/enUS/news/events/gdc05/gdc-jallard-20050309.htm> (18 May 2005). 350 Tuttle, W. Live and Online with Xbox 360. Gamespy. 12 May 2005, <http://xbox.gamespy.com/xbox360/perfect-dark-zero/613233p1.html> (12 June 2005).

140 communicate through a headset that uses voice-over IP (VOIP), or voice chat. This replaces the typical text-based chat of MMOs or PC games, since consoles lack the input devices (keyboards) that allow for textual communication. While playing Xbox Liveenabled games, users form teams or compete against each other while trash talking, making friends or admonishing other players. Microsofts Live marketing site describes the type of communication they hoped to achieve on the service: We wanted our service to be a revolutionary, fun, and social atmosphere. And it's hard to be social without talking to other people. Taunt opponents, strategize with teammates, groan in despair, and exult with a war cry! It's all in real time, and unless you've experienced it before, you have no idea how unbelievably cool it is (those who've played games over a LAN and heard trash talk from the next cubicle know exactly what we mean).351 The focus on sociable communication is a strategic move on Microsofts part for several business reasons. First, console gaming is more of a social pleasure than PC gaming; PC games do not generally afford simultaneous multiplayer gaming, and consoles are more likely to be placed in a living room, making it easier to play with lots of other people. But what if all your friends live across town or its three in the morning? Live gives users a social experience without requiring actual geographical collocation, which becomes a major selling point for the console. Secondly, Xbox Lives revenue stream comes from subscription renewals. Presumably, users who make friends that they can only communicate with through a proprietary network352 will be more likely to continue their Live subscription, thus increasing Microsofts revenue. Halloran, Rogers, and Fitzpatrick write that the development of voice chat has left games producers eager to sell games not just for entertainment value, but for their potential to enable players to
351

Microsoft Corporation. Be Heard on Xbox Live. Xbox.com. 2005, < http://www.xbox.com/enus/live/about/features-voice.htm> (10 May 2005). 352 Live prides itself on its protection of personal information, which would include e-mail addresses, instant messenger handles and the likeall the ways users could get in touch with each other outside the Live service.

141 interact with friends in new ways, meet new people, and even form new relationships353as long as those relationships keep the players coming back to the system. To that end, Microsoft is strongly focused on the expansion of Live as a core part of Xbox strategy and has consistently introduced new features that extend sociability, like voice messaging and the Friends List.354 Within the Live system, players are identified by their Gamertag. The Gamertag is essentially a branded synonym for the username or nickname, but a Gamertag is unique in that it persists across all Live games, rather than changing from game to game. This might not seem significant, but a username can be a remarkably important identifier. Wright, Boria and Breidenbach, in their analysis of the first-person shooter CounterStrike, write that names are important symbolic markers, not just for what they communicate about a players intent, but for what they also communicate about a players perceived status, interests, age, gender or sexuality The fact is names communicate symbolically to all users how one prefers to be perceived by another.355 A Gamertag, once set, is unchangeable and non-variable, regardless of the type of game one is playing, or who one is playing with. I see this as another demonstration of the commodified internets compulsory fixity of identity. Consider context and audience; the context of the game, whether a military first-person shooter, fantasy RPG or sports sim, can vary wildly, and ones co-players (audience) will probably fluctuate by game as well. Regardless, the user cannot vary their Gamertag based on the game they are playing or

353 354

Halloran, J., Rogers, Y. and Fitzpatrick, G., 131 Microsoft Corporation. Get Hooked Up. Xbox.com. 2005, <http://www.xbox.com/enus/live/about/features-friends.htm> (1 May 2005). 355 Wright, T., Boria, E., and Breidenbach, P. Creative Player Actions in FPS Online Video Games: Playing Counter-Strike. Game Studies 2 no. 2, December 2002. Also see Ducheneaut and Moore (2004) on how twitch (first-person shooters) gamers rely on their names to determine reputation.

142 the people they are playing with. The Gamertag functions as a symbolic marker, but its symbolism may be read differently depending on the game one is playing. If we assume that the ability to play with identity is inherently positive something I am not convinced of we must still take into account that studies examining Xbox Live have concluded that the persistence of identity through Gamertags contributes significantly to increased sociability within the system. Halloran, Fitzpatrick, Rogers and Marshall studied Live players interaction and found that players were more likely to be sociable in-game if they knew who was talking; they surmised that Gamertags actually increased the usability of the communication technology.356 A similar study by Wadly, Gibbs, Hew and Graham found that the persistence of Gamertags increased player accountability (and by proxy implied trustworthiness), sociability, and egalitarianism.357 The latter quality assumes that all Gamertags are created equal, which is predicated upon anonymity; this will become important as we look at user-created Live communities. Finally, a study by Halloran, Rogers and Fitzpatrick determined that people were unlikely to play alternate identities within Xbox Live, making the question of variability somewhat moot.358 For example, although Live allows players to transform and thus anonymize their voices through the VOIP, very few do so, meaning that voice cues (accent, gender, age and so forth) provide insight into who a player really is, making radical role-playing improbable.

356

Halloran, J., Fitzpatrick, G., Rogers, Y., and Marshall, P. Does it Matter if You Dont Know Whos Talking? Multiplayer Gaming with Voiceover IP. CHI 2004, Vienna, Austria. 24-29 April 2004, ACM 158113-703-6/04/0004, 2 357 Wadley, G., Gibbs, M., Hew, K., and Graham, C. Computer Supported Cooperative Play, Third Places and Online Videogames. In Proceedings of the Thirteenth Australian Conference on Computer Human Interaction (OzChi 03), eds. S. Viller and P. Wyeth. University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia, 26-28 November 2003, 241. 358 Halloran, J., Rogers, Y. and Fitzpatrick, G., 131.

143 Xbox.com and Gamertagpics.com I want to turn away from the service itself for a minute and talk about two Xbox community sites, one official and one decidedly un-official: Xbox.com and Gamertagpics.com. The first site is a major part of Microsofts marketing strategy for their flagship gaming product, and has been designed to be a third place to facilitate increased sociability between Xbox gamers. The site consists primarily of marketing material promoting the latest Xbox games, features, and news items, combined with an extensive Community section comprised of articles and message boards. The Gamertag functions as the users identity as he or she moves throughout Xbox.com, serving as the username for posting on forums and participating in community activities. Users are thus required to maintain a singular identity within Xbox.com in order to take part. The idea that a user might want to vary his or her identity based on the forum he is posting in or the people she is talking to is not supported by the site infrastructure. First-time visitors to Xbox.com are encouraged to sign in with their Microsoft Passport, Microsofts identity management system that persists across most Microsoft sites, including Microsoft.com, MSN.com, Hotmail.com and various other parts of the MS web empire. Most of the content on Xbox.com is not available unless you sign in with a Passport, providing an incentive for users to register with Microsoft.359 Furthermore, not only are users required to have a Passport, they are encouraged to link their Passport with their Gamertag in order to get access to all kinds of cool stuff, including developer interviews, music videos, fan profiles, exclusive game invitations,

359

An extensive discussion of Passport is beyond the scope of this chapter. For more, see Slemko, M. Microsoft: Passport to Trouble. 2001, <http://alive.znep.com/~marcs/passport/> (28 June 2005); Kormann, D. P. and Rubin, A. D. Risks of the Passport Single Signon Protocol. Computer Networks 33 (2000): 5158; and Opplinger, R. Microsoft .Net Passport: A security analysis. Computer, 36, no. 7 (2003): 29-35.

144 and more!360 While Xbox.com maintains player-to-player anonymityinformation beyond the Gamertag is not provided to other usersthis same privacy does not extend to Microsofts dealings with its users. By linking the Passport and Gamertag, Microsoft has access not only to the standard Live subscription information (credit card number, real name, address), but all of the personal data associated with Passport-associated sites like MSN and Hotmail. Despite Microsofts emphasis on player-to-player anonymity, Live players have a strong inclination to find out more about their fellow players. Wadley, Gibbs, Hew and Grahams study of Live found that players were overwhelmingly curious about the real life identities of their co-players, particularly age, gender, and location (the exact parameters of the infamous a/s/l? question on instant messenger).361 Since Microsoft actively avoids providing this information, and in fact makes it impossible for users to find it through the service, home-brew sites like Gamertagpics.com have sprung up in response. Gamertagpics is a somewhat amateurish but highly trafficked website which boasts 1000s of Xbox Live Members! On the day I visited the site, it claimed 58,167 total photos (presumably more than one per user). Gamertagpics users create profiles that are similar to those on social networking or personal ad sites; each profile includes the users name, age, and location, favorite games, and, optionally, photos. Visitors to the site can search profiles by Gamertag or game title to find more about players that they have encountered online. Like social networking sites, Gamertagpics incorporates a variety of features calculated to increase sociability, such as weblogs, homepage hosting for

360 361

Microsoft Corporation. Xbox.com. 2005, <http://www.xbox.com> (1 May 2005). Wadley, Gibbs, Hew and Graham.

145 premium members and instant messaging. Users can also browse user photographs and rank their favorite profiles based on attractiveness; the winners are displayed on the main homepage under a banner proclaiming the Daily Top Five Hot Votes (Girls and Guys). The existence of user-created sites like Gamertagpics seemingly contradicts the idea that users want multiplicity within Live; in fact, the studies cited in the previous section strongly suggest that users like Gamertags and in fact want even more singularity and presumed authenticity. Gamertagpics.com bears more similarity to Match.com or MySpace than a MUD. What accounts for the difference between how todays users present themselves authentically within Xbox and the emphasis on multiplicity and playfulness in the early work on role-playing in games? It may be the case that todays gamers completely distinguish in-game and outgame identity, and the idea of multiplicitywhile still in existencecan no longer be regarded as inherently revealing. A paper by Ducheneaut and Moore on alts different avatars played by the same person in the same game concludes that while games need to move away from the restrictions imposed by the one body/one machine/one person paradigm,362 the solution is not completely abandoning unitary concepts of in-game identity, but rather allowing a single user to manage multiple characters simultaneously. For example, a person might switch from an Elf to an Ork in order to better solve a tricky in-game puzzle, but their real identity, the one that manages both alts, would persist across these multiple avatars. The same study points out that people have a hard time forming social ties with a person in-game if they are constantly changing their character;

362

Ducheneaut and Moore, 1

146 again, persistent identity encourages sociability.363 Not only does Live privilege unitary, authentic self-presentation, this is desired and encouraged by gamers themselves. Gaming has changed considerably in the last twenty years, to the point where we must continually revisit past theories and conceptions in order to analyze todays technology with any sophistication. In the next section of this chapter, I want to look ahead to the next generation of console technology, and locate it within a spectrum of commodified identity that looks likely to continue for the foreseeable future. Xbox 360 On May 12, 2005, MTV premiered a 30-minute Microsoft infomercial starring Lord of the Rings hobbit Elijah Wood called MTV Presents: the Next Generation Xbox Revealed.364 The flashy program, taped at an LA nightclub filled with celebrities and unusually attractive gamers, consisted primarily of short clips of next-gen games like Tony Hawks American Wasteland and Perfect Dark Zero interspersed with performances from popular alternative band The Killers.365 Coming a week before E3, Microsofts intent was clearly to get a jump on similar next-generation announcements from rival manufacturers Sony and Nintendo. Details about the 360 were covered in trade publications and major newspapers, publicity shots of the sleek, shiny white console were omnipresent on tech blogs and websites, and the online gaming community was abuzz about what the launch would mean for the industry. With the Xbox 360, Microsoft is taking Sonys lead and positioning itself as the next Trojan horse of gaming. The 360 runs Windows Media Center Edition, an
363 364

Ibid., 1-2, 3. MTV Presents: The Next Generation Xbox Revealed, MTV, New York, 9:30pm, 12 May 2005. 365 Kohler, C. MTV Pimps Xbox 360. Wired News. 13 May 2005, <http://www.wired.com/news/games/0,2101,67519,00.html?tw=wn_tophead_2> (13 May 2005).

147 operating system designed specifically to allow home convergence: namely, to let users play DVDs, watch downloaded movies, listen to MP3s and play games all in their living rooms. Moreover, Xbox 360 takes advantage of the massive home theater market, supporting high-definition television and wide-screen gaming.366 The next version of the Xbox brings Microsoft closer to capturing the home entertainment segment that they have been gunning for all along. This is all marketing hype, of course. It remains to be seen whether or not the Xbox 360 will revolutionize the home market, push convergence, facilitate the creation of amazingly immersive gamespaces, spur an increase in hardware and software sales, attract customers outside the already well-defined hardcore and casual gamer markets, or anything else that Microsoft may claim. But what is interesting for my purposes is Microsofts announcement that Live will be more fully integrated into the product. A Wired magazine cover story on the 360 reads: Xbox 360 will introduce gamers to a world where they can create and maintain a persistent, evolving online persona regardless of which game they're playing. A user profile, maintained at a Microsoft data center, will follow you around and track your progress from game to game. That way, if you're a Halo 3 ace, you won't get thrown into a multiplayer Splinter Cell session with a bunch of newbies. The Xbox Live network will also tie into real-world payment systems - la PayPal - so players can buy, make, and sell virtual weapons, car parts, and clothes via micropayments.367 There are several positive implications to these developments. The profile-based system directly addresses some concerns of academic researchers with regard to reputation management within video games.368 A long-time gamer who has high social capital within a particular game will no longer relinquish it by default when playing a
366 367

Marriot. McHuge, J. The Xbox Reloaded. Wired. June 2005, <http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.06/xbox.html?tw=wn_tophead_3> (13 May 2005). 368 Ducheneaut and Moore, 3.

148 new title that she has no experience with. And, presumably, the next generation of Live will continue to roll out features that afford greater sociability, like the recently launched Friends Lists.369 Its also likely that Live users will enjoy many of the new features. However, what is key in this announcement is the idea that a gamer profile will become primarily a consumer profile above all else. The Gamertag will be replaced by something called a Gamercard, which stores personal information, preferences and game data and is persistent throughout the system. For example, the Gamercard keeps track of the users taste in music and varies game soundtracks accordingly. More significantly, the Gamercard includes credit card information so that users can instantly buy co-branded accessories called mods for their game characters.370 Famed Xbox cofounder J. Allard appeared on the MTV special to demonstrate this feature, showing users buying virtual clothing for their avatars, or stickers to be placed on custom NASCAR racers.371 For example, Microsoft might license the Calvin Klein brand name, which would then be leveraged across virtual jeans, t-shirts and sweaters. Players would be able to buy CK gear instantly and then turn up in-game wearing it. The production cost of these accessories is very little; players are basically paying for the privilege of advertising Microsofts business partners. While some of the personalization features may be appealing, the ability to purchase virtual gewgaws with ones Gamercard is unlikely to contribute to better gameplay, sociability, learning, or any of the other positive qualities that academics and ludology pundits associate with advanced console gaming. It is far more likely that

369 370

Microsoft Corporation. Get Hooked Up. McHuge. 371 MTV Presents: The Next Generation Xbox Revealed, MTV, New York, 9:30pm, 12 May 2005.

149 increased convergence of Xbox 360, Passport and Live will simply extend the reach of the Gamertag beyond the gamespace and into Microsofts other properties. J. Allard reiterated these themes in the keynote address at the 2005 Game Developers Conference, the major gathering for the industrys main technical personnel in other words, the people who will be creating, promoting, and designing the next generation of games: In an era where the people out there all value self expression above just about everything else, you have created the one form of entertainment that yields the role of the protagonist to the consumer. It's a perfect marriage. I believe that the games industry is right at that precise point in time, in that before-and-after transformation. 372 Self-expression within Live, then, becomes a series of consumer purchasing decisions, and identity is transformed into another thing that you can buy. Whether or not these new features will be implemented as Microsoft currently demonstrates them remains to be seen. Its clear that Xbox Lives overall customer strategy is to centralize as much information about a user as possible, and ensure that the information is persistent throughout the gaming experience. The idea of playing an alternate character, or varying your in-game self-presentation based on your co-players or the context of the game, is entirely precluded by this singular emphasis.

Framing Gaming as Commodity Quite obviously console games are built and sold by corporations. In order to create a game for Xbox, a game developer needs to strike a deal with Microsoft, tailor the game specifically for the Xbox hardware and hope that Microsoft chooses the game to

372

Allard.

150 promote as a major release.373 This is somewhat different from the PC gaming sphere, in which independent game developers ranging from fifteen year old CounterStrike enthusiasts to Christian parents looking to create educational environments can program and sell their own titles. The extent of this difference should not be exaggerated. Even given the PCs open architecture, the major titles are created, produced and distributed by corporate game entities. A major PC title extensive enough to compete with a console game requires a budget comparable to a motion picture, and that sort of funding is difficult to generate sans venture capital or deep corporate pockets.374 Practically speaking, the real estate in brick-and-mortar video game stores like Electronics Boutique and GameStop is so limited that even a successful new title has only about 3-6 months on the shelves before it is no longer heavily promoted, put on sale and eventually remaindered.375 The profit window for even major PC titles is very limited, while independent games have an infinitesimally small chance of making it into the store in the first place.376

373

Microsoft only allows licensed developers to make titles for the Xbox platform. There is an incubator program which allows smaller developers to work with Xbox development tools prior to getting a publishing tool. See Barker, M. Microsoft Opens the Xbox Playing Field. Gamasutra. 8 November 2005, <http://www.gamasutra.com/newswire/bit_blasts/20001108/index3.htm> (29 June 2005). 374 For example, game developers who want to make Christian games have been unable to raise the $500,000 fee to use the Xbox game engine, plus $2.5 to $4 million for the game development, plus a marketing budget of about 150 percent of that. See Dee, J. PlayStations of the Cross. The New York Times Magazine. 1 May 2005, <http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/01/magazine/01GAMES.html? ex=1272600000&en=354edfec675651b7&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss> (15 May 2005). 375 Mulligan, J. and Patrovsky, B. Online Game Marketing and Distribution Concerns: Retail Box, Download, or Both? Peachpit.com. 18 April 2003. <http://www.peachpit.com/articles/article.asp? p=31548&seqNum=3&rl=1> (16 May 2005). See also Pham, A. Battle for Video Game Recognition. Los Angeles Times. 30 October 2002, <http://www.larta.org/LAVox/ArticleLinks/2002/021111_latimes.htm> (16 May 2005). 376 The top ten best selling PC games of March 2005 included 3 games by Maxis (owned by Electronic Arts), two games by Blizzard and Sierra, both owned by Viviendi Universal, a game by Microsoft, a game by Sega, two games by Lucasarts (founded by George Lucas) and one game by Ubisoft. These are all major game developers. See Top 20 Bestselling PC Games for March 2005. Computer Games Magazine. 21 April 2005. <http://www.cgonline.com/content/view/834/2> (16 May 2005).

151 Kline, Dyer-Witheford and DePeuter write in their book Digital Play: The Interaction of Technology, Culture and Marketing that the location of gaming within corporate culture has direct effects on the type of messages and game situations that are promoted: Player involvement in the storylines of militarized masculinity, the users technology-based experiences of immersive and accelerated virtual environments, and consumer identification with synergistic corporate brands all combine to give interactive gaming a powerful biasone that arises from and reproduces the cultural, economic and technological structures of globally dominant, heavily militarized, digitally networked transnational information capitalism.377 The recent rise of game studies in the academy intimates that games are being taken seriously as texts for study. If we are to seriously consider gaming as the next generation of storytelling, as a non-linear form of literature, or as a space where we can experiment with our most basic notions of self, narrative, embodiment and presence, it is crucial that we contextualize our understanding within political economy. Unlike the early MOOs and MUD's which were free homespun programs run primarily by hackers and students on academic web servers, todays MMORPGs, first-person shooters, console games and multiplayer sim games like The Sims Online and Second Life are produced solely by programmers and game designers working for massive corporations with deep ties to the mainstream entertainment industry.378 As such, these games have a vested interest in encouraging play that matches the goals of the gaming industry. This is particularly the case within Xbox Live. To meet Microsofts goals of increasing sociability within the system, every new title must incorporate in-game chat and the use of persistent Gamertags. While Gamertags may contribute to in-game
377

Kline, S., Dyer-Witheford, N. and De Peuter, G. Digital Play: The Interaction of Technology, Culture and Marketing. (Montreal, Quebec, Canada: McGill-Queens University Press, 2003), 297. 378 Games are a key part of entertainment synergy, with properties like Spiderman, Lord of the Rings, Resident Evil, Mortal Kombat, Tomb Raider and Star Wars all existing as films, games and toys.

152 sociability, and, indeed, may be desired and enjoyed by users, they prevent the type of postmodernist identity exploration that has persistently been linked with gaming in cyberculture studies. Indeed, the incorporation of VOIP makes it difficult even to appear as an alternate gender. It is far more likely that we will see increased emphasis on these types of authentic interactions in game environments than a return to the free-for-all anonymity of MUDs and MOOs. Gamespaces have become simply another corporate realm through which users interact in strictly bounded and regulated ways, provided that they furnish an authenticated credit card number.

153 Conclusion: Reflections Introduction

When I began my research for this thesis, my goal was to create a new model of subjectivity that would allow cyberculture studies scholars and application designers to reconceptualize identity, given the commodified nature of todays internet. I now understand that this may have been a slightly lofty goal for a MA thesis. Regardless, the meandering paths I have taken in the last year have led me to some fascinating places, both intellectually and technologically. While I have not managed to create a unified theory of identity, there are a few loose ends I have encountered along the way that deserve mentioning before my final conclusion. First, I devote some time to summarizing my findings on authenticity, a concept that has loosely threaded itself through every chapter of this thesis. While we already know that authenticity is a construct, the ways that this construct operates with regard to offline interactions or in online communication is quite different from the way it is privileged within commercial applications. Second, given the ideas explored in the previous chapters, I return to the theories discussed in the first chapter to suggest some possible ways that we can conceptualize identity, moving forward. Third, I analyze what I see as a false dichotomy between good and bad internet sites, the danger inherent in following a corporate/independent binary, and propose an alternate way to conceptualize websites with regard to identity management. Finally, I look into the future at the new models of identity management being proposed by major software companies, and

154 emphasize the necessity of undertaking cyberculture studies work in a context of political economy. I close with some personal thoughts on my experiences studying technology. Authenticity If we look at how authenticity operates in the offline world, it is remarkably variable and site-specific. As discussed in the first chapter, what is judged as authentic depends not only on the social context of the object being evaluated, but on the personal experiences and understanding of the evaluator themselves. Moreover, the authentic can only appear so when positioned in opposition to the inauthentic. Despite this recognition of authenticity as a construct, the discourse of authenticity is persistent and persuasive. It extends not only to tourism, food, performance, fashion (and the like) but to our most fundamental concepts of selfhood: to thine own self be true. We use the authentic as an ideal against which all else is measured. The fact that this ideal is everchanging and inconsistent does not negate this understanding. Turning to the internet sphere, we can identify several different ways in which authenticity operates online. Naturally, users evaluate subcultural performances as authentic or inauthentic in the same way that they would offline, but, due to the lack of visual or bodily cues in internet forums, they use a different set of criteria. Williams and Copes, in evaluating a message board devoted to discussions of the punk subculture straightedge, write: When interacting face-to-face with other subcultural members, it is possible to express ones authenticity through a variety of ways, including argot, style of dress, and behavior. In the internet forum, however, it is difficult, if not impossible, to identify other users in such embodied

155 terms the primary way to show others ones authenticity is through text.379 The authors further point out that forum members claim authenticity through the construction of symbolic boundaries as a means of differentiating themselves as authentic from certain other forum participants whom they see as poseurs.380 In other words, authenticity online, as defined by users, operates in a similar manner to how it operates offline: by constructing in-group/out-group identity, and through the display of symbolic markers within self-presentation. The difference between online and offline concepts really comes into play when we talk about definitions of authenticity that are placed on to users from commercial applications. Whereas within the straightedge forum, an authentic user might be one who is conversant with obscure bands, knows appropriate terminology, or demonstrates many years of dedication to the subculture, within commodified contexts, the only acceptable markers of authenticity are pieces of accurate personal information. In order to be deemed authentic on Friendster or Amazon, users must be willing to provide tokens of presumably correct personal information, specifically personal information that is useful to corporations, such as name, credit card number, social security number, household income and address. Within online subcultures, authenticity is social capital, whereas within corporate structures, it is literal capital. Furthermore, this authenticity is equivocated with trust. The authentic is deemed so in distinction to the non-authentic, which is viewed as non-trustworthy. Many corporate sites further a rhetoric of trust which maintains that online safety depends on

379

Williams, J.P and Copes, H. How Edge Are You? Constructing Authentic Identities and Subcultural Boundaries in a Straightedge Internet Forum. Symbolic Interaction 28 Issue 1 (2005): 75-76. 380 Williams and Copes, 76.

156 authenticity. For example, as quoted in chapter three, Friendsters public relations agency claims that the Fakester purges were about consumer protection We do, as a policy, strongly discourage fake profiles. A rogue user hiding behind a Jesus profile, for example, has the potential to abuse the service or users in many ways.381 The fact that the application requires a certain type of authenticity means that people who present in different manners are judged inauthentic, which is further deemed unscrupulous and characteristic of cyber-predators. This rhetoric creates an atmosphere in which the corporate view of what is deemed authentic will be privileged not just by the application, but by other users. The structural emphasis on certain types of authenticity (for example, being unable to create a profile on a site without providing an accurate and verifiable address) combined with the contextual rhetoric of authenticity, severely restricts individual ability to present in site-specific ways. This is compounded when we consider cookies, data aggregators, universal identity management systems and the like that persist across internet structures. Furthermore, if we are constantly surrounded by discourses that encourage and emphasize singularity of self, and we ourselves gravitate towards accounts of ourselves as narrative heroes, the impetus to present as authentic exists even before the user moves online or into an application. The fact that many websites position us as authentic in particular certain ways, and the persistence of the human impulse to view ourselves as singular selves, should not be surprising. The fact that this view fits seamlessly into the profit models of online

381

Lisa Kopp quoted in Terdiman, D. Friendsters Fakester Buddies. Wired News. 12 July 2004, <http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,64156,00.html> (7 May 2005).

157 corporations, too, should not be a great shock. What is surprising is that these developments have not been acknowledged in cyberculture scholarship. Back to Theory Our understanding of what makes up the self is constantly debatable and everchanging. Whether we are each a series of social constructs, a performer constantly reacting to her environment, or a self that exists only through discourse, in Western late modernity, we think of ourselves as singular selves. The theoretical debate over essentialist concepts of self, therefore, is really irrelevant to this discussion. Regardless of the veracity of the model of a single, essential self inextricably linked to a body, we are likewise treated as singular selves. At the same time, the way that we formulate these selves is often through the purchase, use and display of commercial goods and services. A woman wearing iPod headphones, designer jacket and expensive German sneakers is demonstrating a particular set of characteristics, whereas a man with thrift-store cords, pointy boots, a shag haircut and a bandanna is signifying something else entirely. The only people who can interpret these signifiers, however, are people with the social knowledge to read them, which is individually variable; this understanding, therefore, is incredibly mutable and ever-changing, and varies greatly depending on context. Furthermore, as discussed in the second chapter, this construction of self through consumerism is a complicated process that allows for incorporation and subversion of intended messages. Finally, since our sense of self is so often linked to a purchasable lifestyle, and the lifestyles available or desirable to us are constantly being re-negotiated, it means that even singular identities are very much subject to change.

158 Given this, how can we think about identity in ways that are useful, considering the commodified context of not just the internet, but our social milieu overall? Any understanding must be applicable to two disparate paradigms: theory and practice. Theories of internet identity must expand to allow for further analysis of the political economy of identity management and self-expression, both online and offline. Moreover, this understanding should be extended to the practice of application design. It is not enough for us to theorize about identity. Our theories must be applicable to technological production. Technology is generally a bit simpler than theory, so I will start there. Applications first and foremost need to allow for flexible self-presentation based on context and audience. This performance needs to be able to take place both online and offline, and it needs to be up to the users discretion. Applications that privilege limited conceptions of authenticity for instrumental ends should instead focus on user choice and empowerment. Simultaneously, within applications, we must allow people the freedom to think of themselves as singular, if that is what is desired. Returning to the first chapter, recall that people inherently believe that they are connected to a singular body; this does not change as they move online. For example, as discussed in chapter four, studies on Xbox Live demonstrated that users like the Gamertag, a type of universal identity management system. It allows them to maintain relationships with other gamers, personalize their gaming experiences, and preserve certain levels of expertise from one game to the other. The fact that users are fond of the Gamertag, however, does not discount that the

159 principles behind corporate privileging of certain types of authenticity, for instrumental ends, are problematic. Turning to theory, it is unfortunate that in order to reconceptualize internet identity, we will have to put aside the idea of online interaction as being inherently liberatory. In chapter two, I identified three ways in which theorists believe that interacting through the internet can destabilize essentialism. First, playing or performing with alternate identities through internet communication encourages people to view all of their identity expression as potentially multiple, which facilitates alternate types of selfpresentation rather than what is seen to be inherent. Second, post-humanist scholars maintain that online communication can de-couple the ties between subjectivity and seemingly inherent corporal characteristics (gender, race, etc.). Finally, the ability to perform alternate genders, races, and sexualities online can reveal the performativity of these characteristics in everyday life offline. The second chapter provided a thorough critique of these principles by critical cyberculture scholars; we can no longer assume that internet communication has a monopoly on potential destabilization, if such destabilization is even possible. However, given the lens of commodification discussed in chapter two, we must consider that even users ability to play multiple identities online has been quashed within commercial structures. And there lies the danger. We can reject the idea that online multiplicity of identity will somehow break down oppressive categories, and still recognize that identity does vary. Thus, we must reclaim the ability of users to perform in a wide variety of ways and resist the forced singularity of commercial applications.

160 The Evil Empire vs. The Creative Commons: False Dichotomies in Cyberculture Studies The popular position to take while studying internet sites is to assume that corporate sites are universally bad, while independent sites are universally good. This is a simplistic dichotomy that relies on the utopic/dystopic binary so common to cyberculture studies, and it should be examined critically. Although a deep discussion of this fallacy is outside of the scope of this thesis, I will address it briefly before concluding. Generally, when scholars and technophiles label a site or company good, it meets one or more of the following characteristics: independent, usable, open source, community-based, allows lots of customization, encourages user participation, and is run by an entity that listens to users. Furthermore, we tend to consider non-profit sites on face to be better than commercial sites, especially if they do not use copyright models that are seen as unfair, such as digital rights management or software patenting. A bad site or company, on the other hand, might be run by a large corporation, made up of closed code, implement features without taking user input into account, privilege monetization over usability, be difficult to use, developed from the top down, and engineered in accordance to digital rights management, software patents, or the support of strict copyright laws. Obviously, as internet scholars, we would all like to see more usable sites and less unusable sites. However, the laundry list of characteristics above do not fall into a simple corporate/non-corporate dichotomy. I would like to propose a more sophisticated way to evaluate commercial sites. A very large, corporate site can be useable, useful, and a positive experience for users if it is user-centric and designed in accordance with what

161 users actually want and need, rather than what is easier for the company or site owner. For example, the information architecture of corporate sites is often based on the internal organization structure of the company, rather than emphasizing access to frequently used tasks. But these types of organizational mistakes are just as prevalent on independent sites as corporate entities. Indeed, there is little chance that the internet will become less commercial. Instead, we should focus on supporting independent structures that do not use oppressive business practices, while also patronizing large corporations who restructure their business so as not to exploit personal data and information. Our goal should not be to eradicate the corporate internet. Rather, our goal should be to transform it. Finally, keep in mind that there are different degrees of the corporate internet. As discussed in the second chapter, many of the structures that we think of as independent, such as blogging software, are actually owned by larger corporations. And even huge corporations such as Google and Apple are thought of more fondly than, say, Microsoft. We should be careful to think through our presuppositions based on corporate branding rather than rejecting or accepting software or internet sites simply because of the parent company. Indeed, many of the people who work within the internet industry are fully aware of these contradictions. In the spirit of self-reflexivity, I will point out that although I would align myself fully on the side of independent, Free Culture internet users and developers, I worked at Microsoft for four years and even did publicity for the notorious Trustworthy Computing initiative. Issues are never neatly split into binaries.

162 Identity Management Moving Forward

When I began this project, I hoped to reconceptualize identity online and create a new model of subjectivity that would allow for resistance to these trends and structures. These trends, however, are overwhelming, and while researching identity I found little that was encouraging. For example, at the moment, large software corporations are diligently working to create new models for identity management. Microsoft, for instance, is working on the architecture for an identity metasystem382 called InfoCard which has been designed to replace Passport.383 Microsofts white paper explains how the system would work: An identity metasystem would supply a unifying fabric of digital identity, utilizing existing and future identity systems, providing interoperability between them, and enabling the creation of a consistent and straightforward user interface to them all. Basing our efforts on the Laws of Identity, Microsoft is working with others in the industry to build the identity metasystem using published WS-* protocols that render Microsoft's implementations fully interoperable with those produced by others.384 Claims of interoperability aside, what is clear is that Microsoft will take the lead in establishing the standards by which identity will be managed online, while other entities will be free to abide by them. Besides InfoCard, there are several other protocols being developed to handle universal identity, including Lightweight digital ID (LID), Simple eXtensible Identity Protocol (Sxip), and the Identity Commons.385 Meanwhile, major

382

Microsoft Corporation. Microsofts Vision for an Identity Metasystem. MSDN Library. May 2005, < http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnwebsrv/html/identitymetasystem.asp> (24 July 2005). 383 Joyce, E. Microsoft Moving From Passport to InfoCard. Internet.com Developer. 24 May 2005, <http://www.internetnews.com/dev-news/article.php/3507241> (24 July 2005). 384 Microsoft Corporation, in conclusion. 385 Powers, S. I, URL. Burningbird. 10 January 2005, < http://weblog.burningbird.net/archives/2005/01/10/your-digital-self/> (25 July 2005).

163 vendors including IBM, Sun, Novell and Oracle are working on application suites for federated identity management.386 The impetus behind this surge into the identity management space is not benevolent in nature. Rather, corporations are increasingly concerned that internet users are avoiding e-commerce and online shopping due to the dangers inherent in identity theft, phishing, credit card fraud, and the like. A recent Gartner study found that more than 42% of online shoppers and 28% of people who bank online are cutting back on their activity because of "phishing" attacks and other assaults on sensitive data.387 A July 4th Newsweek cover story called Grand Theft Identity painted a bleak picture of the landscape: Today the easy money is still in banksdatabanks: vast electronic caches in computers, hard disks and backup tapes that store our names, Social Security numbers, credit-card records, financial files and other records. That information can be turned into cash; thieves can quickly sell it to fraudsters who will use it to impersonate others. They visit porn sites, buy stereo systems, purchase cars, take out mortgages and generally destroy the credit ratings of innocent victims, who may be unable to get new jobs, buy houses or even get passports until the matter is painstakingly resolved.388 This ominous rhetoric is doing little to increase consumer confidence. The motivation behind federated identity systems, then, is profit-driven at its core: increase consumer trust in the internet economy while ensuring that corporations have timely and accurate access to personal information. Given this, there is no easy answer to these problems. And they are problems. In the worst case scenario, we are envisioning a future where ones personal information is
386

Kearns, D. Issues That Will Shape ID Mgmnt. [sic] Over the Next Year. Network World. 18 July 2005, < http://www.networkworld.com/newsletters/dir/2005/0718id1.html> (25 July 2005). 387 Richmond, R. Internet Scams, Breaches Drive Buyers Off the Web, Survey Finds. Wall Street Journal. 23 June 2005, B3. 388 Levy, S., Stone, B. and Romano, A. Grand Theft Identity. Newsweek 146 issue 1 (4 July 2005):40.

164 more accessible to corporations than oneself (for example, having to pay to see a credit report, which was standard practice until 2004).389 If current business practices persist, personal information will continue to be collected without user consent or much regulation, and sold to any entity that wishes to access it, including governments. Chapter two discusses convergence, and the increasing tendency of corporations to convert extant social relationships offline into potentially profitable networks and contacts online. Besides ones own personal information, ones status as a node in a larger network will become a valuable asset. Friendship, family ties and romantic relationships will all become sources of potential profit. Since people are already seemingly willing to commodify themselves for potential consumption, it seems unlikely that a resistive space will open up in which commodifying others will be seen as taboo. The history of technology has shown us that when we have many competing protocols for a new technology, one will win out in the end, as long as it can maintain its competitive advantage.390 As such, at this point it is impossible to tell which identity protocol will be widely implemented. However, it is likely that the winning solution will be rolled out gradually without public discussion or input, but with much commercial fanfare. Couched in the rhetoric of personal choice, security and empowerment, we are moving towards a world in which our medical records, financial information, entertainment choices and political preferences are simply lines in a database belonging to a megacorporation.

389

Federal Trade Commission. Your Access to Free Credit Reports. FTC.gov. November 2004, < http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/conline/pubs/credit/freereports.htm> (25 July 2005). 390 For example, VHS replaced Betamax as the standard for video, and has now been taken over by DVD; similarly, in the browser wars, we can trace the dominance of Netscape over Mosaic, Internet Explorer over Netscape and now the slow yet steady rise of Firefox against IE.

165 As scholars, we must move forward on these issues. Corporations and governments are spending millions of dollars to develop new methods of capturing and profiting from identity online, while academics are still conceptualizing the internet as a unique communication technology with a peculiarly freeing affect. It is absolutely essential that we look at identity as a political and economic issue. As with the development of HTML, companies will move ahead full speed on these issues while scholars are still debating the best way to think of identity online. We cannot afford to wait; there is much at stake. Conclusion Our need for a practical philosophy of self-knowledge has never been greater as we struggle to make meaning from our lives on the screen. 391 Sherry Turkle concluded Life on the Screen with this call to action in 1997. Eight years later, what Turkle referred to when she talked about cyberspace has been almost entirely transformed. When David Bell summarized the issues ahead for cyberculture scholars in his 2001 book An Introduction to Cybercultures, he wrote, the arguments about virtual identity bring into relief the problematic negotiation of the cyberspace/meatspace boundary.392 Todays college students, with text messaging, instant messenger, mobile phones and email at their fingertips 24/7, would think the distinction between cyberspace and meatspace to be quaint, if they understood it at all. Gone are the days when computer geeks logged on to VAX systems and used IRC to chat with anonymous users at universities flung around the world. The internet now
391 392

Turkle, S. Life on the Screen. (New York: Touchstone, 1997) 269. Bell, D. Last Words. An Introduction to Cybercultures. (New York: Routledge, 2001) 206.

166 resembles the telephone book more than it does ham radio. We are living in a time in which our secret pleasures, once buried deep inside circuitry and found in the familiar sound of modems connecting, have been opened and exposed and shared with the world. The internet is completely mainstream. It is not a separate facet of everyday life; it is everyday life. As scholars, it is sometimes hard to say goodbye to beliefs that have sustained our scholarship and made our explorations so exciting. When the internet was the shared surreptitious interest of true believers, hackers, hobbyists, and geeks, we could trust in its transformative power. During the dot.com era, that transformative power even came true, in a way. But most of us fantasized about a social transformation that would be larger than the ability to buy an infinite array of baubles and gewgaws around the clock with the click of a mouse. For the last year, when people at cocktail parties have asked me about my thesis, I have obediently recited Its about identity in the age of the commodified internet. (A pithy answer that ensured that only the most curious technologists would question me further). When I began, I was frustrated with what I saw as a schism between what the technology industry thought about online interaction, and how the academy was conceptualizing it. I still believe that there is a schism, and I do believe we must acknowledge it. But I didnt realize that when undertaking this research I would be reliving my own history with technology as I did so. As dismissive as I may be of the early cyberculture researchers who earnestly believed that talking to others over textbased chat rooms could help us to destabilize our most cherished notions of gender, I am grateful to them. And I am nostalgic for that sense of possibility.

167 The fact that the internet is now a mainstream, highly-developed commercial structure does not mean that our work is done, that we have somehow lost. Rather, it means that there are far more tools at our disposal than there were in 1997. What is Wikipedia but a million detailed FAQ files? Could developing economies have leapfrogged land-based infrastructure entirely when setting up their first internet networks? Could developers have collectively built operating systems, browsers, and video applications that threaten those created by the most powerful software company in the world? It is our responsibility, as scholars and as internet users, to maintain our adherence to the values of respect, information sharing, independence and curiosity that characterized the early days of the internet. I hope that this thesis has contributed to those values in some small way.

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