“I just try to be genuine.” Through my interviews for the Online Identity Project, I am getting a fascinating insight into what it means for different people to be authentic online: how they perceive their own authenticity, how they act authentic, and whether they think that true authenticity is even possible. As our offline and online […]
Every now and then the media, or someone I know, or (perhaps a bit ironically) social media users will put forward the argument that digital technologies are making us more stupid, more narcissistic, or less connected with each other. For many this theory might be founded in well-meaning concern for their fellow citizen, or based on articles they’ve read […]
“Authenticity [of being human] does not depend on whether the being in question has been manufactured or born, made of flesh and blood or of electronic circuits. The issue cannot be decided by physiological criteria,” writes N. Katherine Hayles in her book, How We Became Posthuman. As we become more and more entertwined with machines, […]
In gender studies, ‘passing’ refers to the act of being able to get by, unquestioned, as either a man or a woman. In massively multiplayer online role playing games (MMORPG), passing happens on two fronts. First, in the player’s ability to choose an avatar’s gender and to pass as that gender, regardless of whether or […]
An exploration of gender performativity as a backbone to a future study of the theatrical nature of gender-play in massively multiplayer online roleplaying games (MMORPG). We suffer from an overwhelming need to label everything. If we can’t identify it, pin it to a chart and attach a name to it, we get confused, frustrated and sometimes angry. In online […]
As convergence between our offline lives and our activities online increases, the subject of authenticity arises more frequently. Identifying details such as our offline legal names, date of birth, gender, ethnicity, occupation or marital status are seen as signifiers of the authentic self. Such details are useful to businesses wishing to communicate with their target […]
When media theory pioneer Marshall McLuhan dramatically announced in the mid 1960s that the medium, not the content it relayed, was the message, he set in motion a conversation about how technology shapes who we are that has lasted until this day. Whether it was movies, advertising, the telephone or even a light bulb (McLuhan […]
