Thanks to the wonderful comments from my last midterm post (thanks guys!), I have decided to stick with the theme of identity while writing my paper. Now, I know what you're thinking: That's a really general topic. Yes, but this is the beauty of a prewrite; it helps me to narrow it down further.
I want to head in the direction of identity crisis. We as people "wear different hats" when it comes to aspects of our lives, like Amber pointed out in the comments of my last post, with the different roles we play as people: students, parents, employees, etc. Our identities online are no different. I, for example, am more professional on my LinkedIn profile than I am on my Facebook profile.
Sometimes because we are trying to juggle so many different roles, we can forget which role we are supposed to be playing, sometimes for a moment or sometimes even longer.
The most obvious example in Moby Dick was Ahab, who forgot about his other roles altogether and made revenge his only focus. But I want to look at other characters like Ishmael, Stubb, and Pip when they mixed up their roles with other personal roles and how that affected them and/or the crew.
Then I want to tie that back into digital identity and how in some cases people get so involved with their digital identities that these become the dominate identities rather than their physical selves.
What do you think? I would appreciate any insights or comments that you might have!
Do you have any examples of this happening in real life? Are there people who have been shown to change because of online identities? I'm interested, but I'm not sure how this will stretch into a full paper.
ReplyDeleteI like this idea. I agree that Ahab was too focused (or immersed, as i put it) into one role and that led to bad consequences. maybe (if you have room) you can talk about the consequences of following particular roles, and what happens when one role becomes "the role". And another thing, using the term "roles" kind of makes me think of roles in a stage play, and perhaps that's intentional because in the epilouge Ishmael announces the end of the story by saying, "The drama's done." Maybe you could think about this in terms of acting and how people behave onstage/offstage/in different parts.
ReplyDeleteRegarding Heidi - a couple of months ago, a man was fired because of his online persona. He was the most notorious and offensive troller on Reddit, and a blogger outed him. I don't know if you could say he changed, but his online persona was viewed as more representative of his true self than his life persona, and so he was judged on that and fired.
ReplyDeleteWith Lizy's point about acting - remember the scriptlike chapters? Yeah. And frankly, "actors" and "roles" are great words to discuss this identity crisis in both M.D. and the digital world. The only thing is whether you have room to discuss it like that in this paper, or what you might have to cut out in order to fit this in. The thing with a paper length like this is that it's easy to be really broad instead of having an even tighter and more focused paper. That'll be an issue for me, I think.
I saw your post on Google+ and I'll be up working on my paper too. What is your current working thesis? What's your direction?
Is the focus on a crisis of identity or having a split or multiple identities? You'll need to go beyond the very obvious concept of "people portray themselves differently online." Think about how identity is constructed in multiple ways outside of online, as well online. You should find examples. Consider positive examples of hidden or alternate identities online. It's a bit easy to just point to people adopting a persona to misbehave.
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