Portal:Digital Identity

What is Digital Identity?

Digital media affords individuals with new ways of expressing, exploring, and asserting their identity. For natives, who are immersed and fluent in these technologies, while finding themselves in a key stage of identity development, these new identity-forming activities present exciting possibilities. However, it is important to take a hard look at these activities, and how they are changing the ways people express and understand both themselves and others within the larger social context. There exist important issues for discussion in looking at how Digital Natives make use of emerging digital media tools available to them as they form identities both on and off line.

Technological Architectures The spaces in which individuals connect on the Internet, as well as through other technologies such as mobile phones and networked gaming consuls, each have their own particular architectures. They are built with specific allowances and capabilities, in attempt to dictate the forms and types of interactions that take place within those spaces. Like any space, these configurations can be re-interpreted and re-inscribed by creative users (who almost always find ways to bend - or break - the rules), but nevertheless, a particular mode of communication and connection evolves for each new technology that catches our attention, and enables connection. Read More...

Narratives OMG,” Elizabeth thumbs into her cell phone’s miniature keyboard. “He’s soooo cute.” Send. Perched in a windowsill high above the city, Elizabeth coos over her new nephew. “What a peanut!” Elizabeth’s sister smiles from the hospital bed. Andy’s not even a day old, still wrapped tightly in the ward’s white-and-blue swaddling blanket, his tiny facing peeking out from his mother’s arms. Elizabeth points the cell at Andy and peers through the viewfinder. The baby screws up his already crinkled face. She clicks a photo with the built-in camera, which makes the sound of an old-fashioned camera shutter, for no good reason. Send. “Must already be the most photographed baby of all time,” her sister laughs. “You should have seen mom. You’d think she’s never seen a baby before. Her poor friends. They’ve probably all exceeded the quota on their AOL inboxes from all her endless e-mails. She’s never learned how to avoid sending pictures as enormo attachments.” Elizabeth takes Andy’s tiny hand. She runs her finger over the plastic bracelet he wears. “Cohen, Baby Boy,” it reads, along with a bunch of other data that a nurse entered into a computer kiosk somewhere. Time of birth, mom’s name, a unique identifier, and so forth. Read More...