Internet Resources

Identity and Community on the Internet

Identity in the Community

• Who Am We? by Sherry Turkle in Wired
  "We are moving from modernist calculation toward postmodernist simulation, where the self is a multiple, distributed system."

• These two pages have many intersting links on Social and Personal Identity and the Internet although the lists duplicate eachother (which is [not?] surprising given that they are at the same site)

  • Gender, Ethnicity & Class - Social and Personal Identity. (You can deposit your e-mail address if you want to be notified when this page is updated.)

  • The Construction of Identity in Personal Home Pages on the World-Wide Web by Daniel Chandler. Chandler is interested in identifying some of the ways in which people frame their social and personal identities on the Web.

• Technologies of the Self in the Age of Modern Reproduction by Andrew Garnar.
  This is a good introduction to historical concepts of the self. It does not concentrate particularly on the frontiers of Net technolgy but rather on home pages.

• Who Am We? by Sherry Turkle in Wired.

• Identity and Deception in the Virtual Community P, Judith S Donath, MIT Media Lab.

• Netropolitan Life (see below) lists two e-lectures on identity, Who are you? P and What do you do? P

• Anonymity for fun and deception: the other side of 'community' by Richard Seltzer.

Community

• Netropolitan Life. "This site is a comprehensive guide to issues and resources pertaining to virtual communities, and the homepage for a university course called CC/1920 The Virtual Community: Daily Life in Cyberspace, which is taught at Calumet College at York University, Canada." The course includes two e-lectures on Identity.

• THE NETIZEN: Special Focus in Computer-Mediated Communication Magazine ISSN 1076-027X / Volume 3, Number 2 / February 1, 1997.

• Home Net A Carnegie Mellon research project studying what people do with the Internet and how it affects their lives.
  • HomeNet: HomeNet: A Field Trial of Residential Internet Use P
  • HomeNet: Why People Use the Internet P
  • Homenet: HomeNet: Residential Internet Use over Time P

• Communities in Cyberspace. The Center for the Study of Online Community seeks to present and foster studies that focus on how computers and networks alter people's capacity to form groups, organizations, institutions, and how those social formations are able to serve the collective interests of their members.

• Peter Kollock: The Economics of Online Cooperation: Gifts and Public Goods in Cyberspace P

• Netizens, On the History and Impact of the Net. A print edition has recently been published by the IEEE Computer Society Press. Its ISBN # is 0-8186-7706-6. HTML Draft (4/9/95)

• Marc A Smith Marc Smith and his students have done a whole bunch of stuff.

  • Voices from the WELL: The Logic of the Virtual Commons P by Marc Smith. This is an article on how communities may or may not act in their collective interest to produce collective goods. The WELL is a virtual community that Smith studied. Some of his conclusions are that despite the potential for abuse of power, the "form of organization in place in the WELL is a kind of benign anarchy....The history of the WELL provides empirical evidence that a mixture of public and private control over a collective good can effectively sustain the production and distribution of that good. In addition, it illustrates the fact that the character of a collective good is an essential element of the kinds of organizations that can be constructed to produce and maintain it.

  • Here's P another paper by P. Kollack and the same author called Managing the Virtual Commons: Cooperation and conflict in computer communities.

  • Netscan: Measuring and Mapping the Social Structure of Usenet. There is an interesting paper here. There is also some software: Netscan is an aid to sociological research on online interaction and group dynamics. Used in conjunction with a social network analysis tool (such as Krackplot), Netscan can create network maps of the interconnections between Usenet groups as well as measures of a newsgroup's activity, population of participants, and style of interaction.

  • Marc Smith, teaches a lecture course on the Sociology of Cyberspace at UCLA. Lecture 8 was on Identity and Anonymity (there's not much here, but (as with the other lectures) he lists references). A number of his students have completed projects such as
    • Can Usenet newsgroups, in this instance rec.music.tori-amos, really qualify as communities? by Kim Stone and
    • What is a MUD? by Gunnar Einarsson

24 February '98