The Language of Technoself

Abstract

The goal of this chapter is to suggest theoretical means to address a fundamental question, what strategies do people use when presenting their selves online? This implies another question, how do people react to the context collapse when shaping their online profiles? The chapter analyzes the concept of identity and provides an analytical approach to the presentation of self online where traditional contextual and non-verbal cues lack. It tackles the issue of self presentation online through the frameworks of symbolic interactionism and narrative theory. The initial hypothesis is that individuals create online selves based on their offline selves; they attempt to shape online personas using similar communication strategies than in the offline world, but do so lacking traditional social cues, and this may generate dissonance for individuals who struggle defining the features of an imagined audience.

DNA portraits: celebrations of the technoself

“…Changes have also occurred with technological advances: New technologies reflect society; the study of context collapse and its relationship to self-coherence are fundamental issues in the future of identity research to help explain technology's intertwinement with human identity. [Fornaciari, 2013] The issue of "context collapse" [Marwick, 2011] is one mirrored in on-line environments where the presentation of self is devoid of situational and contextual information and crafted with partly real, partly imagined audiences. In computer-mediated worlds, "the self is multiple, fluid, and constituted in interaction with machine connections" [Turkle, 1995].…”