An Bui, Spelled An With 1 N

Tonight I talked to an old friend from undergrad, Ryan Croken, about the construction of the online identity. I’ve been thinking about this topic for a few days - there’s quite a bit of literature about the construction of gender, masculine, and feminine identities, but how much is out there about the online identity?

How should we even look at online identity? Does each distinct social networking site/application equal a distinct online identity, even if the creator/owner of the account is one person (ie, Are my twitter, facebook, digg, pownce, whrrl, and all like services separate online identities for me)? What about multiple accounts on the same service, but for different audiences or purposes (ie, personal or professional accounts)? Does your online identity derive from the aggregation of the accounts you control or does it come from Google search results?

Ryan was kind enough to share with me his notes/response paper he wrote for Professor Ken Gergen’s class while at Swarthmore. My first thought - “Looks like a blog post.”

This post? A response to Ryan’s thoughts he so generously shared with me. I look forward to reading and responding to your thoughts.