Identity from Imagined Communities to Virtual Communities
Identity from Imagined Communities to Virtual Communities
1) Reading Boyd’s article about MySpace as a digital ghetto and thinking about the digital great white flight and digital ghetto decay made me consider how Facebook can now be read as a digital space where urban meets suburbia. In real space minority groups follow the migration patterns (flight) toward the suburbs for employment, better schools, etc., basically chasing the ideal “American dream”; i.e. they want the house with the picket fence as well. Now that the digital suburb is co-habitate(d) by marginalized identities that were left behind on MySpace and privileged identities, how does this intermingling of multiple identities transform Facebook or even Twitter? I wonder can the metaphor be extended to think about digital suburban sprawl? If even possible in digital space, how can this process be read?
2) What about digital red light districts (communities) or digital spaces read as deviant? For example: Xtube and the many other pornographic social networking sites online, the personal section of craigslist, and even queer social network sites such as Adam4Adam and GayGirlNet.com (I’m not suggesting that they are pornographic sites but are read by some as deviant). How can digital spaces read as sexually “deviant” provide information for us to think about identity and space?
3) Not to exclude Anderson or Sengupta from the conversation by not directly engaging their work with a question, but I think that reading their work helped me to think more about identity, power, privilege, and oppression’s relationship to space and community when considering Boyd’s work. In regards to how white middle-class journalists considered MySpace “dead” because they did not know anyone who used it still, and assumed that their readers had migrated to Facebook (Boyd, 219), what is at stake when marginalized identities are made invisible in a digital space that is created to provide visibility? (This question may seem redundant but I feel that it is important when thinking about technology that is geared toward creating visibility)
Definition
Identity: Can register as a social and political construct used to mark bodies as normal or deviant and privileged or marginalized through national, class based, age, global, cognitive, intellectual, racial, health, body image, gendered, sexual, familial, and disabled contexts. Identities are nuanced and intersecting and can be contained or imagined spatially and temporally.