DiGRA '09 - Proceedings of the 2009 DiGRA International Conference: Breaking New Ground: Innovation in Games, Play, Practice and Theory
Brunel University, September, 2009
Volume: 5
ISBN / ISNN: ISSN 2342-9666
Much of the contemporary debate on identity – and its fragmentation - has been informed by digital media and by its usage by communities. During the ‘90s, the debate has revolved around the notion of nomadic identities that, disembodied from the physical subject, could roam free in the cyberspace. With the deflation of the media objects that supported such paradigm, including Second Life, a trend towards a more unified, coherent individual has emerged - the Facebook model, as it became known. The Facebook model implies a user even more internally coherent than in real life: his or her identity is shared simultaneously by contacts from different social spheres (work, family, new and old friends) all of whom participate and communicate in the same semiotic space. Other signs of this shift are the declining usage of nicknames, often replaced by the users’ actual names. The leading theory to explain such phenomena is that of the critical mass: as long as few and sparse users are connected to the internet, no one would know the user in real life, and as a consequence his or her name would not carry any information for other people. On the other hand, a nickname represents a hook on which users could attach immediately recognisable meanings and ideas about themselves. However, as the mass of digital media users grows, and many of the user’s acquaintances become part of the same network, one’s name becomes a more efficient solution because it brings in play all the semiosis constructed during the user’s lifetime.