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Monday 11th December 2006 4:06 pm
David Buckingham: Considering Identity
The editor of the MacArthur Series volume on Identity breaks down some of the core questions his group is tackling.
What does it mean to grow up in a world that is increasingly saturated with digital media? How are youth identities currently being defined, and redefined, through young people’s engagements with technology? What are the implications for their identities as learners, as citizens and as consumers, and as members of broader social groupings and communities? These are among the questions we’re exploring in our volume for the MacArthur initiative on digital media and learning.
‘Identity’ is a large and complicated issue, and there are many ways of addressing it. Adolescence is often seen as a period of ‘identity crisis’, in which young people have to address basic questions about who they are and who they will become. But identity is also a social and a political issue: we define who we are in relation to others, and in relation to broader ideas about individuality. Many social theorists argue that the process of identity formation is now very different from what it was in more traditional, less mobile societies.
We’re particularly interested in how young people are using digital media to share their ideas and creative productions, and to participate in wider networks. New media genres, from SMS and instant messaging to blogs and home-pages, provide new resources for communication and self-expression. But they also set constraints on what is possible, not least through their connections with the broader consumer culture. What are the longer-term consequences of this for a generation that is ‘growing up digital’?
Category: Identity
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aguimarin
Posted on December 12 2006 11:08 PM
I am not sure that I agree with the assumption that our society is now ‘less traditional’ and ‘more mobile.’ I think the idea of mobility might be better theorized as networked and connected. Rather than being ‘more mobile,’ we are ‘more networked’ and ‘more connected.’ However, I question to what extent we
are actually networked and connected in relation to the seemingly infinite possibilities we have to be so. Drawing on one of your questions in this week’s
introduction, to what extent are youth actually networked/connected when Rupert Murdoch owns MySpace?
Also, to say that we are more mobile now than we have been in the past overlooks those populations who are very much less mobile (examples: 1. “traditionally” nomadic peoples who are now sedentary because of voluntary or forced government, conflict, economic, and urbanization-related relocation, and 2. those peoples who are restricted not only from upward economic and social mobility, but also from physical mobility [leisure travel, emigration, immigration] by economic, ethnic, national, and other constraints).
And, as I tried to highlight above through the use of quotation
marks, the concept of tradition is very delicate. I don’t think we should
conceptualize the use of digital media in relation to identity as being any more or less traditional, but rather as constituting new, different traditions. If we look at how traditions are changing rather than how they are being lost, we position ourselves to learn more about them and the dynamics of change itself.
These ideas regarding identity are of particular interest to me. Between the Fall of 2003 and the Spring of 2005, I conducted an ethnographic study of the practice of body piercing among college-aged youths in Orange County, California. My reseach culminated in a thesis titled, “In the Flesh: Body Piercing as a Form of Commodity-Based Identity and Ritual Rite of Passage.” Rather than situating this contemporary, western practice of body
piercingas an evolution or extension of non-western practices, I drew upon
existing work on non-western body modification, as well as literature on ritual, rites of passage, identity, the body, and consumer culture to theorize the contemporary, western practice of body modification as a new, unique tradition with its own significances.
More recently I’ve been examining the use of online social networking websites and profiles in the creation, maintenance, and negotiation of identity, mainly among youth. Even more recently I’ve been exploring the
combination of the two, body modification and online social networking, on Body Modification Ezine and
IAM in relation to identity. The intersection of these subjects raises intriguing questions, both theoretical and methodological, and I look forward to your future posts.