Social Relationships and Identity Online and Offline
Social Relationships and Identity Online and Offline – Summary
In contrast to the typically panicked reception of older new media technologies, fearful of their ill effects on social relationships and identities, the internet has posed the possibility of entirely new relationships and identities, constituted within new media, and in competition with ostensibly non-mediated, older forms of relationship.
Distinguishing Life Online
To study the internet as a cultural artifact involves looking at how a means of communication is used within an offline social world. To study the internet as culture, on the other hand, means regarding it as a social space on its own right, looking at the forms of communication, sociality and identity that are produced within this social space, and how they are sustained using the resources available within the online setting. The claim that the new media sustain online social spaces that can be inhabited and investigated relatively independently of offline social relations has been advanced on quite various grounds, and from the earliest days of the internet. We can summarise them in terms of four properties: Virtuality, Spatiality, Disembedding and disembodiment.
Virtuality
Virtuality evoke the construction of a space of representation that can be related to “as if” it were real, and therefore effects a separation from, or even replacement of, the “really real”. The extreme point of virtuality is the idea of “virtual reality”: a space of representations in which all one’s senses are exposed to coordinated representations such that the experience is completely immersive and the participant can respond to stimuli as if to a real world that behaves consistently, in a rule governed, non-arbitrary manner.
Spatiality
‘Cyberspace” captures the sense of a social setting that exists purely within a space of representation and communication and therefore doesn’t map clearly onto offline spaces. At the same time, cyberspace itself can,
In contrast to the typically panicked reception of older new media technologies, fearful of their ill effects on social relationships and identities, the internet has posed the possibility of entirely new relationships and identities, constituted within new media, and in competition with ostensibly non-mediated, older forms of relationship.
Distinguishing Life Online
To study the internet as a cultural artifact involves looking at how a means of communication is used within an offline social world. To study the internet as culture, on the other hand, means regarding it as a social space on its own right, looking at the forms of communication, sociality and identity that are produced within this social space, and how they are sustained using the resources available within the online setting. The claim that the new media sustain online social spaces that can be inhabited and investigated relatively independently of offline social relations has been advanced on quite various grounds, and from the earliest days of the internet. We can summarise them in terms of four properties: Virtuality, Spatiality, Disembedding and disembodiment.
Virtuality
Virtuality evoke the construction of a space of representation that can be related to “as if” it were real, and therefore effects a separation from, or even replacement of, the “really real”. The extreme point of virtuality is the idea of “virtual reality”: a space of representations in which all one’s senses are exposed to coordinated representations such that the experience is completely immersive and the participant can respond to stimuli as if to a real world that behaves consistently, in a rule governed, non-arbitrary manner.
Spatiality
‘Cyberspace” captures the sense of a social setting that exists purely within a space of representation and communication and therefore doesn’t map clearly onto offline spaces. At the same time, cyberspace itself can,