IMing and the Instant Identity

I think reading about all the ways IMing is a communication system within itself has made me understand the concept of how disembodiment can both limit and give infinite freedom to girls when it comes to identity (4) . I thought of identity online before mainly as predators posing as young people. I hadn’t realized (because before I was just participating without analyzing it) how much IMing was a precursor to texting and how there are all these idiosyncrasies in how some things are slang or abbreviation but others aren’t, how you adjust what you’re saying to who you are talking to and how the nature of IMing makes you multitask. Thinking about it now, though, I can see how this sort of performance shapes gender and identity. You get to try on all sorts of hats, so to speak, and never have to face the ‘what if they find me out one day’ worry, like that comic with the dogs saying no one will know their dogs talked about in the book and that someone found and posted in discussion.

I had kind of a hard time understanding why “Arab girls” and in a way even the Korean girls were so concerned about what they put on social media sites. Even knowing how easily someone can access your information, I and I think others my age had always sort of seen IMing and social networking as an extension of the self. I think it’s interesting how girls in those cultures will care so much about reputation, but then do things like post pictures of their stomachs or say they follow a trend ironically. When this was mentioned and when the Arab girls said they shared a profile they used to flirt with guys, I kept wondering why they didn’t just be themselves. I realized that they were just rebelling by putting their curiosities before societal protocol. It’s not beyond people, especially young girls, to say one thing as a defense and do another either. However, this made me realize more of how things I thought were unintentional like posing at certain angles to look good in a MySpace picture was a trend. Changing your voice when typing or trying to portray parts of your personality and not others on Facebook, even unconsciously, is by definition, altering your image. You can’t help but do this because of how communicating online does disembody you and leaves all this room for identity, which is daunting because it could be anything and liberating because it could be anything.