The Internet Identity ( IID ), also online identity or internet persona , is the social identity that Internet users define in the community online and website. It can also be regarded as an actively constructed presentation of oneself. Although some people choose to use their real names online, some internet users prefer to be anonymous, identify themselves with a pseudonym, which reveals various amounts of personally identifiable information. Online identities can even be determined by user relationships to specific social groups, they are part of online. Some can even deceive their identity.
In some online contexts, including Internet forums, online chats, and massive online role play (MMORPG) games, users can represent themselves visually by choosing an avatar, an icon-sized graphic image. Avatar is one way users disclose their online identity. Through interaction with other users, an established online identity gains a reputation, allowing other users to decide whether identity is worth believing. An online identity is associated with the user through authentication, which usually requires registration and login. Some websites also use the user's IP address or tracking cookie to identify users.
The self-concept, and how it is influenced by emerging technologies, is the subject of research in areas such as education, psychology and sociology. The effect of online disinhibition is an important example, referring to the concept of unwise and unimpeded behavior on the Internet, arising as a result of anonymity and audience satisfaction.
Video Online identity
Identity expression and identity exposure
The social web, that is the use of the web to support social processes, is a space where people have the possibility to express and expose their identities in a social context. For example, people explicitly define their identity by creating user profiles in social networking services like Facebook or LinkedIn and online dating services. By expressing opinions on blogs and other social media, they define more silent identities.
Disclosure of one's identity can present certain privacy-related issues. Many people adopt strategies that help them control the disclosure of their personal information online. Some strategies require users to invest a lot of effort.
The emergence of the concept of online identity has raised many questions among academics. Social networking services and online avatars have complicated the concept of identity. Academics have responded to this emerging trend by establishing the domain of scientific research such as technical studies, which focus on all aspects of human identity in a technological society.
Online activity may affect our offline personal identity as well.
Concept mask
Dorian Wiszniewski and Richard Coyne in their contributions to the book Building a Virtual Community exploring online identity, with an emphasis on the concept of "cover" identity. They show that every time an individual interacts within the social sphere they portray the mask of their identity. It's no different online and even more real because of the decisions that online contributors have to make regarding their online profile. He must answer specific questions about age, gender, address, username and so on. Furthermore, with the accrual of one's online activity, the mask is increasingly determined by the style of writing, vocabulary, and the topic.
The type of mask a person chooses reveals at least something from the subject behind the mask. One might call it a "metaphor" mask. Online masks do not reveal the true identity of a person. That, however, reveals an example of what lies beneath the mask. For example, if a person chooses to act like an online rock star, this metaphor expresses interest in rock music. Even if one chooses to hide behind a completely wrong identity, it says something about fear and lack of self-esteem behind a false mask.
Due to many emotional and psychological dynamics, people can be reluctant to interact online. By awakening the identity mask one can make a safety net. One of the great fears of online identity is that a person's identity is stolen or misused. This fear keeps people from sharing who they are. Some are very afraid of identity theft or misuse that they will not even disclose any known information about them in the public listing. By making masks available, people can interact with some degree of trust without fear.
Wiszniewski and Coyne stated "Education can be seen as a process of change in which identity manifests, how one finds one's place.Education implies the transformation of identity Education is, among other things, the process of establishing a sense of identity, common as a coaching process." Students who interact in the online community should reveal something about themselves and others responding to this contribution. In this way, the masks are constantly formulated in dialogue with others and thus the students will get a richer and deeper sense of who they are. There will be a process of improvement that will help students understand their strengths and weaknesses.
Mixed identity
This masked perspective is likened to the concept of 'mixed identity', which offline-itself informs the creation of a new online self that in turn informs offline through further interaction with people who first meet online.
Maps Online identity
In different contexts
Blogging
Because blogs allow one to express his views in an individual essay or as part of a wider discussion, he creates a public forum for expressing ideas. Bloggers often choose to use pseudonyms, either in platforms like WordPress or on interest-based sites like Blogster, to protect personal information and allow them more editorial freedom to express ideas that may be unpopular with family, businessmen, etc. The use of a pseudonym (and a wise approach to disclosing personal information) may allow a person to protect their "real" identity, but still build an online reputation under a pseudonym.
Human resources
Digital identity management becomes something that individuals need to consider when applying for a job while working for a company. Social media has been a tool for human resources for many years. The KPMG report on social media in human resources says that 76 percent of American companies use LinkedIn to recruit. Ease of search means that reputation management will become more important especially in professional services such as lawyers, doctors and accountants.
Social networks
Online social networks like Facebook and MySpace allow people to maintain an online identity with some overlap between the context of the online world and the real world. These identities are often made to reflect certain aspects or ideal versions of themselves. Representations include pictures, communications with 'friends' and other memberships in network groups. The privacy control settings in social networks are also part of the social networking identity.
Some users can use their online identity as an extension of their physical, and centralize their profile around realistic details. These users value continuity in their identities, and prefer to be honest with their self-portrayal. However, there is also a group of social networking users who will oppose the use of real identity online. These users have experimented with online identity, and in the end what they have found is that it is possible to create an alternative identity through the use of such social networks. For example, a popular blogger on media.com writes under the name Kel Campbell - the name chosen by him, was not given to him. He states that when he is verbally attacked online by other users, he is able to protect himself from the sting of humiliation by considering him as Kel, not his true self. Kel becomes a kind of shield, and acts as a mask that frees the actual user underneath.
Such is the benefit of forming an alternative identity in the online space. "I" is the subject of "I", and individuals are given the power to mold themselves into whoever (or whatever) they want. The story of people learning about "hidden extroversion" or "unknown creativity" or being "someone else" is still at large. Research from scientists such as Danah Boyd and Knut Lundby has even found that in some cultures, the ability to form online identity is considered a sacred privilege. This is because having an online identity allows users to accomplish things that are not possible in real life. These cultures believe that self has become a subjective concept in the online space; by logging onto their profiles, the user is essentially released from physical body prison and can "create a self-narrative in a completely new virtual space".
The possibilities are endless - which is a worthy explanation for the popularity of explosive social networking sites in the last decade. Users are lured by opportunities to express themselves in a variety of ways. Maybe social networking will always remain popular, as long as the incentive to join is always there.
Online business
As the development of social networking, emerging new economic phenomenon: doing business through social networking. For example, there are many WeChat users called wei-entrepreneurs who sell products at WeChat. Doing business through social networking is not that easy. The identity of users on social networks is not the same as in the real world. For the sake of security, people do not tend to trust someone on social networks, especially when dealing with money. So for a wei entrepreneur, reputation is very important for a wei business. They need to invest big efforts to gain reputation among WeChat users, then these wei entrepreneurs might be able to sell something to the users.
Online learning
Communications
Online identity in the classroom forces people to reevaluate their concepts of a classroom environment. With the discovery of online classes, the classrooms have changed and no longer have traditional face-to-face communication. This communication has been replaced by a computer screen. Students are no longer determined by visual characteristics unless they make it known. There are pros and cons on each side. In traditional classrooms, students can connect visually with a teacher standing in the same room. During the class, if a question arises, clarification can be given immediately. Students can make face-to-face connections with other students, and these connections can be easily extended beyond the classroom. For students who are timid or socially awkward, the ability to shape and expand relationships through personal contacts may be less attractive. For these students, appeals can be in an online course, where computer communication allows them to have greater levels of separation and anonymity.
With the prevalence of long distance Internet communications, students do not form prejudices from their classmates based on the appearance or characteristics of classmates' utterances. Instead, impressions are formed only on the basis of information presented by classmates. Some students feel more comfortable with this paradigm for avoiding the discomfort of public speaking. Students who are not comfortable expressing their idea in class can take time to sit down and think about what they want to say.
Communication through written media can lead students to take more time to think about their ideas because their words are in a more permanent setting (online) than most conversations made during the class (Smith).
Professor's perception
The online learning situation also caused a shift in the perception of professors. While anonymity can help some students achieve greater comfort levels, professors must maintain an active identity where students can interact. Students should feel that their professors are ready to help whenever they need it. Although students and professors may not be able to meet in person, email and correspondence between them should occur at the right time. Without this the students tend to drop online classes because it seems they are hanging around in the course without anyone guiding them.
Virtual world
In the Virtual world, users create personal avatars and communicate with others through virtual identities. Virtual personalized figures and sounds can draw from a real person or a fantasy world. The virtual figure for some degree reflects personal expectations, and the user can play a completely different personality in the virtual world rather than in reality.
Internet forums
Internet forums, or message boards, are online discussion sites where people can have conversations in the form of a posted message. There are many types of internet forums based on specific themes or groups. The online identity properties also differ from different forum types. For example, users at the BBS university usually know some others in reality because users can only be students or professors at this university. But freedom of expression is limited because some BBS universities are under the control of the school administration and its identity is related to the student ID. On the other hand, on some questions and answers websites like "ZhiHu" in China, it is open to the public and users can create accounts only with e-mail addresses. But they can describe their specialization or personal experience to show reliability in a particular question, and other users can also invite them to answer questions based on their profile. Answers and profiles can be either real or anonymous.
Benefits and worries
Benefits
The positive aspect that is discussed from virtual communities is that people can now present themselves without fear of persecution, whether it is personality traits, behaviors they want to know, or announcements of real-world identity components that have never been announced before.
This freedom generates new opportunities for society as a whole, especially the ability for people to explore the role of gender and sexuality in a harmless, yet interesting and beneficial way for those who make changes. Online identity has given people the opportunity to feel comfortable in a broad role, some of which may be a fundamental aspect of the lives of users that can not be described by users in the real world.
Online identity has a beneficial effect on minority groups, including minority ethnic populations, people with disabilities, etc. Online identity can help eliminate the prejudices created by stereotypes found in real life, and thus provide a greater sense of inclusion.
A key example of this opportunity is the formation of many communities that welcome gay and lesbian adolescents dealing with their sexuality. These communities allow teenagers to share their experiences with each other and older gays and lesbians, and hopefully they provide a non-threatening and non-judgmental community. In the community review, Silberman quoted an information technology worker, Tom Reilly, who stated: "The great thing about online services is that they are intrinsically decentralized resources.Children can challenge what adults say and make news ". If teenagers are successful everywhere, news about them is readily available. The internet is the most powerful tool that young people with alternative sexuality ever have.
The online world provides users with the option of determining their gender, sexual preferences, and sexual characteristics that they want to manifest. In every online meeting, a user basically has a chance to change which identity they want to portray. As McRae points out in Surkan (2000), "The lack of unlimited physical presence and body flexibility complicates sexual interaction in a single way: since gender choice is a" choice "rather than a strictly determined biological characteristic, the whole gender concept as the primary identity marker be partially subverted. "
Online identity can offer potential social benefits for those with physical and sensory disabilities. The flexibility of online media provides control over their disclosure of distractions, opportunities that are not normally available in real-world social interactions. Researchers highlight its value in improving inclusion. However, it should be noted that the ability of "normalization" offers the possibility of experiencing an untimatized identity while also offering the capacity to create harmful and harmful outcomes that could endanger the safety of participants.
Worries
In particular, concerns about virtual identity revolve around the misrepresentation area and the contrast effect on and offline presence. Sexuality and online sexual behavior provide some of the most controversial debates with many people concerned about the predatory nature of some users. This mainly refers to concerns about child pornography and the ability of pedophiles to obscure their identities.
Finally, concerns about the relationship between online and offline lives challenge the idea of ​​what is a real experience. Associated with gender, sexuality, and sexual behavior, the ability to play with these ideas has generated questions about how virtual experiences can affect one's offline emotions. As McRae puts it, best, virtual sex not only complicates but drastically disrupts the connection between mind, body, and self that has become a convenient truism in Western metaphysics. When projected into virtuality, mind, body, and self, all become conscious constructs through which individuals interact with each other.
Reliability
The identity that people specify on the social web is not always an aspect of their offline self. Research has shown that people lie in online dating services. In the case of social networking services like Facebook, the company even proposes to sell 'friends' as a way to increase user visibility, and question more of the reliability of a person's 'social identity'.
Van Gelder reports a famous incident that occurred in a computer conference system in the early 80s in which a male psychiatrist served as Julie, a female psychologist with various deformities including deaf, blind, and serious facial deformity. Julie makes herself a loved community of computer conferencing, finding psychological and emotional support from many members. The choice of psychiatrists to perform differently is sustained by exploiting the unbearable stigma attached to Julie's disability as justification for not meeting face-to-face. The lack of visual cues allows the transformation of identity to continue, with the psychiatrist also assuming the identity of Julie's husband, who firmly refuses to allow anyone to visit Julie when she admits to being seriously ill. This example highlights the ease of identity that can be built, altered, and maintained by the textual nature of the online interaction and visual anonymity it provides.
Catfishing online
Catfishing is a way for users to create fake online profiles, sometimes with photos and fake information, to enter into a relationship, intimate or platonic, with other users. Catfishing became popular in mainstream culture through the MTV show Catfish .
Identity management infrastructure
The problem facing anyone who hopes to build a positive online reputation is that reputation is specific to the site; for example, someone's reputation on eBay can not be transferred to Slashdot.
Several proposals have been made to build the identity management infrastructure into the Web protocol. All require an effective public key infrastructure so that the identities of two separate manifestations of online identity (for example, one on Wikipedia and the other on Twitter) may be one and the same.
OpenID, a decentralized open standard for authenticating users is used for access control, allowing users to log in to different services with the same digital identity. This service must allow and implement OpenID.
Reputation management
Given the flexibility of online identity, some economists have expressed surprise that growing trading sites (such as eBay) have been developed on the Internet. When two false identities propose to enter into an online transaction, they are faced with a prisoner's dilemma: the deal can succeed only if the two sides want to trust each other, but they have no rational basis for doing so. But successful internet trading sites have developed reputable management systems, such as eBay feedback systems, which record transactions and provide technical means through which users can assess their respective levels of trust. However, users with malicious intent may still cause serious problems on the website.
Online reputation is the perception someone generates on the Internet based on their digital footprint. Digital footprints accumulate through all shared content, feedback provided and information made online. Due to the fact that if someone has a bad online reputation, he can easily change his pseudonym, new accounts on sites like eBay or Amazon are usually not trusted. If an individual or company wants to manage their online reputation, they will face more difficulties. This is why a web merchant who owns a brick and mortar store is usually more trustworthy.
Ultimately, online identity can not be completely free of the social constraints that are applied in the real world. As Westfall (2000, p.Ã, 160) discusses, "the idea that really departs from the social hierarchy and restrictions does not occur on the Internet (as might be suggested by previous research to the possibilities presented by the Internet) with the construction of an identity that is still being formed Westfall raises important, but rarely discussed, concerns about the effects of online literacy and user communication skills. "Indeed, this skill or lack of ability has the ability to form a person's online perception when they shape a person's perception through the physical body in" the real world. "
Disembodiment and implications
This gender issue and sexual assignment enhances the idea of ​​disembodiment and its associated implications. "Disembodiment" is the idea that after an online user, the need for the body is no longer needed, and the user can participate separately from it. This ultimately deals with feelings regardless of the identity determined by the physical body. In the virtual world, many aspects of sexual identity become blurred and only determined by the user. Therefore, the question of truth will be raised, especially in relation to online dating and virtual sex. As McRae stated, "Virtual sex allows for certain freedom of expression, physical presentation and experimentation beyond the limits of a person's real life". Best of all, it not only complicates but drastically disrupts the division between mind, body and self in the only way possible through the construction of an online identity.
Legal and security issues
Online identity and user rights
The future of online anonymity depends on how the identity management infrastructure is developed. Law enforcement officials often express their opposition to anonymity and online pseudonyms, which they view as open invitations for criminals who want to hide their identities. Therefore, they are calling for an identity management infrastructure that will permanently bind the online identity to a person's legal identity]; in most such proposals, the system will be developed in conjunction with a secure national identity document. Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, has stated that Google's social networking is meant to be an exact identity system like that. Controversy resulting from Google policies that require users to sign in using their official name has been dubbed "nymwars".
Online civil rights advocates, by contrast, argue that there is no need for a privacy-invasive system because technological solutions, such as reputation management systems, are sufficient and are expected to grow in their sophistication and utility.
Predator online
Online predictors are Internet users who exploit other users' vulnerabilities, often for sexual or financial purposes. It is relatively easy to create an attractive online identity for people who are not normally involved with predators, but fortunately there are several ways that you can ensure that someone you have not met is actually who they say they are. Many people will believe things like the style in which someone writes, or someone's photo on their web page as a way of identifying the person, but this can be easily falsified. Long-term Internet relationships are sometimes difficult to adequately understand knowing what a person's identity really is.
The age group most vulnerable to online predators is often considered young adolescents or older children. "Over time - maybe weeks or even months - the stranger, having gained as much personal information as possible, caring for the child, earning his confidence through praise, positive statements, and other forms of praise to build an emotional bond." The victims often do not suspect anything until it's too late, because the other side usually misleads them into believing they're the same age.
The Dateline event at NBC has, on the whole, conducted three investigations on online predators. They have adults, pose online as teenagers, engage in explicit sexual conversations with other adults (predators) and arrange to meet them personally. But instead of meeting a teenager, the unsuspecting adult was confronted by Chris Hansen, an NBC News correspondent, arrested, and aired on national television. Dateline conducted an investigation in five different locations that captured a total of 129 people.
Federal law has been passed in the US to assist the government while trying to capture online predators. Some of these include tapping, so that online offenders can be arrested first, before a child becomes a victim. In California, where a Dateline investigation occurs, it is a minor offense for a person to have a sexual conversation with an online child. People who come to the house are accused of a crime because their intentions are clear.
Market
An online identity that has earned an excellent reputation is invaluable for two reasons: first, one or more people invest a lot of time and effort to build a reputation for identity; and secondly, other users see a reputation for identity when they try to decide whether it is reliable enough. It is therefore not surprising that online identities have been put up for sale on online auction sites. However, conflicts arise over the possession of online identity. Recently, a massive online game user called EverQuest, owned by Sony Online Entertainment, Inc., is trying to sell EverQuest's identity on eBay. Sony objected, stating that the character is Sony's intellectual property, and demanded the removal of the auction; under the terms of the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), eBay may become a party to a copyright infringement suit if it fails to comply. Unresolved time is a fundamental question: Who has an online identity created on a commercial website? Does the online identity belong to the person who created it, or to the company that owns the software used to create the identity?
See also
Note
External links
- Center for European Reputation Studies
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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