1. Identity By: Alison Knecht

2. Queering Internet Studies: Intersections of Gender and Sexuality By: JanneBromseth and Jenny Suden • Purpose: Discussion on play and power of imagination in shifting Internet cultures. • Moves to contextualize notion of play, questioning credibility, accountability, and genre. • Finding inter-links between gender and sexuality and subcultures online • Ending with questions of body, spatiality, queer feminist politics • Cyberspace • Unbound by physical bodies • Create/recreate yourself, allowing for flexible gender identity • Experimental and liberating • Cyberfeminist • “Boys and toys” • 80's/90's women were positioned as computer illiterates • 5 different scenarios • Sexual/sexuality based • Change in personal reaction/others reaction

3. Continued • Access to online communities both on and off screen more widespread • Competing understandings • Identity, gender, and body • Also accountability • Conclusion • Overview of research on gender, sexuality, and Internet technologies. • Addressed changes in mediation and ownership Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 • More needs to be studied on the Internet and discourses on gender and sexuality • Queer critique of the study of gender, sexuality, and the Internet • “Establishing online selves is also always a situated process and dependent on genre as well as the social frame created within a group” (pg. 277)

4. Discussion • Do we actually have gender freedom online? • Is the Internet a new breading ground for the next gender debate? • Are gender differences as important online as they are offline? • Can we ever escape this need for known gender roles?

5. Self-disclosure, privacy and the Internet By: Adam N. Joinson & Carina B. Paine • Purpose: focus on disclosure in CMC and web-based forms, finding links between privacy and self-disclosure, and proposing three critical issues that unite the ways in which we understand the links between privacy, self-disclosure, and new technology. • Determine self-disclosure: bonds of trust, solidarity, and strengthen identity • Measure self-disclosure: different from F2F and CMC • Self-disclosure and the Internet: New technology contains high levels of self-disclosure. • Findings suggest more is being disclosed through internet relationships compared to real-life relationships. • Online and automated interviews and surveys, report more sensitive information • “Very few individuals actually take any action to protect their personal information, even when doing so involves limited costs.”(pg. 239) • Models of self-disclosure online: Paradox of being able to express yourself and also allowing more access to self. • What is privacy?: various functions and dimensions to privacy

6. Continued • Privacy and the Internet: clash between privacy and new technology. Concerns about the Internet eroding privacy. Personal information being a commodity. “Double edged sword” • Linking models of privacy and CMC: privacy is prerequisite for disclosure. • Trust and disclosure: Establishing trust and not always having to reduce privacy • Control: self-disclosure online is control. Volunteering info, privacy may be compromised, uncontrolled use. • Conclusions: Focus on micro-level media is ignored which limits how we conceptualize online behavior. Examples: • Facebooks use of personal info to conduct research • Privacy setting on Facebook • Commercial use of our browsing history • Online dating

7. Discussion • What is your definition of privacy? • What are some of your ways to protect your privacy online? Do they work sufficiently? • What are the moral and ethical implications to using our personal online information even if it is supplied voluntarily? • How has the increased use of new technology changed our self-disclosure patterns?

8. The real problem: avatars, metaphysics and online social interaction By: David Gunkel • Purpose: addressing social issues regarding CMC proxies or avatars, distinguishing what is reality vs virtual reality. • Online we are free to be who we wish to be • Manipulate avatar characteristics • Neglects to recognize limitations of real physical bodies • Cartesian Thinking • Online behavior/Avatar behavior vs Real behavior • Shedding race and gender without “real life” consequences • Violent actions not tied to real behavior • Will the Real Please Stand Up • Case of Julie • Earliest recorded accounts of avatar identity crisis • To Tell the Truth Show • One would need access to appearance and real thing

9. Continued • Plato • Differentiates between object as it appears to us, through our senses and the thing itself • Kant • Adds further qualification that access to the real thing is forever restricted and beyond us • Zizek • Real= already a virtual construct • Truth= no longer resides in what is assumed to be the “real state of things” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CMA4x7aXJT0

10. Discussion • How is identity determined in the age of the Internet? • Do social media groups such as Facebook, allow us to access the “real” thing? • What are some ways that we might be able to protect ourselves from “fake” identities online?

11. Is Facebook Changing Our Identity? | Idea Channel | PBS Digital Studios • Facebook has 955 million users • Helps to create memories • Our identity • Hair, clothes, music we listen to, car we drive etc. • We create our identity off what we know and remember from our past experiences • Facebook is doing to our memory what Google does for simple facts • Dunbar’s Numbers • Describes cognitive friend limit • Facebook increases this number from 150 to 5,000 • Browse self to help construct more about identity EX: The usage of Facebook as it relates to narcissism, self-esteem and loneliness By: Madeline Schwartz http://digitalcommons.pace.edu/dissertations/AAI3415681/

12. Discussion • Has Facebook become our memory surrogate? • Has our society become lazy with our interactions due to increased Facebook use? (i.e. remembering birthdays) • In what others way has Facebook influence dour behavior?

13. References Gunkel, David J. "The real problem: avatars, metaphysics and online social interaction." new media & society (2010). Ioinson, Adam N., and Carina B. Paine. "Self-disclosure, privacy and the Internet." The Oxford handbook of Internet psychology (2007): 2374252. Is Facebook Changing Our Identity? | Idea Channel | PBS Digital Studios. Perf. Mike Rugnetta. Youtube.com. PBS Digital Studios, 12 Sept. 2012. Web. 10 Sept. 2014. Schwartz, Madeline. "The usage of Facebook as it relates to narcissism, self- esteem and loneliness." (2010).