Internet and Society - Social Theory in the Information Age

fully immersed in a virtual image setting, in the world of make believe, in which symbols are not just metaphors, but comprise the actual experience” (Castells 2000a, 381). The culture of real virtuality would be “real (and not imaginary) because it is our fundamental reality, the material basis on which we live our existence, construct our systems or representation, practice our work, link up with other people, retrieve information, form our opinions, act in politics, and nurture our dreams” (Castells 2001, 203). If virtuality is real, then also online identities are not purely artificial but form an aspect of social reality. The anonymity of cyberspace enables an endless space of possible identities that humans can construct in online communication. But not each individual makes use of these endless possibilities, because his or her identity is enabled and constrained by social structures, class relationships (in the broad Bourdieuian sense of the term), and by his or her endowment with economic, social, and cultural capital. Social experiences and the individual history of an individual influence and shape his or her online behavior. But this doesn’t mean that social structures determine online identity in a linear way; they rather open up a space of possibilities in which each possible online identity is more or less likely to be constructed in virtual communities. In any case, online personae are connected to the social life of the individual who feels a desire to act and communicate in certain ways online. Online characters are an expression of real-world experiences, desires, fantasies, and ideas; they are connected to the offline world. If one knows the endowment of an individual with the different types of capital, one can’t deduce his or her online identities, because there is a nonlinear, but not arbitrary, connection of the offline and the online world. Online identities have characteristics that give us a hint of which topics and ideas are important for an individual. But there is a continuum of how these topics and ideas are enacted online that ranges from a reversal of ideas, values, and behaviors, the enactment of behaviors that a person tries to develop with the help of CMC, to the affirmation and exaggeration of ideas, characteristics, and behavior of the offline individual. Studies show that the difference of online and offline identities is in many cases not as large as some scholars suspected in early Internet research (cf. Dšring 2003, 351, 380, 398sq.). On the one hand, differences and discrimination concerning racial, sexual, gender, class, and bodily identities can have a lower importance online due to the anonymity of online communication; but on the other hand, users might feel more disinhibited online and might hence engage in identitybased discrimination more openly and directly. Lynn Schofield Clark (1998) interviewed 61 teens and 26 of their family members. She found that online teenage communication wasn’t so different from the offline world concerning gender roles and homosexuality.“Indeed,there is evidence of much more that is socially reproduced into the chat rooms from the environment of ‘real life’” (Schofield Clark 1998, 169).

I suspect that most people’s online personae share many characteristics of their offline identities because they want to make contacts online that also work in the offline world, which might not be possible if others discover that the offline behavior is very different from the online behavior of persons whom they like and have learned to know in cyberspace. The World Wide Web allows an accentuation of certain personal characteristics that individuals consider important and realize by making use of hyperlinking, pictures, videos, animations, and social software that supports interaction online. One can expect that on platforms like myspace.com, which allow the self-presentation of individuals, most users aim at presenting and accentuating aspects of their self that can help them in creating contacts with others.

Personal blogs can be considered as publicly available online diaries that allow accentuated presentations of individual selves (Dšring 2003, 367). Nicola Dšring (2003, 341sqq.) distinguishes between virtual self-presentation as the representation of an individual online by an application program (e.g., nickname, system-generated information) and virtual identity as the subjective and intersubjective representation of an individual online.

Due to post-Fordist flexiblization, the increasing importance of mobile phones, and convergence phenomena, mobility has emerged as a new trend in virtual communities. This 246