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WEEK 8
TOPIC/ CONTENT
WHO AM I IN THE CYBERWORLD? (DIGITAL SELF)
 Selective Self-presentation and Impression Management
 Gender and Sexuality Online
 Performing Gender Online
 Setting Boundaries To Your Online Self: Smart Sharing
LEARNING OUTCOME/ OBJECTIVE
 Define online identity,
 Compare real identity versus online identity;
 Describe the influence of internet on sexuality and gender; and
 Discuss the proper way of demonstrating values and attitudes online.

ABSTRACTION
The number of people who are becoming more active online continues to increase worldwide.
More than half of the population worldwide now uses the Internet. It has only been 25 years since Tim
Berners-Lee made the World Wide Web available to the public, but in that time, the Internet has
already become an integral part of everyday life for most of the world's population. The Philippines is
among one of the countries with the most active Internet users (We are Social and Hootsuite n.d.),
 Almost two-thirds of the world's population now has a mobile phone.
 More than half of the world's web traffic now comes from mobile phones.
 More than half of all mobile connections around the world are now "broadband."
 More than one in five of the world's population shopped online in the past 30 days.
Media users in the Philippines grew by 12 million or 25% while the number of mobile social users
increased by 13 million or 32%. Those growth figures are still higher compared to the previous year.
More than half the world now uses a smartphone.

Based on Figure 1, the number of digital users worldwide increases. More people are becoming
interested and devoted in using the Internet for various activities. In the Philippines, adolescents are
among the most avid users of the Internet.
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Online identity is actually the sum of all our characteristics and our interactions while partial
identity is a subset of characteristics that make up our identity. Meanwhile, persona is the partial identity
we create that represents ourselves in a specific situation.

SELECTIVE SELF-PRESENTATION AND IMPRESSION MANAGEMENT

According to Goffman (1959) and Leary (1995), self-presentation is the process of controlling how
one is perceived by other people and is the key to relationship inception and development. To construct
positive images, individuals selectively provide information about them and carefully cater this
information in response to other's feedback.
Anything posted online should be considered "public" no matter what our "privacy" settings are.
Let us say, a student wrote online about how much he hated another student in school, and started
bullying him online. Does it matter if the student said, "Well, this is my personal account"? Even if the
student wrote it in a "private" account, it can become public with a quick screen capture and shared with
the world. Personal identity is the interpersonal level of self which differentiates the individual as unique
from others, while social identity is the level of self whereby the individual is identified by his or her group
memberships.
Belk (2013) explained that sharing ourselves is no longer new and has been practiced as soon as
human beings were formed. Digital devices help us share information broadly, more than ever before. For
those who are avid users of Facebook, it is possible that their social media friends are more updated about
their daily activities, connections, and thoughts than their immediate families. Diaries that were once
private or shared only with close friends are now posted as blogs which can be viewed by anyone. In
websites like Flickr or Photobucket. the use of arm's-length self-photography indicates a major change. In
older family albums, the photographer was not often represented in the album (Mendelson and
Papacharissi 2011), whereas with arm's-length photos, they are necessarily included (e.g., selfies and
groupies). In addition, the family album of an earlier era has become more of an individual photo gallery in
the digital age. As Schwarz (2010) mentioned, we have entered an extraordinary era of self-portraiture.
Blogs and web pages have been continuously used for greater self-reflection and self-presentation.
Facebook and other social media applications are now a key part of self-presentation for one sixth of
humanity. As a result, researchers and participants become concerned with actively managing identity and
reputation and to warn against the phenomenon of "oversharing" (Labrecque, Markos, and Milne 2011

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Shepherd 2005; Suler 2002; Zimmer and Hoffman 2011). Sometimes people become unaware of the extent
of information they share online. They forget to delineate what can be shared online and what should not.
Furthermore, it provides a more complete narration of self and gives people an idealized view of how they
would like to be remembered by others (van Dijck 2008). Many teenagers, as well as some adults, share
even more intimate details with their partners like their passwords (Gershon 2010). This could be an
ultimate act of intimacy and trust the ultimate expression of paranoia and distrust with the partner.
Because of the conversion of private diaries into public revelations of inner secrets, the lack of
privacy in many aspects of social media make the users more vulnerable, leading to compulsively checking
newsfeeds and continually adding tweets and postings in order to appear active and interesting. This
condition has been called "fear of missing out." People would like to remain updated and they keep on
sharing themselves online because it adds a sense of confidence at their end especially if others like and
share their posts. One of the reasons for so much sharing and self-disclosure online is the so-called
"disinhibition effect" (Ridley) 2012; Suler 2004). The lack of face-to-face gaze-meeting, together with
feelings of anonymity and invisibility, gives people the freedom for self-disclosure but can also "flame"
others and may cause conflict sometimes. The resulting disinhibition causes people to believe that they are
able to express their "true self" better online than they ever could in face-to-face contexts (Taylor 2002).
However, it does not mean that there is a fixed "true self." The self is still a work in progress and we keep
on improving and developing ourselves every single day. Seemingly self-revelation can be therapeutic to
others especially if it goes together with self-reflection (Morris et al. 2010). But it does appear that we now
do a large amount of our identity work online. When the Internet constantly asks us: "Who are you?" and
"What do you have to share?", it is up to us if we are going to provide answers to such queries every time
we use the Internet and to what extent are going to share details of ourselves to others.
In addition to sharing the good things we experience, many of us also share the bad, embarrassing,
and "sinful" things we experience. We also react and comment on negative experiences of others.
Sometimes, we empathize with people. We also argue with others online. Relationships may be made
stronger or broken through posts online. Blogs and social media are the primary digital fora on which such
confessions occur, but they can also be found in photo- and video sharing sites where blunders and bad
moments are also preserved and shared (Strangelove 2011). Why confess to unseen and anonymous others
online? In Foucault's (1978, 1998) view, confessing our secret truths feels freeing, even as it binds us in a
guilt-motivated self-governance born of a long history of Christian and pre-Christian philosophies and
power structures.
According to Foucault (1998), confession, along with contemplation, self-examination, learning,
reading, and writing self-critical letters to friends, are part of the "technologies of the self through which
we seek to purge and cleanse part ourselves.
Despite the veil of invisibility, writers on the Internet write for an unseen audience (Serfaty 2004).
Both the number and feedback of readers provide self-validation for the writer and a certain celebrity
(O'Regan 2009). Confessional blogs may also be therapeutic for the audience to read, allowing both sincere
empathy and the voyeuristic appeal of witnessing a public confession (Kitzmann 2003).
Consequently, we should have a filtering system to whatever information we share online, as well
as to what information we believe in, which are being shared or posted by others online. We should look at
online information carefully whether they are valid and true before believing and promoting them. In the

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same way, we should also think well before we post or share anything online in order to prevent conflict,
arguments, and cyberbullying, and to preserve our relationships with others.

GENDER AND SEXUALITY ONLINE

According to Marwick (2013), while the terms "sex," "gender," and 'sexuality" are often thought of
as synonymous, they are actually quite distinct. The differences between the common understandings of
these terms and how researchers think about them yield key insights about the social functioning of gender.
Sex is the biological state that corresponds to what we might call a "man" or a "woman." This might seem to
be a simple distinction, but the biology of sex is actually very complicated. While "sex" is often explained as
biological, fixed, and immutable, it is actually socially constructed (West and Zimmerman 1987). Gender,
then, is the social understanding of how sex should be experienced and how sex manifests in behavior, personality,
preferences, capabilities, and so forth. A person with male sex organs is expected to embody a masculine
gender. While sex and gender are presumed to be biologically connected, we can understand gender as a
socioculturally specific set of norms that are mapped onto a category of "sex (Kessler and McKenna 1978;
Lorber 1994). Gender is historical. It is produced by media and popular culture (Gauntlett 2008; van
Zoonen 1994). It is taught by families, schools, peer groups, and nation states (Goffman 1977). It is
reinforced through songs, sayings, admonition, slang, language, fashion, and discourse (Cameron 1998;
Cameron and Kulick 2003), and it is deeply ingrained. Gender is a system of classification that values male-
gendered things more than female related things. This system plays out on the bodies of men and women,
and in constructing hierarchies of everything from colors (e.g., pink vs. blue) to academic departments (e.g.
English vs. Math) to electronic gadgets and websites. Given this inequality, the universalized "male" body
and experience is often constructed as average or normal, while female-gendered experiences are
conceptualized as variations from the norm (Goffman 1977).
Sexuality is an individual expression and understanding of desire. While like gender, this is often
viewed as binary (homosexual or heterosexual), in reality. sexuality is often experienced as fluid.

PERFORMING GENDER ONLINE

Theorist Judith Butler (1990) conceptualized gender as a performance. She explained that popular
understandings of gender and sexuality came to be through discourse and social processes. She argued that
gender was performative, in that it is produced through millions of individual actions, rather than
something that comes naturally to men and women. Performances that adhere to normative
understandings of gender and sexuality are allowed, while those that do not are admonished (for example,
a boy "throwing like a girl") (Lorber 1994). In the 1990s, many Internet scholars drew from Butler and other
queer theorists to understand online identity. According to the disembodiment hypothesis, Internet users
are free to actively choose which gender or sexuality they are going to portray with the possibility of
creating alternate identities (Wynn and Katz 1997). The ability of users to self-consciously adapt and play
with different gender identities would reveal the choices involved in the production of gender, breaking
down binaries and encouraging fluidity in sexuality and gender expression.
Recently, social media has been celebrated for facilitating greater cultural participation and
creativity. Social media sites like Twitter and YouTube have led to the emergence of a "free culture" where
individuals are empowered to engage in cultural production using raw materials, ranging from homemade
videos to mainstream television characters to create new culture, memes, and humor. At its best, this
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culture of memes, mash-ups, and creative political activism allows for civic engagement and fun creative
acts. While Digg, 4chan, and Reddit are used mostly by men, most social network site users are women;
this is true in Facebook, Flickr, LiveJournal, Tumblr, Twitter, and YouTube (Chappell 2011; Lenhart 2009:
Lenhart et al. 2010). But mere equality of use does not indicate equality of participation. While both men
and women use Wikipedia, 87% of Wikipedia contributors were identified as male (LaVallee 2009). Male
students are more likely to create, edit, and distribute digital video over YouTube or Facebook than female
students. However, the Pew Internet and American Life Project found no discernible differences in user-
generated content by gender except remixing. which was most likely among teen girls (Lenhart et al. 2010).
One explanation for these differences is that user-generated content is often clustered by gender.
Researchers have consistently shown that similar numbers of men and women maintain a blog about 14%
of Internet users (Lenhart et al. 2010). While the number of male and female bloggers is roughly equivalent,
they tend to blog about different things. Overwhelmingly, certain types of blogs are written and read by
women (e.g., food, fashion, parenting), while others (e.g., technology, politics) are written and run by men
(Chittenden 2010; Hindman 2009; Meraz 2008). Although the technologies are the same, the norms and
mores of the people using them differ.

Setting Boundaries to Your Online Self: Smart Sharing

The following guidelines will help you share information online in a smart way that will protect
yourself and not harm others. Before posting or sharing anything online, consider the following.
 Is this post/story necessary?
 Is there a real benefit to this post? Is it funny, warm-hearted, teachable or am I just making noise
online without purpose?
 Have we (as a family or parent/child) resolved this issue? An issue that is still being worked out at
home, or one that is either vulnerable or highly emotional, should not be made public.
 Is it appropriate? Does it stay within the boundaries of our family values?
 Will this seem as funny in 5, 10, or 15 years? Or is this post better suited for sharing with a small
group of family members? Or maybe not at all?
RULES TO FOLLOW
Here are additional guidelines for proper sharing of information and ethical use of the Internet
according to New (2014):
 Stick to safer sites.
 Guard your passwords
 Limit what you share.
 Remember that anything you put online or post on a site is there forever, even if you try to delete it.
 Do not be mean or embarrass other people online. Always tell if you see strange or bad behavior
online.
 Be choosy about your online friends.
 Be patient.

GE 1: UNDERSTANDING THE SELF