This title examines the relationship between identity and technology in the learning and lives of young people.

Online Identities: Creating and Communicating the Online Self presents a critical investigation of the ways in which representations of identities have shifted since the advent of digital communications technologies. Critical studies over the past century have pointed to the multifaceted nature of identity, with a number of different theories and approaches used to explain how everyday people have a sense of themselves, their behaviors, desires, and representations. In the era of interactive, digital, and networked media and communication, identity can be understood as even more complex, with digital users arguably playing a more extensive role in fashioning their own self-representations online, as well as making use of the capacity to co-create common and group narratives of identity through interactivity and the proliferation of audio-visual user-generated content online. - Makes accessible complex theories of identity from the perspective of today's contemporary, digital media environment - Examines how digital media has added to the complexity of identity - Takes readers through examples of online identity such as in interactive sites and social networking - Explores implications of inter-cultural access that emerges from globalization and world-wide networking

Identity Technologies is a substantial contribution to the fields of autobiography studies, digital studies, and new media studies, exploring the many new modes of self-expression and self-fashioning that have arisen in conjunction with Web 2.0, social networking, and the increasing saturation of wireless communication devices in everyday life. This volume explores the various ways that individuals construct their identities on the Internet and offers historical perspectives on ways that technologies intersect with identity creation. Bringing together scholarship about the construction of the self by new and established authors from the fields of digital media and auto/biography studies, Identity Technologies presents new case studies and fresh theoretical questions emphasizing the methodological challenges inherent in scholarly attempts to account for and analyze the rise of identity technologies. The collection also includes an interview with Lauren Berlant on her use of blogs as research and writing tools.

In this extensive inquiry into the sources of modern selfhood, Charles Taylor demonstrates just how rich and precious those resources are. The modern turn to subjectivity, with its attendant rejection of an objective order of reason, has led—it seems to many—to mere subjectivism at the mildest and to sheer nihilism at the worst. Many critics believe that the modern order has no moral backbone and has proved corrosive to all that might foster human good. Taylor rejects this view. He argues that, properly understood, our modern notion of the self provides a framework that more than compensates for the abandonment of substantive notions of rationality. The major insight of Sources of the Self is that modern subjectivity, in all its epistemological, aesthetic, and political ramifications, has its roots in ideas of human good. After first arguing that contemporary philosophers have ignored how self and good connect, the author defines the modern identity by describing its genesis. His effort to uncover and map our moral sources leads to novel interpretations of most of the figures and movements in the modern tradition. Taylor shows that the modern turn inward is not disastrous but is in fact the result of our long efforts to define and reach the good. At the heart of this definition he finds what he calls the affirmation of ordinary life, a value which has decisively if not completely replaced an older conception of reason as connected to a hierarchy based on birth and wealth. In telling the story of a revolution whose proponents have been Augustine, Montaigne, Luther, and a host of others, Taylor’s goal is in part to make sure we do not lose sight of their goal and endanger all that has been achieved. Sources of the Self provides a decisive defense of the modern order and a sharp rebuff to its critics.

Social Networking and Impression Management: Self-Presentation in the Digital Age, edited by Carolyn Cunningham, offers critical inquiry into how identity is constructed, deconstructed, performed, and perceived on social networking sites (SNSs), such as Facebook, and LinkedIn. The presentation of identity is key to success or failure in the Information Age, especially because SNSs are becoming the dominant form of communication among Internet users. The architecture of SNSs provide opportunities to ask questions such as who am I; what matters to me; and, how do I want others to perceive me? Original research studies in this collection utilize both quantitative and qualitative methods to study a range of issues related to identity management on SNSs including authenticity, professional uses of SNSs, LGBTQ identities, and psychological and cultural impacts. Together, the contributors to this volume draw on current research in the field and offer new theoretical frameworks and research methods to further the conversation on impression management and SNSs, making this text essential for both students and scholars of social media.

This book investigates the relationship between the self and screen in the digital age, and examines how the notion of the self is re-negotiated and curated online. The chapters examine the production of the self in postmodernity through digital platforms by employing key concepts of ubiquity, the everyday, disembodiment and mortality. It locates self-production through ubiquitous imaging of the self and our environments with and through mobile technologies and in terms of its ‘embeddedness’ in our everyday lives. In this innovative text, Yasmin Ibrahim explores technology’s co-location on our corporeal body, our notions of domesticity and banality, our renewed relationship with the screen and our enterprise with capital as well as the role of desire in the formation of the self. The result is a richly interdisciplinary volume that seeks to examine the formation of the self online, through its renewed negotiations with personalised technologies and with the emergence of social networking sites.

It has become popular in recent years to talk about 'identity' as an aspect of engagement with technology - in virtual environments, in games, in social media and in our increasingly digital world. But what do we mean by identity and how do our theories and assumptions about identity affect the kinds of questions we ask about its relationship to technology and learning? Constructing the Self in a Digital World takes up this question explicitly, bringing together authors working from different models of identity but all examining the role of technology in the learning and lives of children and youth.