Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Series Editor's Foreword
- Acknowledgments
- List of Transliterated Names
- List of Figures
- Epigraph
- Introduction: Writing Arab Selfhood – From Taha Husayn to Blogging
- 1 Autobiography and Nation-Building: Constructing Personal Identity in the Postcolonial World
- 2 Writing Selves on Bodies
- 3 Mapping Autobiographical Subjectivity in the Age of Multiculturalism
- 4 Visions of Self: Filming Autobiographical Subjectivity
- 5 What Does My Avatar Say About Me? Autobiographical Cyberwriting and Postmodern Identity
- Conclusion: Arab Autobiography in the Twenty-first Century
- Bibliography
- Index
5 - What Does My Avatar Say About Me? Autobiographical Cyberwriting and Postmodern Identity
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2016
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Series Editor's Foreword
- Acknowledgments
- List of Transliterated Names
- List of Figures
- Epigraph
- Introduction: Writing Arab Selfhood – From Taha Husayn to Blogging
- 1 Autobiography and Nation-Building: Constructing Personal Identity in the Postcolonial World
- 2 Writing Selves on Bodies
- 3 Mapping Autobiographical Subjectivity in the Age of Multiculturalism
- 4 Visions of Self: Filming Autobiographical Subjectivity
- 5 What Does My Avatar Say About Me? Autobiographical Cyberwriting and Postmodern Identity
- Conclusion: Arab Autobiography in the Twenty-first Century
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
When we step through the screen into virtual communities, we reconstruct our identities on the other side of the looking glass. This reconstruction is our cultural work in progress.
Sherry Turkle, Life on the ScreenNew Sites of Autobiographical Production: Autoblography
In the first decades of the twenty-first century, cyberspace has integrated our lives in so many different ways. It is the source of instantaneous information: we read, hear, and watch the ever-changing news cycle, flipping through news channels, eyewitness reports, and individual opinions from every part of the world. It is where popular culture takes place: we read stories, watch films and TV videos, listen to music, and talk about our cultural experiences. It is where much of the social exchanges take place (for many people, it is where all of their social exchanges take place): Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Internet gaming, Blogspot, and a myriad of similar sites provide unprecedented opportunities to construct communication lines between different cultures, generations, genders, and societal groups. In other words, for many, the ever-expanding cyber universe has become a place where a significant part of their living reality takes place.
From the identity studies point of view, cyberspace has truly revolutionized – and continues to do so – both our understanding of selfhood and the ways in which we perform our individual identities on a daily basis. The questions behind cyber identity are so many and so complex that one needs to navigate through all available theories on human subjectivity to even begin unwrapping the implications of cyber-living on general human experience. Avatars, gaming personalities, profiles on dating sites, blogs, twits, chat rooms, and personal webpages such as Facebook provide limitless prospects to create multiple – virtual – versions of our selves. Modern technology offers every one of us with a computer and Internet access a series of reincarnations in cyberspace, and ways to construct virtual bodies however we want and however we want others to see us. Sherry Turkle wrote about contemporary identity-making experiments that the Internet provided a medium for:
Now, in postmodern times, multiple identities are no longer so much on the margins of things.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Autobiographical Identities in Contemporary Arab Culture , pp. 170 - 196Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2014