Deadline: June 15, 2010
The popularity of social networking sites, user-generated content, wireless technologies and games has engendered a rapid proliferation of identities and ways to imagine, produce and consume them. As a result, the internet has become central to how many of its users understand intimacy, communication and community. We contend that this phenomenon is nothing new. Online and offline forms of identity have the potential to act genealogically, challenging our ideas about utopian approaches to the internet as a place without history, bodies or politics.
How then can we understand what identity means online and why it is so important to so many internet users that they have a digital existence? For us, answers to this question do not have to take the form of utopian ideas about internet identities, time and space, but should admit that issues about internet identity are inevitably embedded in concerns about the production of discourse and about the material conditions of internet access, surveillance and use.
In this essay collection, we hope to gather together investigations into a whole host of questions raised by the popularity and power of identity technologies. What kinds of selves are generated online? How do memory and narrative, key elements of autobiography, exist and persist in various forms of online subjectivity? How is identity related to virtual time and space? How do we account for the role of recreation and entertainment in communicating an online self? How do we describe and analyze the relationship between hardware and software design and the identities they occasion and transmit? Is it possible to resist the hail of ITs (internet technologies)? What is the relationship between identity politics and ITs? We aim to bring together emerging ideas about identity and online life from the fields of cultural studies, new media studies and auto/biography studies in order to explore what online identity is and what it might mean.
Please submit a completed essay by June 15, 2010. Essays must be 4000-6000 words in Chicago B style with 12-point font. Essays must be written in English, but they do not have to be about the anglophone, western version of the internet. The collection will be published in digital and paper form with a university press. We welcome submissions which include--but are not limited to--the following topics:
theorizing online identity
questions of pedagogy
research methods
youth cultures and emerging identities
social networking
virtual lives
online desires
collaboration
biography and technology
work
shopping
hardware and software
publicity and privacy
regulation
identity theft
personal video
cyberbodies and cyberspaces
avatars
internet surveillance
archives
viruses and "going viral"
deception and authenticity
activism
Send one copy each of your submission as an electronic attachment to:
Anna Poletti, Charles Sturt University (apoletti@csu.edu.au)
Julie Rak, University of Alberta (julie.rak@ualberta.ca)
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