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This collection is an experiment in interdisciplinary dialogue. As scholars of autobiography, we are intensely interested in the rise of autobiographical discourse in contemporary culture. Nowhere is the power and diversity of the autobiographical more visible than online, where it is the raison d’être for many of the activities and practices associated with Web 2.0, and where acquiring and maintaining online identities make up the core activities of many users. Research into how identity is presented online is occurring in a number of fields, such as auto/biography studies (a widely used term for the study of autobiography, biography, and life writing), communications and new media studies, cultural studies, education, game studies, psychology, and sociology. Each field draws upon its own methods and prominent theorists to gather data and analyze the diverse range of identity technologies that have become available. Each field, too, rests on a confidence in the methods and approaches it deploys to undertake this research, and how the key questions and issues raised by the spread of identity technologies are to be identified and defined. As our individual research interests have led us further into the analysis and theorizing of online identity, we have become excited by the prospect of creating a bridge between auto/biography studies and media studies, which could be mutually beneficial to researchers in both fields. The aim of this bridge is to productively challenge a founding assumption, or tendency, in each field, using the approaches and ways of thinking of the other in order to problematize “identity ” as a frame through which to examine online texts and practices. To do this, we have included a mix of new and established scholarship on the topic of online identity from the areas of media studies, sociology, cultural studies, and auto/ biography studies. This variety of approaches brings together a range of examples of how “identity” can be read in order to encourage researchers and students in Introduction Digital Dialogues k A n n a P o l e t t i and J u l i e R a k 3 the field to revisit the question of what it means to pay attention to identity online. As researchers adapt the methods of their discipline to the expanding field of identity technologies, we must question how preexisting ways of defining , identifying, and interpreting online texts shape not only what is visible as evidence of online identity but also the conclusions drawn about that evidence. We realize that it is not possible to trace the contours of each approach to online identity in their entirety, but we do think that it is possible to think about how the study of online media can benefit from the insights of auto/biography studies about identity construction. In turn, auto/biography studies could benefit from the long engagement scholars from media studies and other disciplines have had with specific aspects of online life. Beyond thinking about specific software packages or hardware designs, this book discusses what it actually means to be online and to have an online life, and the ways in which we can study this question in all its complexity. Identity Technologies represents one way to approach these issues. Why Study Online Identity? It is now commonplace to assume that personal identity work is foundational to the production of social media and even of hardware interfaces. There are many possible reasons for this. One reason involves the connection of Web 2.0—with its insistence on digital forms of participation between individuals— to liberal ideas of subjectivity. Internet subjects can be many things: they can be citizens, consumers, participants, gamers, lurkers, or stalkers, but generally the conditions of Internet subjectivity remain indebted to classic liberalism. Internet users understand themselves to be individuals who are unique, have agency, and exhibit commonly understood forms of consciousness, as discussed by Helen Kennedy in her foundational article (this volume, 25–41). Arguably, the structure of the Internet works to support this understanding of identity, which originated in Europe, spread via various forms of print culture, and became part of Western ideas about what the self is. These assumptions about the subject have continued to travel worldwide, via the grammar of Internet interfaces. Moreover , if these conditions of selfhood are not present, then there are usually traces of active resistance to normative Internet culture present as well (Rak 2005). Therefore, the study of online activity needs to take into account ideas about what identity is, how it is formed...

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