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Foundations k The Internet, Identity, and Anonymity In his overview of the short history of the field that he defines as cyberculture studies (which has many overlaps with new media studies), David Silver (2000) suggests that the area has moved through three key phases. The first phase he defines as “popular cyberculture,” consisting of descriptive journalism, often in the columns of magazines. The second phase builds on this and is defined as “cyberculture studies”: while more academic and less journalistic, it was marked by equally celebratory literature such as Rheingold’s The Virtual Community (1993) and Turkle’s Life on the Screen (1995). These texts also reflect the focus on virtual communities and online identities that marked this historical phase. Silver claims that we are now in a phase of “critical cybercultural studies,” characterized by a concern with contextualizing cyber-experiences and by the emergence of a broader range of empirical studies of cyber-worlds. Consequently, cyberculture studies are now more theoretically nuanced and more empirically based than they have been in the past. Although the neat chronology of events implied in Silver’s account is somewhat oversimplified, he makes a number of important claims: today, cyberculture studies is increasingly populated by empirical research and focused on a broader range of concerns than identity and community, resulting in more diverse and richer theorizations than existed fifteen years ago. Nevertheless, a number of writers continue to argue that there has been too much focus on identity in cultural studies of the Internet. For example, Christine Hine (2001) proposes that conceiving of web pages as performances of identity fails to acknowledge the social and cultural meaning of web page production; Tara McPherson (2000) argues that instead of focusing on identity play online, we should consider politics and participation, in order to understand cyber-worlds. Furthermore, within 25 Beyond Anonymity, or Future Directions for Internet Identity Research k H e l e n K e n n e d y some sectors of cultural studies, there has been ongoing debate about the usefulness of the very concept of identity—from Stuart Hall’s essay “Who Needs Identity” (1996), which criticizes the essentialist model of human subjectivity embodied in this concept, to more recent literature influenced by the work of Gilles Deleuze, which proposes alternatives to identity such as affect, as more effective starting points for carrying out sociocultural research (e.g., Parisi and Terranova 2001). Despite these critical interventions, the tropes of identity and community endure. This chapter addresses the debates about whether identity remains a useful focus for studies of the Internet and other new media.1 Its aim is to map the field of Internet identity research, to point to some of its limitations, and to suggest some future directions. I question the specific claim in Internet identity research that virtual identities are anonymous (Turkle 1995); some of them might be, but there are problems with this generalized, enduring claim. I argue that online identities are often continuous with offline selves, not reconfigured versions of subjectivities IRL; for this reason it is necessary to go beyond Internet identities, to look at offline contexts of online selves, in order to fully comprehend virtual life. More importantly, the concept of anonymity is problematic because it fixes the relationship between being and feeling in a way that limits the exploration of the significant differences between these two conditions— concepts other than anonymity might therefore be more helpful in conceptualizing Internet identities. If Internet identity research is to reposition itself conceptually , then it needs to engage with and learn from ongoing debates within cultural studies, which call into question the usefulness of the concept of identity . To date, such an engagement has been surprisingly absent from considerations of identity within new media studies, despite the close relationship between these two fields. This engagement may lead Internet identity researchers to start with a different set of conceptual tools than those mobilized to date, which, in turn, might lead to some new conceptual developments within the broader field of new media studies, within which Internet identity research is located. This chapter draws on empirical research into Internet use by a group of ethnic minority women in the UK on Project Her@, which took place in the late 1990s.2 Project Her@ was an experiment in computer-mediated distance learning that aimed to enhance access to university education for women from disadvantaged backgrounds. Fourteen mature (i.e., over twenty-one years old), ethnic minority, working-class women took...

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