Identity Technologies: Constructing the Self Online ed. by Anna Poletti and Julie Rak (review)

The collected essays in Identity Technologies provide not only a timely examination of contemporary digital identity practice but serve as “an experiment in interdisciplinary dialogue” (Poletti and Rak 3). Contributors come from diverse academic backgrounds including (but not limited to) auto/biography and new media studies, borrowing theories and methodologies from each other’s fields as means of interrogating the potentially limiting assumptions of their respective areas of expertise. The volume’s commitments are largely concerned with interdisciplinarity: to demonstrate how auto/biography studies’ recent troubling of notions of subjectivity and concern with how the “self” is produced through representation (5) could nuance work from new media studies and to indicate how auto/biography studies might benefit from imitating the work of new media theorists in their study of “non-narrative forms of identity work” (7), which could rectify auto/biography studies’ previous tendency to focus on those digital genres that most resemble offline autobiographical genres (for example, text-heavy blogs their predecessors online diaries). Recurring concerns in this collection include the situatedness of digital identity within “offline” geographical, economic, and racialized contexts; how the “affordances” of digital interfaces influence the kinds of writing—and by extension, the kinds of “selves”—that are produced; and how the formation online identity is inextricable from digital community and the technologies that enable and direct communities’ formation.

Contributors demonstrate how attention to the offline contexts of digital identity work can add nuance to analyses of how online sociality fits into subject formation overall, an approach that poses productive challenges for auto/biography studies as a field heavy in the text-centric approaches familiar to English departments. Several authors in this work (Kennedy, Cover, Nakamura, Gray) contend that, where possible, scholarship should consider the offline contexts of digital identity construction. Online and offline selves are not separate entities; rather, they are continuous, mutually influential, and involve many of the same self-fashioning practices insofar as both online and offline performances operate in response to the “ongoing cultural demand that we process our selves and our actions into coherence, intelligibility, and recognizability” (Cover 56). The authors in this collection criticize the tendency in scholarship to focus on the novelty of the technologies themselves, a tendency that promotes the misconception that communication technologies are producers of effects, rather than “cultural elements of the complexity of human interactions” (Gray 171).

Authors in this volume set a precedent for how to read closely in online environments, a practice that must take into consideration the various contexts and contingencies that contribute to online identity performance. The concept of “affordances,” which is key to this collection, refers to those properties (overt and covert) of a digital interface that determine how it will be used and, consequently, the kinds of identities that will be enacted using a particular social platform in the context of computerized environments. Essays in Identity Technologies (notably those by Gregg, Morrison, Rivard, and McNeill) are nuanced by an awareness of how the tools and functions built into the platforms we use impact the character of our self-disclosure, and therefore shape the selves we create. This concept is most explicitly referred to in Aimée Morrison’s study of the history of the Facebook status in its various iterations over time, analyzing how subtle changes in how the empty field coaxes information affects the kind of updates and narratives that are registered.

This volume contains several essays about digital communities (Gray, Banner, Micalizzi, Bouclin, Kennedy). One insight that emerges is that digital identity develops in relation to digital community in ways that are continuous with offline communities: we find that identity in the context of digital communities is a result of both “interior process” and “relationships that contribute to the creation of an interwoven fabric of ontological stories” (Micalizzi 218). However, authors are cognizant that digital communities come with affordances and interest specific to their platforms, and which move subjectivities in often new directions, as...