Lecture 3: Identity, Ideology

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Lecture 3 Identity, Ideology the Web
Player Name Karsten (Germany)

• Professor Daniel Bernardi

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In the last lecture

• Ideology Identity
• Fiskes Ideology
• What does ideology have to do with identity
  online?

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In this lecture

• Turkles MUD?
• Whats the relationship between role playing and
  identity?
• MUD Genders

Sherry Turkle, Ph.D.
Lecture Hint Pause the lecture and click on one
of the hyperlinks (text that is underlined).
Return to the lecture after you have visited the
site.
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Turkles MUD?

• Lecture 3 Part 1

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Turkles MUD

• Internet-Based Multi-User Domain
• AKA Multi-User Dungeons
• Origin in Dungeons and Dragons
• You Play as You or as a Role
• You Can Be Any Species or Alien
• You Can Be Any Gender or Race
• Fuzzy Boundaries Lead to Parallel Lives
• Role Playing is a Form of Identity Construction-A
  Construction of Self

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The Self

• In the MUDs, the projections of self are engaged
  in a resolutely postmodern context. Authorship is
  not only displaced from a solitary voice, it is
  exploded. The self is not only decentered but
  multiplied without limit. There is an
  unparalleled opportunity to play with one's
  identity and to try out new ones.
• - Sherry Turkle (1997)

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Reminds One of Halls Identity

• Local yet Global
• Historical Process
• Fragmented
• We have now to re-conceptualize identity
  as a process of identification, and that is a
  different matter. It is something that happens
  over time, that is never absolutely stable, that
  is subject to the play of history and the play of
  difference.
• - Stuart Hall (1991)

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Authoring Identity

• Authorship is not only displaced from a solitary
  voice, it is exploded. The MUDs are authored by
  their players, thousands of people in all, often
  hundreds of people at a time, all logged on from
  different places. And the self is not only
  decentered but multiplied without limit. There is
  an unparalleled opportunity to play with one's
  identity and to try out new ones.
• - Sherry Turkle (1997)

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In MUDs

• Social interactions are built not received.
• Local, Global, Historical / Not Physical
• Virtual (you can navigate, converse, build, play,
  lie and discover) / Meaningful
• Ideologies Are Not Always Naturalized

Resistance isnt futile!
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Resistance is Possible

• Engagement with computational technology
  facilitates a series of second chances for
  adults to work and rework unresolved personal
  issues and more generally, to think through
  questions about the nature of self, including
  questions about definitions of life,
  intentionality, and intelligence.
• - Sherry Turkle (1997)

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Whats the relationship between role playing and
identity?

• Lecture 3 Part 2

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Playing Identity

• I have found that individuals use computers to
  work through identity issues that center around
  control and mastery in the second, where the
  computer is used as a communications medium,
  there is more room to use the control provided by
  the computer to develop a greater capacity for
  collaboration and even intimacy. The medium
  enables the self to explore a social context as
  well as to reflect on its own nature and powers.
  .
• - Sherry Turkle (1997)

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MUD Possibilities

• Work on the Self
• Think About Community
• Question Gender and Race
• Avoid Nation and Nationalism
• Create Meaningful Relationships
• Fall in Love
• Make Friends
• Leaving the Real World Behind

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Example Peter

• It is from MUDs that Peter has learned what he
  knows of politics, of economics, of the
  differences between capitalism and welfare state
  socialism. He revels in the differences between
  the styles of Americans and Europeans on the MUDs
  and in the thrill of speaking to a player in
  Norway who can see the Northern lights.
• - Sherry Turkle (1997)

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Example Robert

• it kept him from what he called his "suicidal
  thoughts," in essence by keeping him too busy to
  have them it kept him from drinking it enabled
  him to function with responsibility and
  competency as a highly placed administrator it
  afforded an emotional environment where he could
  be in complete control of how much he revealed
  about his life
• - Sherry Turkle (1997)

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The Big Point

• Virtual communities such as MUDs are the most
  dramatic example of the way the culture of
  simulation challenges traditional notions of
  human identity. Indeed, they make possible the
  construction of an identity that is so fluid and
  multiple that it strains the very limits of the
  notion. Identity, after all, literally means
  one.
• - Sherry Turkle (1997)

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Remember Halls Collective Identities

• Cultural (Race, Ethnicity)
• Economic (Class)
• Gendered and Sexualized
• Nationalized / Globalized / Alien
• Identities, for Hall, are always
• crossed and re-crossed by several historical
  formations.

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MUD Genders
Play the Michael Jackson iModule

• Lecture 3 Part 3

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Turkles Subjects

• Gender Swapping
• Worked Through Personal Issues Around Sexuality
  and Gender
• Famine
• Masculine
• People were using gender swapping as a first
  hand experience through which to form ideas about
  the role of gender in human interactions.
• Sherry Turkle (1997)

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Resistance in Play

• MUDding throws issues of the impact of gender on
  human relations into relief and brings the issue
  home the seriousness and intensity of
  discussions of gender among MUDders speaks to the
  fact that the game allows its players to
  experience rather than merely observe what it
  feels like to be the opposite gender or to have
  no gender at all.
• - Sherry Turkle (1997)

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Virtual Reality is Real

• MUDs Facilitate Personal Relationships
• MUD Relations Can be Meaningful
• Meaningful Relations are Real
• The Reality is One of Thinking, Experimenting,
  Questioning and Acting in Both Universes

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Cyborg ConsciousnessBlade Runner or Bust

• As we live in a world of cyborgs, the important
  distinctions may not follow from a priori
  essences but from ongoing relationships.
• Sherry Turkle (1997)
• Think
• Homo-Cybernetics

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Identity is about the Future

• Watch for a nascent culture of virtual reality
  that underscores the ways in which we construct
  gender and the self, the ways in which we become
  what we play, argue about, and build. And watch
  for a culture that leaves new space for the idea
  that he or she who plays, argues, and builds
  might be doing so with a machine .
• - Sherry Turkle (1997)

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End of Lecture 3
Julie Sweeneys Pat

• Next Lecture
• Gender MUDs