Internet, Identity, the new sociological frontier

So our final project for this class was on identity as it relates to the internet. This topic has intrigued me for quite some time and I’ve had many conversations with friends about it as well. In the paper my group members and I investigated several different aspects, I distributed a survey asking people what they thought about their own usage of the internet and how it related to their identity.

What I found was that most people thought they did not display a different identity on the internet than in real life, which I think in general was true. It was interesting though that some females felt freer from social forces online, they thought they could be more sassy and flirtatious in a low-stakes way even with potential partners they knew in real life. This exemplified how many thought that the internet was a shield, though a permeable and imperfect one that could fail them if they put too much reliance on it.

The other piece of information that appealed to me the most was from respondents who had just graduated high school in the past 5 years. Those people almost unanimously said that they felt they had adopted different personalities online while in high school but that they had left them behind as they grew older. Well, not that they had left them behind but that they had converged over time.

This aspect of divergent and convergent personalities between the internet and real life is really what is most appealing to me about this subject. My friends and I have often spoken of how we feel we are the “bridge generation” between those who began accessing the internet sometime after adolescence and those who have had the internet as a ubiquitous tool and icon all their lives.

The internet became a social tool while we were in our teens. We were the first ones to begin discovering what it meant to explore your weaknesses in a truly alternate world at a time in life when you thought nearly everything about you was a vulnerability. This of course doesn’t mean that the internet was an absolutely safe place to delve into what identities we might want to grow into. It did give us a place where we could find spaces to examine and think about who we were and be totally removed from the real world yet still be able to jump right back into our normal lives if we needed to.

The people around my age were the ones who first began to realize this aspect of the internets potential and I think that our internet and real life selves as compared to those much older or younger than us is a very valuable relationship to investigate.

The data I collected with my surveys was very telling but I must admit they were rudimentary and slap-dash at best. I would enjoy the opportunity, if it came a long in the future, to do another version of these surveys, conduct interviews and do further research on this topic. I feel that this is probably the most important piece of sociological work to be done in the present day as it governs such a huge section of our social interactions and yet it really is not very well understood.

Between Straight and Gay is totally...

“Between Straight and Gay” has taken its place in my mind as my favorite ethnographic study. Though this was mainly in its style. The novel-esque direction that Tillman-Healy takes is really quite engaging and allows one to really get the feel of the community she is interacting with in a way that purely academic ethnography cannot. I also appreciated that she realized that it is impossible to do an objective study of this kind, it is as in all experiments: you cannot make an observation of something without disturbing it on some level or another.

However, I believe that what she thought she was studying was not at all what was really going on. Her premise of “I want to see how friendship dynamics between straight and gay men work and what is contained within them” should have been modified to “I want to see how friendship dynamics between straight and gay men work when the straight man is in the minority rather than the majority”.

Tillman-Healy’s book subject needs so many more qualifiers before it can be applied to anything else in the world that it pretty much becomes useless as anything beyond a meta guide to doing an ethnographic study. “relationships between a group of gay men and a straight couple from the midwest in Florida in the mid 1990s” doesn’t really help anyone out in general application.

Personally I think that she should have tried to study pre-existing friendships between straight and gay men where there was more of a balance between the sexualities. I have two friends who are roommates, one straight and one is gay. I have spoken to the straight one, Deck, about the book and he seems interested in how it would apply to his friendship with Ryan. I don’t think it would apply very much at all however. When I hang out with them we've pretty much got the spectrum covered, and in this interaction and others I've never known anyone who felt they were 'invading' a gay community if they just happened to be the only straight one there. Maybe they felt like a foreigner, but never in a negative way thats been expressed to me.

I’m not really sure where I’m going with this. I guess my main point is that to me Tillman-Healy’s book seems to be more about how to write a Ph.D. in ethnography and sociology than to actually examine her relationships with the men involved in a meaningful way.