Showing our Beliefs in our Creative Efforts: some thoughts

Something our class visitors said on Thursday really struck me.  One of them said something to the effect of: Non-mormons are getting rich off of The Book of Mormon Broadway musical, but a church member would have been afraid to title a musical that, thinking it would turn people away.  We're paying for that reluctance because other people are using The Book of Mormon and maybe not portraying us in a way that we would like.

Can you see the truth in this?  When we fall silent about the church, in our creative efforts or in our conversations online and  offline, other people come in and say what we wouldn't say, how we wouldn't have said it.

As I looked for more possible sources of social proof for the Mormon badge project, I ran across this NBC interview with Matthew Bowman, a church member and religion professor at Campden-Sydney College.  The interview was to discuss misconceptions about Mormon doctrine in the song "I Believe," from, you guessed it, The Book of Mormon musical.  I think Bowman did a great job of explaining our beliefs and clarifying the problems in the song.  Check it out: http://rockcenter.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/08/23/13436403-true-or-false-how-accurate-is-the-book-of-mormon-song-i-believe

I think it is really important that members engaged in creative efforts periodically include evidence of their spirituality in their work, and as appropriate, include positive and accurate portrayals of the Church.  As a poet, I guess that means I should try more often to include spiritual themes in my work.  Here is a preliminary attempt that I wrote for my poetry workshop class last week.  Feedback appreciated.  This poem is definitely in beta. :)

Tools of His Trade

Ellis Clark Dyck

In a moment carved from heaven’s timelessness,
Jesus walks alone, barefoot
down miles of gold paving stones,
past fresh snowfall mansions glittering
in the ubiquitous, source-less light,
to his workshop.

It’s a small house, diamond bright,
except for the unadorned cedar door,
which he opens, entering with a smile
for the golden light lofting
a million motes of sawdust
and for the scent of cedar,
maple, and rosewood rising like incense.

Here, the tools of His trade,
the bronze headed chisels, the hand adze
and hand saw, the bow drill and brad awl,

the whetstone waiting for His hand.

He goes to the work bench, begins
again the work of carving and shaping.

With the adze he planes timbers from Lebanese cedars
for a fishing boat that could have carried him
over the choppy waters of Galilee,
on a day when sunrays burned his neck red
and squeezed sweat from his temples and back,
a miraculous day of living that the Gospels forgot.

Reaching for a mallet to pound a plank in place,
he thinks briefly of the Roman nails,
how he gave up his hands
long before the cross,
forsook Joseph’s sunlit workshop
for the fishermen and tax collectors

and well women who would follow Him.

He does not regret His trade,
 but as he prepares to leave, brushing
sawdust and shavings from his clothes,
he wills his omniscience to ignore
a single curl of cedar
clinging to the hem of His robe.

Reflections on the Media Fast: We Are so Lucky

My media fast was more like Jalena’s idea of a media diet for a day.  I committed to only use the Internet for work and school, not to listen to music, and only to use my telephone to communicate with family.  This wasn’t that different than my normal media use because lately I rarely use social media except for this class.  I felt slightly more tempted than usual to use the Internet in other ways just because I knew I couldn’t, but resisted.   So in summary I didn’t feel like this experience was a big change from the routine.  In the past I’ve had problems with using too much social media or surfing aimlessly, but lately I’ve been pretty minimalist in my Internet use. 

But what the media fast did do for me was, ironically, make me really grateful for media technology.  I started thinking how difficult it would have been for me to give up my phone entirely by switching it off.  I use it as a watch, I use it at the supermarket to call my husband to remind me what we decided to buy, I use it as a timer when I’m baking, I use it to talk to my family in North Idaho (and I like to talk to them a lot).  Just not being able to check the time would have driven me crazy.  What an amazing tool! 

And what if I didn’t have the Internet for schoolwork?  This semester I’m taking an online section of Physical Science.  Because I just married and my husband lives in Cedar City, I spend four days a week in Provo and go home on Thursday afternoons for the weekend.  It was hard to find classes that didn’t meet on Friday, and if it weren’t for my online class, I would have one less day to spend with my husband—that is a big deal to me. 

Not to mention that email and facebook let me keep in touch with some (thought not all) of my converts in Argentina, people I have no way of seeing.  

I expected the media fast to alert me to the ways the “machines” were controlling me.  Instead it reminded me what a tremendous blessing most media technology is, reminded me especially of the ways it keeps me connected and even makes it easier for me to be with the people I love.  We are so lucky to live in the Digital Age.

Ideas for Mormon Info Badges Project

Thanks, everyone, for the social feedback about my Mormon info badges today.  We all know there is a lot of misinformation or sometimes just a lack of information about the Church.  We’ve all been annoyed by people who share their false assumptions about the church without bothering to check facts.  But at this moment, because of all the Romney hype, everyone wants to know what Mormonism is about.  It’s our chance to help people get informed and get accurate.  Here are some more specific ideas about the project: 

Purpose
Use badges to inform people with little to no knowledge about the Church about our basic beliefs and clarify common misconceptions or controversies.  Create publicity for the project by encouraging people to push their badges to their blogs or social media profiles so others will see them and want to earn them too.

Project Tasks

·         Learn Mozilla specs, how badge-baking (I think this just means embedding a link to the host website into the badge icon) works.

·         Write badge content.  I imagine reading material followed by multiple choice questions to test knowledge.  Any different ideas? 

·         Design host website for badges.

·         Design attractive looking badge icons that will catch people’s attention.

·         Find a way to publicize: get large numbers of BYU students to earn the badges, post them, and invite non-member friends to earn them?  It would be great to release the badges before the election.

Possible Badges and Content – I’m not sure how many we’ll want to make.  How many is too many?  I think it would be best if each badge only took 5-10 minutes to complete, but what do you guys think?  We want them to be accessible, but I certainly don’t want people doing a 5 minute badge and thinking they know everything about the church.  Here are some ideas for badges.  The bolded words are badge titles.

·         How Was Mormonism Founded?

o   Prophets and apostasy (define term: restoration)

o   First Vision

o   Book of Mormon

o   Missionary efforts today

·         What Do Mormons Believe about God?   (this badge could maybe be combined with the following two badges under the title What Do Mormons Believe?, but I thought it might be too long.)

o   God is our loving Heavenly Father

o   3 separate beings

o   God has a body like ours

o   Heavenly Mother too!

·         What Scriptures Do Mormons Use?

o   Book of Mormon

o   Bible

o   Doctrine and Covenants

o   Pearl of Great Price

·         What Do Mormons Believe about Family and Community?

o   Eternal families

o   Importance of Service

·         Why Mormons Don’t Drink Coffee

o   Word of Wisdom background

o   Good: fruits, grains, small amount of meat  Bad: tea, coffee, tobacco, illegal drugs, alcohol

·         Articles of Faith (a short explanation of each one)

·         Mormon Controversies: Polygamy

o   Brief history of polygamy in the Church and the Manifesto.

o   NO member in good standing practices polygamy.

o   Polygamist groups in S. Utah, Arizona, etc. are NOT affiliated with the church in any way.

·         Mormon Controversies: Banning the Priesthood to Blacks

o   For their times, early church members were racially progressive and opposed slavery.

o   President Kimball and the lifting of the ban in 1978.

o   Statement by President Hinckley warning against racism, BoM scripture that says all are alike unto God, both black and white, male and female, etc.

·         Mormon Controversies: Women and the Church

o   Women have played an important part in the Church since its founding.

o   Although women do not hold the priesthood, they do serve in some leadership positions.  (Women and men have complementary roles.)

o   Relief Society?

o   General authority quotes about the importance of women, respecting women, etc, including quotes by female general authorities.

o   Maybe some quotes by regular Mormon women about how they feel about Mormonism and womanhood.

·         Meet a Mormon

o   Mormons come from all parts of the world and all walks of life.  Some of them probably have a lot in common with you!

o   This badge would require participants to read a certain number of mormon.org profiles.  But we’d have to make it clear our badges aren’t affiliated with mormon.org.

So, who wants to work on this project?  What suggestions do you have (even if you don’t want to be a project member)?  Which badges do you like?  What others would you suggest?

A Lesson from the Importance of Being Earnest: Credibility’s Relationship with Identity and What this Means for Badges

As I’ve thought about how credibility can be established on the Internet, especially the credibility of badges, I’ve realized that identity has a lot to do with it.  Often we find people credible because of who their identity in society—usually their identity as a licensed professional or recognized scholar.  But as I mentioned in my last post, the Internet floods us with information from millions of different people, many of whom don’t have an identity that establishes their credibility.  Often, we have very little information about their identity at all.  So we’re often left confused, not knowing how to verify the credibility of all the people who post information online.

scene in Oscar Wilde’s play, The Importance of Being Earnest, reminded me of this dilemma.  Jack, who assumes the name of Ernest when he is in town, was adopted as a baby and does not know who his parents are.  Thus not only does he use an assumed identity, his identity as part of a family is unknown.  When Jack proposes marriage to Gwendolen, she accepts him because she thinks his name is Earnest.  Likewise, sometimes it is easy to create credibility with an online identity.  So far so good.  But when Jack tries to break the news to his potential mother-in-law, Lady Bracknell, she rejects him because she can’t establish his identity.

When Lady Bracknell interviews Jack to determine his eligibility, she first wants to know if his answers to her questions are satisfactory.  Likewise, we all expect accurate and interesting information from the material we read online and often reject information that appears blatantly inaccurate.  We may be looking for a certain kind of information or content and reject material that doesn’t fit what we are looking for.  Take a look at this excerpt:

LADY BRACKNELL: I am quite ready to enter your name, should your answers be what a really affectionate mother requires.  Do you smoke?

JACK: Well, yes, I must admit I smoke.

LADY BRACKNELL: I am glad to hear it.  A man should always have an occupation of some kind.  There are far too many idle men in London as it is.

So far, so good.  Jack has passed the first test because his content fits Lady Bracknell’s criteria.  But then, as Internet users often do, Lady Bracknell wants to know his identity.  Can she trust his apparently satisfactory content?

LADY BRACKNELL: Now to minor matters.  Are your parents living?

JACK: I have lost both my parents.

LADY BRACKNELL: Both? . . . That seems like carelessness.  Who was your father?  He was evidently a man of some wealth.  Was he born in what the Radical papers call the purple of commerce, or did he rise from the ranks of the aristocracy?

JACK: I’m afraid I really don’t know.

Jack must then reveal the embarrassing truth that he was found abandoned inside a handbag in a train station.  In other words, his content may be good, but his credentials, and thus his credibility to Lady Bracknell, are nonexistent:

LADY BRACKNELL: You can hardly imagine that I and Lord Bracknell would dream of allowing our only daughter—a girl brought up with the utmost care—to marry into a cloakroom, and form an alliance with a parcel?

So Jack’s satisfactory content is rejected because of his lack of credibility, or rather, both his obscured identity and his lack of an appropriate one.

So what does this mean for the future of badges?  Will links showing the exact identity of the badge issuer be sufficient to calm credibility qualms?  Or will the credibility test fail if the badge issuer is merely a small business or an enthusiasts’ group rather than a community college?

Evaluating the Credibility of Badges

Noticing that several of my classmates (Katie Cannon Wilkie for instance) have expressed interest in badges,  I’m going to continue learning more about them.  I think the idea of badges is a great one, but the question is, can it work?  We’ve discussed possible difficulties in having people accept these badges as legal tender in accreditation.  Professor Burton in particular has posed some issues with credibility online in a recent post.  So in this blog post I’d like to explore credibility—generating some preliminary ideas about how badges might gain credibility.

Today I found a research article on EBSCOhost from the Journal of Communication.  The researcher, Miriam J. Metzger, investigated the way Internet users evaluate credibility online.  She found that users in her study increasingly used social and group based methods to evaluate the credibility of online content.

Early on in her paper I found a paragraph that stated clearly for me the basic problems in determining credibility online:

“These concerns are reflected by Callister (2000), who argued that standard conventions of determining credibility break down in cyberspace. Traditional solutions

to credibility include granting credibility to some representative believed to provide reliable information (e.g., the government) or granting it by credential (e.g.,

expertise). This works, he says, only when there are a limited number of sources

and when there are high barriers for access to public dissemination of information

because these conditions create a meritocratic filtering process.—only those with

something of merit to say are published, put on the air, or allowed to teach/practice. . . The Internet presents a very different environment—one of information

abundance—which makes traditional models of gatekeeper oversight untenable. In

such an environment, people must defer to external sources of knowledge on a very

large scale, resulting in a ‘‘radical externalization of the processes involved in trust

assessment.” (Metzger 412)

To summarize, because there are so many sources of information on the Internet, traditional methods of judging credibility (relying on credentialed) are less useful.  Badges are a good example of this problem.  Because anyone, not just accredited organizations, can create badges, there has to be a new way to evaluate if a particular badge issuer is credible.  I’ve mentioned in a previous post that the badge itself will contain a link to the issuer’s website.  This helps, but users still need ways to evaluate whether that website proves issuer credibility.

Metzger’s study participants reported that they used a lot of social media to evaluate claims, such as customer evaluations and user ratings.  Another quote from Metzger’s article:

In the words of Madden and Fox (2006), socialcomputing tools and applications can ‘‘replace the authoritative heft of traditional institutions with the surging wisdom of crowds’’  The result may be a shift from a model of single authority based on scarcity and hierarchy to a model of multiple distributed authorities based on information abundance and networks of peers. (415)

Could user ratings help give credibility to badges?  I think so, but there would be a lot of trial and error involved.  For instance, an employer might have to hire someone based on their badges and see if they really have the skills they claim.  Once several employers had done this and posted comments, then new potential employers could begin to discern which badges and badge issuers were reliable.

Now here are some questions for my classmates: How do you evaluate credibility online?  Do you think that “the wisdom of crowds” can really discern credible from non-credible information, especially as related to badges?

Still interested? Here’s the link to my social-proof seeking comment on a P2PU blog post about badge credibility: http://info.p2pu.org/2012/08/15/what-if-people-make-bad-badges-p2pus-plan-of-action/#comment-654715909

A Snapshot of Internet Activism: the Zapatistas of Chiapas

Some of you may remember my blog post last week about the book @ Is for Activism.  The basic idea was that the rapid and decentralized transfer of information on the Internet allowed activists to organize and spread their message with little interference from censors.

Today I'd like to share a real life example of Internet activism that I learned about in my class on Hispanic-American Culture.  In Chiapas, a state in southern Mexico, the revolutionary group Ejercito Zapatista de Liberacion Nacional (EZLN or Zapatista Army of National Liberation) uses the Internet to disseminate information, organize, and promote their cause.

The EZLN came into the public spotlight on January 1, 1994, when they seized control of the town San Cristobal de las Casas and of several other small towns to protest the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) which came into effect the same day.  The Mexican government quickly sent troops and retook the town, but the Zapatista message was now on the world's radar.

The EZLN is composed mostly of indigenous Mayan residents in Chiapas, though their main spokesperson, Subcomandante Marcos, is not indigenous.  They protest NAFTA because it floods the Mexican market with cheap produce from the U.S. that poor rural farmers can't compete with.  NAFTA also removed a clause from the Mexican constitution stipulating that the government would give lands to indigenous people.

Since 1994, the EZLN has used mostly non-violent methods to promote their cause. One of their main methods?  The Internet.  Instead of staying local, the EZLN has used the Internet to go global.
The documentary A Place Called Chiapas, produced in 1996, spends considerable time emphasizing the movement's use of the Internet.  It includes an interview with a member of the EZLN leadership whose sole responsibility is to create support through publicity online.  The EZLN have their own website, http://enlacezapatista.ezln.org.mx/, which gives regular updates on the movement.  They also have an online magazine, Rebeldia (Rebellion), at revistarebeldia.org.  Since the organization thrives on the anonymity of its leaders, who wear masks in public, the Internet is a useful way to spread information anonymously.

What I find most interesting is how the Internet allowed the Zapatista's to go global instead of staying local.  In 1996 the EZLN issued an open invitation  to a conference in Chiapas via their website to people all over the world interested in their cause and in broader issues of social justice.  A few thousand people from several different countries showed up to debate issues surrounding the rebellion and show support for the cause.  More recently, from December 28, 2007 to January 1, 2008, the EZLN organized the Third Encuentro of the Zapatistas People with the People of the World.  

Whether you agree with the Zapatista cause or not, isn't it AWESOME that a relatively unknown and small political movement in rural Mexico could use the Internet to garner international support?  I love how in response to the online invitation, people from all over the world came to show support for the Zapatistas.  The Internet isn't just good news for activists.  It's good news for anyone who cares about what humans on different parts of the globe are going through.  The Internet helps us stay informed about important issues, gives us more avenues to contribute to or show support for far-away causes, and helps us organize with people across the globe.  And every once in a while it gets us invited to a big fiesta in southern Mexico.

The Importance of Being What? Issues of Identity in Social Media in Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest

Identity is an interesting subject in social media because social media users can carefully curate information about themselves and constantly reshape their identity(ies), even assuming false ones. 

In Oscar Wilde’s play The Importance of Being Earnest, two young men, Algernon and Jack, already accustomed to manipulate their  own identities and assume or create false ones, must reshape their representations of identity to win the hearts of Cecily and Gwendolyn, who are both convinced they must marry men named Ernest. 

The title itself offers a play on words about identity.  Which is more important for Algernon and Jack?  To be (named) Ernest, or to be earnest with their sweethearts?  Algernon and Jack both pretend to be named Ernest, but before the end of the play they are discovered.  Cecily and Gwendolyn are shocked and hurt that they have been lied to, but acquiesce to marriage when Algernon and Jack agree to be christened Ernest.  This dishonesty when discovered is harmful, but false identity triumphs.

In the blogging world, honesty can often win you a wider audience.  For instance, revealing details about personal struggles creates interest and sympathy in readers.  On the other hand, users in the online dating scene may hide details about themselves or make things up to attract future mates.

Using varying levels of earnestness in different online venues and situations creates multiple representations of identity or multiple identities.  On Facebook it might get you more “likes” to represent yourself as a partier by posting pictures of the funny things you did while you were drinking, but on Linkedin you would want to project a more sober, professional identity.

Likewise, in the play Jack goes by different names in the city and in the country.  In the city, he uses the false name of Ernest, even with his friend Algernon.  In the country, where he cares for his young ward Cecily, he goes by his real name Jack and blames his frequent visits to the city on a wayward brother, Ernest, who constantly needs to be helped out of scrapes.

Though Jack and Algernon both have real and fake identities, in a sense neither of them ever reveals their true identity.  Both characters play the dandy and never say anything serious.  In effect, no matter which identity they choose, they are constantly play acting.  To draw another parallel, are any of our online identities really us?  To what extent do we show our real, personal selves in the digital world and to what extent to we spend our time acting, hidden by the virtual smokescreen? 

Open Badges: the Future of Learning

We might ask, when shall we cease to learn?
I will give you my opinion about it;
never, never. . . . We shall never cease to learn, unless
we apostatize from the religion of Jesus Christ.
--Brigham Young 

Part of the Mormon belief system is a high value placed on continual learning.  At BYU, one of the 4 aims of a BYU education is Lifelong Learning and Service.  ". . .a BYU diploma is a beginning, not an end, pointing the way to a habit of constant learning." In today's world, many resources offer us opportunities to continue learning after graduation.  The Internet gives us thousands of sources to expand our knowledge and learn new skills, as well as linking us to experts who can help us learn.  Many communities and organizations offer classes and learning opportunities offline.  Finally, we can learn through experience in the workplace and in other settings.  But there's one problem: How can we get recognition for learning gained outside of a university?

Enter Mozilla's openbadges.org.  It's a bright new idea that offers us a way to get "credit" for learning done outside a traditional University setting.  Not only could this system help us qualify for jobs, it could encourage us to continue learning and mastering skills throughout our lives, long after we have left school.  Here is how it works:

Any organization can download Mozilla's Open Badge Infrastructure (OBI) and use it to issue badges to earners, showing mastery of specific knowledge or skills.  A badge is an online graphic with an embedded link to information about the earner's skills and to the issuing organization's website.  When your organization issues you a badge, they email it to you and you can choose whether or not to post it in your Mozilla badge backpack.  You can share your backpack link with others to let them see what skills you have.  Badges are also exportable to any website, so you can display your certifications on your blog, on social media profiles, and anywhere you want!

I think of it kind of like a Red Cross first aid certification.  When you've satisfactorily completed the first aid course, you get a wallet-sized card proving you are certified.  So a badge is like that Red Cross wallet card, except you can display it online and earn badges for a huge variety of skills!  For instance, if you volunteer frequently with disabled kids, your organization could award you a badge indicating your skill level in working with disabled children, which you could display online to potential employers, possibly leading to a job in that field.

Openbadges.org is still in beta form, so there aren't many badges to earn yet.  But some badges are available through Peer 2 Peer University (P2PU), a Mozilla initiative to help people learn together online.  (This could be a whole other blog post!)  By 2013 though, we should start seeing a lot more participating badge issuers.

Here are some questions you might have with answers I adapted from openbadges.org:

Are badges just for people without degrees?
Not at all!  Degrees indicate that a person has knowledge in a specific field, but don't indicate exactly what they've learned. Two people with the same degree might have different skill sets.  For instance, an English major who took several classes in British literature would have different skills than one who focused on literature and film.  Badges are a way to show what specific skills a person has acquired in their field.  They can complement degrees, not just compete with them.

How is the badge backpack different than a resume?
It can be difficult to verify information someone puts on their resumes.  In contrast, because each badge in your backpack contains a link to the badge issuer and to information about your learning, badges can be used to verify your skill.

What standards exist for badge issuers?
Very few, actually.  As long as they comply with OBI and maintain a page on their site with information about badges they've issued, they can issue badges.  This seems sketchy, but it allows issuers to be flexible and create their own standards for their badges.  This makes learning more flexible and makes it easier to  acquire individual skills dependent of degrees.  Lack of standardized rules for issuers isn't necessarily a problem because the badge links to information about how it was earned and what standards were met.

I think badges have potential to revolutionize learning.  What do you think?

Preliminary Review of @ Is for Activism by Joss Hands

The title of this book grabbed me right off the bat, and the implied idea that the Internet can be a powerful tool for creating change.  I haven't yet read enough of it to give you a complete picture of the book, so I won't give it a star rating yet, but I will jot down some of the things I've learned so far:

This book explains the role that the Internet can have in protest, dissent, resistance and rebellion.  The Introduction reviews some of the events that have brought Internet activism into the spotlight, such as Twitter-organized protests in Iran.  Then Hands explains some working definitions of protest, dissent, resistance and rebellion.  In the chapters that follow he outlines how technology can work for activism, the power of digital authorship, the democracy inherent in a network as well as consumerist/capitalist influences on the net, and other topics I will overview later.

The part I found most interesting was Hands' explanation of why the Internet has so much potential for activism.  The structure itself of the Internet makes it perfect for protests and resistance. I'm just recently learning how the Internet functions, so for the sake of other newbies like me I'll give a brief, brief overview so what follows will make sense:
 How the Internet Works
Data sent online travels through Internet routers, which are like hubs connecting smaller networks of computers.  When it is sent, data is divided into smaller packets.  Each packet has an identifier code and a destination code.  The packets are not sent in a direct line from the originating computer to the destination computer, because no direct connection exists.  Instead, the packets are bounced between routers, which read the destination codes and direct the packets to other routers closer and closer to the destination computer until they arrive.  If a router is down, the packets are just redirected through a different one. Of course, all of this happens in just a few seconds, but any time you click a link to a new page, that information has traveled a long way to get there!

Why this Structure Is Important for Activism
This structure has several important characteristics for activists:

• Anyone can connect to the Internet because the protocols that allow your computer to send and receive data are universally available.  This means the network can keep expanding infinitely.
• Also, the Internet is very hard to shut down, because taking out a router just means information will have to be rerouted-- it will still arrive.
• Because information does not travel in a direct line, it is almost impossible to intercept it.  This means the Internet is nearly impossible to censor.

To quote Hands, "it is very difficult for one person or people to dominate or dictate what happens on the network" (p78).  People who want their voices to be heard online can send their message to a huge number of people.  Anyone who wants to participate can get on the network.  People who want to censor or stop those voices of protest or keep activists from organizing online will have a VERY hard time.

I'll flesh out this review later, but for now I'll end with a quote used by Hands from a Twitter user in Moldova during the 2009 protests against unfair elections: "North of Moldova TV IS OFF!!!  But we have THE ALMIGHTY INTERNET!!!  Let us use it to communicate peacefully for freedom!!"

Virtual Identities

In the virtual world of the Internet, identity is fluid. We can choose which aspects of ourselves to reveal or invent an identity that doesn’t reflect our life in the real world.

Identity shaping is a given on social networking sites like Facebook. I’ve tried to use my profile picture to shape my online identity in different ways. Many of my profile pictures I picked because I thought a particular picture was more flattering. But I often wanted to showcase other aspects of my identity too: Sometimes I wanted my picture to say “I’m good with babies” or “I can make beautiful, creative cakes” or “I won second place in a costume contest” or “I climb mountains.” Most recently, I used a picture from my wedding day to reflect my new identity as a married woman. 

My choices of profile pictures consistently reflected how I wanted my peers to see me, but I could have chosen to shape my identity based on my need for acceptance in a different group. For instance, one of my friends who was preparing to apply for med school told me she frequently checked her profile to make sure there was nothing there that would make her look unprofessional.

When we want online relationships to coincide with our face-to-face ones, we usually create an online identity that correlates, at least somewhat, with our real identity. But in some situations people create identities completely separate from their real selves. A couple months ago my friend “Jason” told me a story about how he used an assumed identity online. In high school, he and his friend “Blake” started a website that included an online discussion board. When Jason disagreed with Blake’s comments one time too many, Blake blocked Jason from the board. To retaliate, Jason decided to create a new username on the website, unbeknownst to his friend. He carefully composed comments that coincided with Blake’s opinions. Over time, Blake liked this new identity so much that he invited him to be a website administrator, not realizing that the user was Jason. Jason used his administrative power to delete everything on the website. While his reaction was immature, Jason understood that in the digital world he could change identities at will to manipulate others’ reactions.