Virtual Identities and Digital Culture


Book Description

Virtual Identities and Digital Culture investigates how our online identities and cultures are embedded within the digital practices of our lives, exploring how we form community, how we play, and how we re-imagine traditional media in a digital world. The collection explores a wide range of digital topics – from dating apps, microcelebrity, and hackers to auditory experiences, Netflix algorithms, and live theatre online – and builds on existing work in digital culture and identity by bringing new voices, contemporary examples, and highlighting platforms that are emerging in the field. The book speaks to the modern reality of how our digital lives have been forever altered by our transnational experiences – one of those key experiences is the pandemic, but so too is systemic inequality, questions of digital privacy, and the role of joy in our online lives. A vital contribution at a time of significant social and cultural flux, this book will be highly relevant to those studying digital culture within media, communication, cultural studies, digital humanities, and sociology departments.




Digital Identities


Book Description

Online Identities: Creating and Communicating the Online Self presents a critical investigation of the ways in which representations of identities have shifted since the advent of digital communications technologies. Critical studies over the past century have pointed to the multifaceted nature of identity, with a number of different theories and approaches used to explain how everyday people have a sense of themselves, their behaviors, desires, and representations. In the era of interactive, digital, and networked media and communication, identity can be understood as even more complex, with digital users arguably playing a more extensive role in fashioning their own self-representations online, as well as making use of the capacity to co-create common and group narratives of identity through interactivity and the proliferation of audio-visual user-generated content online. - Makes accessible complex theories of identity from the perspective of today's contemporary, digital media environment - Examines how digital media has added to the complexity of identity - Takes readers through examples of online identity such as in interactive sites and social networking - Explores implications of inter-cultural access that emerges from globalization and world-wide networking




Playful Identities


Book Description

In this publication, eighteen scholars examine the increasing role of digital media technologies in identity construction through play. This interdisciplinary collection argues that present-day play and games are not only appropriate metaphors for capturing postmodern human identities, but are in fact the means by which people create their identity.




Theorizing Digital Cultures


Book Description

The rapid development of digital technologies continues to have far reaching effects on our daily lives. This book explains how digital media—in providing the material and infrastructure for a host of practices and interactions—affect identities, bodies, social relations, artistic practices, and the environment. Theorizing Digital Cultures: Shows students the importance of theory for understanding digital cultures and presents key theories in an easy-to-understand way Considers the key topics of cybernetics, online identities, aesthetics and ecologies Explores the power relations between individuals and groups that are produced by digital technologies Enhances understanding through applied examples, including YouTube personalities, Facebook’s ‘like’ button and holographic performers Clearly structured and written in an accessible style, this is the book students need to get to grips with the key theoretical approaches in the field. It is essential reading for students and researchers of digital culture and digital society throughout the social sciences.




Digital Ego


Book Description




Latin American Identity in Online Cultural Production


Book Description

This volume provides an innovative and timely approach to a fast growing, yet still under-studied field in Latin American cultural production: digital online culture. It focuses on the transformations or continuations that cultural products and practices such as hypermedia fictions, net.art and online performance art, as well as blogs, films, databases and other genre-defying web-based projects, perform with respect to Latin American(ist) discourses, as well as their often contestatory positioning with respect to Western hegemonic discourses as they circulate online. The intellectual rationale for the volume is located at the crossroads of two, equally important, theoretical strands: theories of digital culture, in their majority the product of the anglophone academy; and contemporary debates on Latin American identity and culture.




Online Communication


Book Description

Online Communication provides an introduction to both the technologies of the Internet Age and their social implications. This innovative and timely textbook brings together current work in communication, political science, philosophy, popular culture, history, economics, and the humanities to present an examination of the theoretical and critical issues in the study of computer-mediated communication. Continuing the model of the best-selling first edition, authors Andrew F. Wood and Matthew J. Smith introduce computer-mediated communication (CMC) as a subject of academic research as well as a lens through which to examine contemporary trends in society. This second edition of Online Communication covers online identity, mediated relationships, virtual communities, electronic commerce, the digital divide, spaces of resistance, and other topics related to CMC. The text also examines how the Internet has affected contemporary culture and presents the critiques being made to those changes. Special features of the text include: *Hyperlinks--presenting greater detail on topics from the chapter *Ethical Ethical Inquiry--posing questions on the nature of human communication and conduct online *Online Communication and the Law--examining the legal ramifications of CMC issues Advanced undergraduates, graduate students, and researchers interested in the field of computer-mediated communication, as well as those studying issues of technology and culture, will find Online Communication to be an insightful resource for studying the role of technology and mediated communication in today's society.




Handbook of Writing, Literacies, and Education in Digital Cultures


Book Description

At the forefront of current digital literacy studies in education, this handbook uniquely systematizes emerging interdisciplinary themes, new knowledge, and insightful theoretical contributions to the field. Written by well-known scholars from around the world, it closely attends to the digitalization of writing and literacies that is transforming daily life and education. The chapter topics—identified through academic conference networks, rigorous analysis, and database searches of trending themes—are organized thematically in five sections: Digital Futures Digital Diversity Digital Lives Digital Spaces Digital Ethics This is an essential guide to digital writing and literacies research, with transformational ideas for educational and professional practice. It will enable new and established researchers to position their studies within highly relevant directions in the field and to generate new themes of inquiry.




Handbook of Research on Examining Cultural Policies Through Digital Communication


Book Description

Culture is one of the most important elements for explaining individuals' behaviors within the social structure. It meets the various social needs of members of a society by directing how individuals must react to various events and how to act in specific circumstances. A planned and systematic process is required for disseminating this cultural accumulation as a policy, which is produced collectively by all members within their everyday life practices. The Handbook of Research on Examining Cultural Policies Through Digital Communication provides emerging research on this aspect of cultural policy, which is formed within the framework of this systematic process in a strategic manner and can be defined as various activities of the state intended for art, human sciences, and cultural inheritance. Creating such cultural policies involves the establishment of measures and organizations required for the development of each individual, providing economic and social facilities, all of which are actions intended for directing society. Featuring coverage on a broad range of topics such as long-distance education, digital citizenship, and public diplomacy, this book is ideally designed for academicians, researchers, advanced-level students, sociologists, international and national organizations, and government officials.




Protecting Your Internet Identity


Book Description

People research everything online – shopping, school, jobs, travel – and other people. Your online persona is your new front door. It is likely the first thing that new friends and colleagues learn about you. In the years since this book was first published, the Internet profile and reputation have grown more important in the vital human activities of work, school and relationships. This updated edition explores the various ways that people may use your Internet identity, including the ways bad guys can bully, stalk or steal from you aided by the information they find about you online. The authors look into the Edward Snowden revelations and the government’s voracious appetite for personal data. A new chapter on the right to be forgotten explores the origins and current effects of this new legal concept, and shows how the new right could affect us all. Timely information helping to protect your children on the Internet and guarding your business’s online reputation has also been added. The state of Internet anonymity has been exposed to scrutiny lately, and the authors explore how anonymous you can really choose to be when conducting activity on the web. The growth of social networks is also addressed as a way to project your best image and to protect yourself from embarrassing statements. Building on the first book, this new edition has everything you need to know to protect yourself, your family, and your reputation online.