1. DIGITAL CULTURE AND SOCIOLOGY session 7 – Susana Tosca Identity Digital Culture and Sociology

2. DIGITAL CULTURE AND SOCIOLOGY session 7 – Susana Tosca Conceptual introduction Dibbell, Julian. “A rape in Cyberspace”. Giddens, Anthony. “’Modernity and Self-Identity’ Tribulations of the Self”. Turkle, Sherry. 1995. Life on the Screen. SEMINAR: “Match-making” session about today break identity texts break

3. DIGITAL CULTURE AND SOCIOLOGY session 7 – Susana Tosca what is identity? Why is everyone so interested on identity at the moment? Do the words “crisis of identity” mean anything to you? Why do people “invest” in identity positions? Movement: no question to national to personal (Freud) to modern crisis (Giddens) to postmodern dissolutions (Turkle?) Woodward

4. DIGITAL CULTURE AND SOCIOLOGY session 7 – Susana Tosca essentialist identity Everybody from a country, ethnia, etc. shares a clear authentic set of characteristics with do not alter across time. Often claims of common history or culture Tied to the physical: first territory, later body; i.e. racial or sexual identity Disrupted by: globalization, inmigration, break-ups such as USSR... Woodward

5. DIGITAL CULTURE AND SOCIOLOGY session 7 – Susana Tosca imaginary identity When we claim the past as an identity we reconstruct it (Caribbeanness) “Becoming” “Difference”, i.e. how Martinique is and is not French Main point: we are not only positioned by identity, we can also position ourselves and reconstruct and transform historical identities. Hall

6. DIGITAL CULTURE AND SOCIOLOGY session 7 – Susana Tosca group identities Bourdieu- individuals integrated in “fields”: families, peer groups, work, etc. Each has a material context and symbolic resources. We are the same person but have different roles (Goffman) Thomas Højrup- Life Mode analysis: people, same country, qualitatively different cultures, or life modes, each of which has its own specific material conditions, a specific praxis and a corresponding ideology. Giddens: modernity threatens self-identity (or positive hypercomplexity: Qvortrup) Woodward

7. DIGITAL CULTURE AND SOCIOLOGY session 7 – Susana Tosca Identity keywords Identities are produced at particular points in time (i.e. hippies, women’s liberation movements) parameters cut accross each other: class, country, religion, gender... Difference as essential to meaning, dichotomies, ex. Cixous: activity/passivity, culture/nature, father/mother, intelligible/sensitive... Important: divisions not equally weighted Subjectivity: sense of self, then we adopt identity Woodward

8. DIGITAL CULTURE AND SOCIOLOGY session 7 – Susana Tosca Identity keywords II Althusser- Interpellation, how subjects are recruited into subject positions through recognizing themselves, “yes, it’s me”. Unconscious process The unsconscious origin in Freud, developed by Lacan in relation to identity Lacan: unified human subject is a myth, children learn, entry into language=subjectivity, entry of the father=subconscious birth, phallus as first signifier, girls and boys positioned differently. Woodward

9. DIGITAL CULTURE AND SOCIOLOGY session 7 – Susana Tosca complementary bibliography  ALTHUSSER, Louis. 1971. Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. London: New Left Books.  CIXOUS, Hélène. 1975. “Sorties” In MARKS, 1980. French Feminisms: an anthology. Amherst: The University of Massachussetts Press.  GOFFMAN, Erving. 1959. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Doubleday.  HALL, Stuart. 1990. “Cultural Identity and Diaspora”, in Rutherford, J. (ed). Identity: community, culture, difference. London: Lawrence and Wishart.  HøJRUP, Thomas. 1983. “On the Concept of Life-Mode. A Formspecifying Mode of Analysis Applied to Contemporary Western Europe”. Ethnologia Scandinavica.  LACAN, Jacques. 1977. Écrits: a selection. London: Tavistock.  WOODWARD, Kathryn. 1997. “Concepts of Identity and Difference”. In Identity and Difference. London: Sage.

10. DIGITAL CULTURE AND SOCIOLOGY session 7 – Susana Tosca

11. New thing: liberation from power point We discuss the three texts just with the texts