Understanding the Self Module 7 1.

I am
Name: _______________________________________________________
Year and Course: ___________________
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
At the end of the lesson, the students should be able to:
1. define online identity;
2. compare real identity versus online identity; and
3. describe the influence of Internet on sexuality and gender, and discuss the proper
way of demonstrating values and attitudes online.
INTRODUCTION
Who Am I in the Cyberworld? (Digital Self)
These days, more people are becoming active in using the Internet for
research, pleasure, business, communication, and other purposes. Indeed, the Internet
is of great help for everyone. On the other hand, people assume different identities
while in the cyberspace. People act differently when they are online and offline. We
have our real identity and online identity.
ACTIVITY
Three Facts, One Fiction
Construct four sentences that should start with "I am
____________________________________.” Three of the four sentences should be
true about yourself. You can talk about your characteristics, strengths, weaknesses,
accomplishments, personalities, and behavior. One statement should be a lie--
something that you just made up about yourself. Make the activity more fun by
making your classmates believe that the statement is true. Post your answer on our
facebook page. Check your other classmate’s answer and guess if their statements are
true or lie by posting comments in their posts.
_____________________________________________________________________
.
2. I am
_____________________________________________________________________
.
3. I am
_____________________________________________________________________
.
4. I am
_____________________________________________________________________
.
ANALYSIS
What have you learned from the activity? Did you learn something from your
classmates that you did not know before? What were the clues that helped you figure
out which statements were facts and fiction? Were your classmates able to discern
easily the facts and fiction about you? Why? Applying the same activity in the virtual
world or cyberworld, how do people portray themselves online? What are the things
that you would want to post/share online? What are the things you want others to
share online?
ABSTRACTION
The number of people who are becoming more active online continues to increase
worldwide. More than half of the population worldwide now uses the Internet. It has
only been 25 years since Tim Berners-Lee made the World Wide Web available to
the public, but in that time, the Internet has already become an integral part of
everyday life for most of the world's population. The Philippines is among one of the
countries with the most active Internet users (We are Social and Hootsuite n.d.).
 Almost two-thirds of the world's population now has a mobile phone.
 More than half of the world's web traffic now comes from mobile phones
 More than half of all mobile connections around the world are now
"broadband."
 More than one in five of the world's population shopped online in the past 30
days.
 Media users in the Philippines grew by 12 million or 25% while the number of
mobile social users increased by 13 million or 32%. Those growth figures are still
higher compared to the previous year. More than half the world now uses a
smartphone
Based on Figure 1, the number of digital users worldwide increases. More
people are becoming interested and devoted in using the Internet for various
activities. In the Philippines, adolescents are among the most avid users of the
Internet.
Online identify is actually the sum of all our characteristics and our
interactions while partial identify is a subset of characteristics that make up our
identity. Meanwhile, persona is the partial identity we create that represents ourselves
in a specific situation.
Selective Self-presentation and Impression Management
According to Goffman (1959) and Leary (1995), self-presentation is the
"process of controlling how one is perceived by other people" and is the key to
relationship inception and development. To construct positive images, individuals
selectively provide information about them and carefully cater this information in
response to other's feedback.
Anything posted online should be considered "public" no matter what our
"privacy" settings are. Let us say, a student wrote online about how much he hated
another student in school, and started bullying him online. Does it matter if the
student said, "Well, this is my personal account"? Even if the student wrote it in a
"private account, it can become public with a quick screen capture and shared with
the world. Personal identity is the interpersonal level of self which differentiates the
individual as unique from others, while social identity is the level of self whereby the
individual is identified by his or her group memberships.
Belk (2013) explained that sharing ourselves is no longer new and has been
practiced as soon as human beings were formed. Digital devices help us share
information broadly, more than ever before. For those who are avid users of
Facebook, it is possible that their social media friends are more updated about their
daily activities, connections, and thoughts than their immediate families Diaries that
were once private or shared only with close friends are now posted as blogs which
can be viewed by anyone. In websites like Flickr or Photobucket, the use of arm's-
length self-photography indicates a major change. In older family albums, the
photographer was not often represented in the album (Mendelson and Papacharissi
2011), whereas with arm's-length photos, they are necessarily included (e.g., selfies
and groupies). In addition, the family album of an earlier era has become more of an
individual photo gallery in the digital age. As Schwarz (2010) mentioned, we have
entered an extraordinary era of self-portraiture. Blogs and web pages have been
continuously used for greater self-reflection and self-presentation. Facebook and
other social media applications are now a key part of self-presentation for one sixth of
humanity. As a result, researchers and participants become concerned with actively
managing identity and reputation and to warn against the phenomenon of
"oversharing" (Labrecque, Markos, and Milne 2011; Shepherd 2005; Suler 2002;
Zimmer and Hoffman 2011). Sometimes people become unaware of the extent of
information they share online. They forget to delineate what can be shared online and
what should not. Furthermore, it provides a more complete narration of self and gives
people an idealized view of how they would like to be remembered by others (van
Dijck 2008). Many teenagers, aswell as some adults, share even more intimate details
with their partners like their passwords (Gershon 2010). This could be an ultimate act
of intimacy and trust or the ultimate expression of paranoia and distrust with the
partner.
Because of the conversion of private diaries into public revelations of inner
secrets, the lack of privacy in many aspects of social media make the users more
vulnerable, leading to compulsively checking newsfeeds and continually adding
tweets and postings in order to appear active and interesting. This condition has been
called "fear of missing out." People would like to remain updated and they keep on
sharing themselves online because it adds a sense of confidence at their end
especially if others like and share their posts. One of the reasons for so much sharing
and self-disclosure online is the so-called "disinhibition effect" (Ridley 2012; Suler
2004). The lack of face-to-face gaze-meeting, together with feelings of anonymity
and invisibility, gives people the freedom for self-disclosure but can also "flame"
others and may cause conflict sometimes. The resulting disinhibition causes people to
believe that they are able to express their "true self" better online than they ever could
in face-to-face contexts (Taylor 2002). However, it does not mean that there is a fixed
"true self." The self is still a work in progress and we keep on improving and
developing ourselves every single day. Seemingly self-revelation can be therapeutic
to others especially if it goes together with self-reflection (Morris et al. 2010). But it
does appear that we now do a large amount of our identity work online. When the
Internet constantly asks us: "Who are you?" and "What do you have to share?", it is
up to us if we are going to provide answers to such queries every time we use the
Internet and to what extent are going to share details of ourselves to others.
In addition to sharing the good things we experience, many of us also share
the bad, embarrassing, and "sinful" things we experience. We also react and comment
on negative experiences of others. Sometimes, we empathize with people. We also
argue with others online. Relationships may be made stronger or broken through
posts online. Blogs and social media are the primary digital for a on which such
confessions occur, but they can also be found in photo and video- sharing sites where
blunders and bad moments are also preserved and shared (Strangelove 2011). Why
confess to unseen and anonymous others online? In Foucault's (1978, 1998) view,
confessing our secret truths feels freeing, even as it binds us in a guilt-motivated self-
governance born of a long history of Christian and pre-Christian philosophies and
power structures.
According to Foucault (1998), confession, along with contemplation, self-
examination, learning, reading, and writing self-critical letters to friends, are a part of
the technologies of the self" through which we seek to purge and cleanse ourselves.
Despite the veil of invisibility, writers on the Internet write for an unseen audience
(Serfaty 2004). Both the number and feedback of readers provide self- validation for
the writer and a certain celebrity (O'Regan 2009). Confessional blogs may also be
therapeutic for the audience to read, allowing both sincere empathy and the
voyeuristic appeal of witnessing a public confession (Kitzmann 2003).
Consequently, we should have a filtering system to whatever information we
share online, as well as to what information we believe in, which are being shared or
posted by others online. We should look at online information carefully whether they
are valid and true before believing and promoting them. In the same way, we should
also think well before we post or share anything online in order to prevent conflict,
arguments, and cyberbullying, and to preserve our relationships with others
Gender and Sexuality Online
According to Marwick (2013), while the terms "sex," "gender," and
"sexuality" are often thought of as synonymous, they are actually quite distinct. The
differences between the common understandings of these terms and how researchers
think about them yield key insights about the social functioning of gender. Sex is the
biological state that corresponds to what we might call a "man" or a 'woman." This
might seem to be a simple distinction, but the biology of sex is actually very
complicated. While "sex" is often explained as biological, fixed, and immutable, it is
actually socially constructed (West and Zimmerman 1987). Gender, then, is the social
understanding of how sex should be experienced and how sex manifests in behavior,
personality, preferences, capabilities, and so forth. A person with male sex organs is
expected to embody a masculine gender. While sex and gender are presumed to be
biologically connected, we can understand gender as a socioculturally specific set of
norms that are mapped onto a category of "sex" (Kessler and McKenna 1978; Lorber
1994). Gender is historical. It is produced by media and popular culture (Gauntlett
2008; van Zoonen 1994). It is taught by families, schools, peer groups, and nation
states (Goffman 1977). It is reinforced through songs, sayings, admonition, slang,
language, fashion, and discourse (Cameron 1998; Cameron and Kulick 2003), and it
is deeply ingrained. Gender is a system of classification that values male-gendered
things more than female related things. This system plays out on the bodies of men
and women, and in constructing hierarchies of everything from colors (eg. pink vs,
blue) to academic departments (e... English vs. Math) to electronic gadgets and
websites. Given this inequality, the universalized "male" body and experience is often
constructed
as average or normal, while female-gendered experiences are conceptualized as
variations from the norm (Goffman 1977),
Sexuality is an individual expression and understanding of desire. While like
gender, this is often viewed as binary (homosexual or heterosexual), in reality,
sexuality is often experienced as fluid
Performing Gender Online
Theorist Judith Butler (1990) conceptualized gender as a performance. She
explained that popular understandings of gender and sexuality came to be through
discourse and social processes. She argued that gender was performative. In that it is
produced through millions of individual actions, rather than something that comes
naturally to men and women. Performances that adhere to normative understandings
of gender and sexuality are allowed, while those that do not are admonished (for
example, a boy "throwing like a girl") (Lorber 1994). In the 1990s, many Internet
scholars drew from Butler and other queer theorists to understand online identity.
According to the disembodiment hypothesis, Internet users are free to actively choose
which gender or sexuality they are going to portray with the possibility of creating
alternate identities (Wynn and Katz 1997). The ability of users to self-consciously
adapt and play with different gender identities would reveal the choices involved in
the production of gender, breaking down binaries and encouraging fluidity in
sexuality and gender expression,
Recently, social media has been celebrated for facilitating greater cultural
participation and creativity. Social media sites like Twitter and YouTube have led to
the emergence of a "free culture" where individuals are empowered to engage in
cultural production using raw materials, ranging from homemade videos to
mainstream television characters to create new culture, memes, and humor. At its
best, this culture of memes, mash-ups, and creative political activism allows for civic
engagement and fun creative acts. While Digg, 4chan, and Reddit are used mostly by
men, most social network site users are women; this is true in Facebook, Flickr,
LiveJournal, Tumblr, Twitter, and YouTube (Chappell 2011; Lenhart 2009; Lenhart
et al. 2010). But mere equality of use does not indicate equality of participation.
While both men and women use Wikipedia, 87% of Wikipedia contributors were
identified as male (LaVallee 2009). Male students are more likely to create, edit, and
distribute digital video over Youtube or Facebook than female students. However, the
Pew Internet and American Life project find no discernible differences in user-
generated content by gender except remixing, which was most likely among teen girls
(Lenhart et al. 2010). One explanation for these differences is that user-generated
content is often clustered by gender. Researchers have consistently shown that similar
numbers of men and women maintain a blog-about 14% of Internet users (Lenhart et
al. 2010). While the number of male and female bloggers is roughly equivalent, they
tend to blog about different things. Overwhelmingly, certain types of blogs are
written and read by women (e.g., food, fashion, parenting), while others (e.g.,
technology. politics) are written and run by men (Chittenden 2010; Hindman 2009;
Meraz 2008). Although the technologies are the same, the norms and mores of the
people using them differ.
Setting Boundaries To Your Online Self: Smart Sharing
The following guidelines will help you share information online in a smart
way that will protect yourself and not harm others. Before posting or sharing anything
online, consider the following.
 Is this post/story necessary?
 Is there a real benefit to this post? Is it funny, warm-hearted, teachable-or am
just making noise online without purpose?
 Have we (as a family or parent/child) resolved this issue? An issue that is still
being worked out at home, or one that is either vulnerable or highly
emotional, should not be made public.
 Is it appropriate? Does it stay within the boundaries of our family values?
 Will this seem as funny in 5, 10, or 15 years? Or is this post better suited for
sharing with a small group of family members? Or maybe not at all?
Rules to Follow
Here are additional guidelines for proper sharing of information and ethical
use of the Internet according to New (2014):
 Stick to safer sites.
 Guard your passwords.
 Limit what you share.
 Remember that anything you put online or post on a site is there forever, even
if you try to delete it.
 Do not be mean or embarrass other people online.
 Always tell if you see strange or bad behavior online.
 Be choosy about your online friends.
 Be patient
APPLICATION AND ASSESSMENT
1. Creative work. With your previous groupmates, the leader will assign tasks with
each member. In an illustration board, make a slogan or a poster about becoming a
responsible Internet user. Use coloring materials to improve your output. Share your
output in facebook page and record the reaction and comments of your classmates.
2. Research work. Search from the library (books, journals, facebook or any websites)
for the guidelines used in identifying fake news. Share in class the result of your
research work and your own insights about fake news. Use the comment section.

REFERENCE
Alata, E.J.P., Bernardo, N.C., Jr., Serafica, J.P.J., Pawilen, R.A. (2018).
Understanding the Self, Rex Book Store, 856 Nicanor Reyes, Sr. St.