Identity

An International Journal of Theory and Research

o/Theory
IDENTITY is the official journal of the Society for Research on the Identity Formation (SRIF) and is subsidized with grants
from the Faculty of Social Science at the University of Western Ontario and the College of Arts and Science at Florida
International University.

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 Identity
An International
Journal o f Theory and Research
Volume 4, Number 4

Special Issue:
Mediated Identity in the Emerging Digital Age: A Dialogical Perspective
Guest Editor:
Hubert J. M. Hermans
University of Nijmegen

Introduction: The Dialogical Self in a Global and Digital Age 297

Hubert J. M. Hermans

Threaded Identity in Cyberspace: Weblogs and 321

Positioning in the Dialogical Self
Vincent W. H evem

Self-Positioning in a Text-Based Virtual Environment 337

Maria Beatrice Ligorio and Annarita Celeste Pugliese

The Diatextual Construction of the Self in Short Message Systems 355

Michela Cortini, Giuseppe Mininni, and Amelia Manuti

Mediated Identity in the Parasocial Interaction of TV 371

Susanna Annese

The Usage of Space in Dialogical Self-Construction: 389

From Dante to Cyberspace
Cor van Halen and Jacques Janssen
 Society for Research on Identity Formation

President
James C o te................................................. .............University of Western Ontario

President Elect
Jane K ro g e r............................................... ............................University of Tromsp

Past President
Alan W aterman........................................... ................. The College of New Jersey

Treasurer
William K urtines...................................... ...........Florida International University

Secretary
Marilyn Montgomery................................ ...........Florida International University

Members-at-Large
Janet Gebelt................................................. ..........................University of Portland
Joseph W h ite............................................. .............South Dakota State University

Student Members-at-Large
Sharon Roberts........................................... .............University of Western Ontario
Amy Yoder................................................. ...........Claremont Graduate University

Advisory Board to the President

Philip D re y e r............................................ ...........Claremont Graduate University

Membership information is available at SRIF@FIU.EDU

IDENTITY: AN INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF THEORY AND RESEARCH, 4(4), 297-320
Copyright © 2004, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.

Introduction: The Dialogical Self in a

Global and Digital Age

Hubert J. M. Hermans
University of Nijmegen

In this article, culture and self, like society and identity, are conceived as mutually in-
clusive. On the basis of this premise, self and identity are discussed in the context of
an evolution toward a global and digital society. The core concept is the “dialogical
self’ that is described as a spatial and temporal process of positioning. Examples of
multivoiced and dialogical selves are given in communities and cultures that lack ad-
vanced technological means. Apparently, the dialogical self is not an exclusive fea-
ture of the present era but a general human condition. Specific to the era is that dia-
logue is becoming increasingly mediated as a result of technological advances.
Closely related to these advances, one can witness an increasing cultural complexity,
mobility, and hybridization. It is argued that technological developments and global
interconnectedness provide new opportunities for innovation of the self as
multivoiced and dialogical. At the same time, such developments evoke counter
forces that can close the self off from such opportunities. This article ends with a
short introduction to the several contributions in this special issue.

When you ask people to localize their “self,” they will point to their body and tell
you that it is somewhere “inside.” They may point to a specific part of their own
body (e.g., head or breast), and consider the self an immaterial and nonspatial in-
side. “Space”, on the other hand, is rather localized in the outside world or in the
body, but not in the self. People who adhere to such a conception are often not
aware that they are articulating a Cartesian conception in which space is consid-
ered to be an essential property of the material world (res extensa), whereas the self
is seen as a thinking matter (res cogitans). In this conception, space is outside of
the self.

Requests for reprints should be sent to Hubert J. M. Hermans, University o f Nijmegen, Department
o f Culture and Personality Psychology, P.O. Box 9104, 6500 HE Nijmegen, The Netherlands. E-mail:
hhermans@psych.kun.nl
 In apparent contradiction to a Cartesian view, this article starts from the as-
sumption that the self, like the outside world, is spatialized. In this conception, the
I is not seen as an immaterial essence hovering above the world and sometimes go-
ing down like an angel who visits the material world. In contrast, the I itself is “dis-
tributed” in a spatial world and can be conceived of as a dynamic multiplicity of “I
positions ” As localized in a variety of positions, the I moves from one position to
another and, like a traveler, takes a variety of perspectives on the world; these open
particular vistas and, at the same time, close off others from view. One of the
far-reaching implications of the spatialization and decentralization of the self is
that I positions are not only inside the person but also outside, not only here but
also there in the so-called outside world.

WHAT IS IN A NAME?

My first name is Hubert. When somebody asks me who I am, I have the spontane-
ous tendency to describe myself as a coherent whole and as unified in myself, very
well expressed by my first name. The traditional laws of Aristotelian logic support
this qualification: Hubert is Hubert and cannot be, at the same time and in the same
respect, Hubert and my father Mathew.
However, to describe myself by my first name only would be an oversimplifica-
tion of the person I am. I have not only a first name but also a surname, Hermans,
the family of my father. The Hermans’s represent a particular culture: They are
typically commercial people, having jobs in one of the larger cities in the Southern
part of the Netherlands, very practically oriented, and with a rather optimistic view
of life. For a long time I have participated in this culture, and it became an impor-
tant part of me. However, this is not the only family culture in which I have been
educated. I have also participated in the family of my mother, Janet Spronck, a
family with a rural and agricultural background. They were involved in a series of
misfortunes, and consequently, developed a rather pessimistic view of life. I re-
member very well the long stories about those misfortunes that were often told by
my mother with a somewhat sad tone of voice. The long and somber stories told by
members of the Spronck family contrasted rather strongly with the much shorter,
cheerful, and humorous stories told in the Hermans”s family, where every long
story was interrupted by a joke.
In the course of time, I became aware that my own self, participating in the two
different family cultures, incorporated the two discrepant worldviews. I developed
both an optimistic and pessimistic view, being more optimistic and playful in some
situations and more pessimistic and serious in other ones. Sometimes, it may hap-
pen that my Hermans”s voice and my Spronck voice are simultaneously present
and engage in some kind of internal dialogue. This may result in a negotiation be-
tween the two voices that tend to correct or complement each other. For example,
when I am involved in a financial case, the Spronck voices warns me that this
might go wrong, but the Hermans voices may convince me that this is probably a
too pessimistic way of responding to this particular situation. At the end, I, Hubert,
feel most at ease when I take a moderate risk, in this way finding a workable com-
promise between the two admonitions.
Such an exercise could be done by anybody who is educated in two families,
each with their particular histories, stories, and views of life. My intention is to
draw attention to the fact that my first name (Hubert) does not suffice when de-
scribing myself. My family names have to be taken into account to understand the
particular histories and collective voices in which I have participated and that have
formed me during my education. My first name and my family names function to-
gether as a dynamic multiplicity of positions or a combination of individual and
collective voices that respond to each other in dialogical ways. From a spatial point
of view, the name example suggests that my self is not purely inside and here (first
name), but also outside and there (family names). In terms of James (1890) and
Rosenberg (1979), one could say that the specific combination of first names and
family names illustrates that the self is extended to the environment; in Bruner’s
(1986) terms, distributed over different identities.

THE CASE OF EDWARD SAID

In a discussion of the phenomenon of acculturation, Bhatia (2002) argued that the

emergence of non-European, “third-world” diasporic communities in North
America and Europe has led to the construction of “in-between” identities such as
Mexican Americans, Arab Americans, Chinese Canadians, Turkish Germans, and
Franco Maghrebi. In a period of globalization, acculturation becomes complicated
as a result of the rapid creation of multinational citizens, the formation of diasporic
communities, and the massive flows of transmigration and border crossings.
Rather than depicting immigrants as moving in a linear trajectory from culture A to
culture B, Bhatia suggested that we should think of acculturation as “mixing and
moving.” In general, postcolonial studies have demonstrated that third-world im-
migrants construct their cultural identities as citizens of “first-world” countries
(e.g., United States or Europe) while simultaneously retaining strong affiliations
and loyalties to the culture of their home country.
An example of nonlinear acculturation is provided by Edward Said’s (1999),
Out of Place: A Memoir. The author, bom as a Palestinian, educated in an English
school in Egypt, and later immigrated to the United states, described how his name
reflects his hyphenated (in between) identities. His name, an American first name
and an Arab family name, often made him feel like a foreigner with an in-between
identity.
 “What are you?”; “But Said is an Arab name”; “You are an American?” “You are
American without an American name”: ... “You don’t look American!; “How come
you were bom in Jerusalem and you live here?; “You“re an Arab after all, but what
kind are you? A protestant?” (Bhatia, 2002, p. 66)

As Bakhtin (1986) argued, an individual speaker’s utterance is not just coming

from an isolated, decontextualized voice; rather, individual voices are influenced by
the culture of institutions, groups, and communities in which they participate. The
collective voices that are prominent in the individual’s personal history (profes-
sional jargon, authorities of various circles, sociopolitical ideologies, dialects, na-
tional languages) influence what the speaker’s individual voice is saying. The power
struggles and differences between the several voices in a particular community are
reflected as power differences between positions in the self. The colonial school in
Egypt where Said received his training was run entirely by British staff members
who viewed the Arab boys as delinquents who needed to be punished and disciplined
regularly. Moreover, the teachers had a handbook with rules that were intended to
make Arab students become like the British. Said explained about the boys resisting
the colonial rules of the handbook by invoking their Arab position:

Rule 1 stated categorically: “English is the language of the school. Anyone caught
speaking other languages will be severely punished.” So Arabic became our haven, a
criminalized discourse where we took refuge from the world of masters and
complicit prefects and anglicized older boys who lorded it over us as enforcers of the
hierarchy and its rules. Because of Rule 1 we spoke more, rather than less, Arabic, as
an act of defiance against what seemed then, and seems even more so now, an arbi-
trary, ludicrously gratuitous symbol of their power. (Bhatia, 2002, p. 68)

As this excerpt suggests, power struggles on the level of the community have their
impact on the dialogues between the members of a minority group and also between
opposing positions in the self. As a result of the oppression on the level of the institu-
tion, the Arab position in the self of the boys was not simply repressed but rather em-
phasized as a counter position that has to be defended and maintained for its own
value. In this way, a name can be involved as part of a power struggle on the level of
the institution. The Arab part of the identity (Said) had to be defended against the in-
stitutionalized emphasis of the English American part of the identity (Edward). As
this example suggests, a name may reflect a hyphenated identity that is involved in
the relation between collective voices and their historically based power struggles.

THE WORD / IN SRANON TONGO

The use of the first name is closely related to the use of the word I. The use of sepa-
rate words, like I or me, may suggest that they represent entities that have an exis-
tence on their own. Part of the problem is that in our language we are using the
word I indiscriminately for a great variety of states of mind that, despite their vari-
eties, contrasts, and contradictions, are appropriated as if the I is somewhere
“above” the multiplicity of voices of the self. We tend to attribute all these states to
the I, similar to the way we put a variety of contents in a container separated from
other containers. This implies that the relationship with other individuals and
groups of individuals is left implicit or even disregarded. Certainly, cultural factors
are involved that are closely related to linguistic practices. In some languages, the
word I is not systematically used in a separating manner but as a combination of
words with other people included. An example is Sranon Tongo, the language of
Afro-Surinam people in which different words express different modalities of the I
(Wekker, 1994):

Mi I
Mi kra (Mi yeye) my soul, I
A misi (f’mi) My feminine part
A masra (f’mi) My masculine part
Mi mi Mi misi nanga mi masra My feminine and masculine part
Mi dyodyo My divine parents
Mi skin My body, I
Mi geest My spirit, I

As these examples show, the word I (Mi) is directly associated with markers of a
variety of persons or voices, including not only singular but plural ones. For exam-
ple, Mi dyodyo suggests that I am not speaking to my parents but rather like my
parents; even better, we (i.e., I-my parents or my parents-I). In this phrase, the
word I in particular situations is extended to the word we, and a common voice is
speaking.
In Sranon Tongo, particular word combinations give a more direct access
to deeper layers of the self than any singular word, like I or me, could permit.
For example, “Mi kra” or “Mi yeye” refer to a deeper level of expressiveness
than the use of the singular Mi. When somebody says, “Mi no wani nyan a
nyan disi” (I do not want to eat this), the speaker wants to say that he or she
simply does not prefer this food at this moment. However, when the person
says, “A yeye no wani a nyan disi” (My soul does not want to eat this), a stron-
ger refusal is expressed, which may occur when a particular food carries a rit-
ual prohibition (I am not allowed to eat this). In the latter case, the speaker
may be punished for taking this food (G. Wekker, personal communication,
August 5, 2002).
As the earlier examples suggest, the different modalities of the term I in Sranon
Tongo are more spatially extended than the separate terms I and Me. In Sranon
Tongo, the word I is not only here (I) but also there (e.g., I-my parents) and not
only superficial (I) but also deeper (e.g., my soul, I).
 THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN LOGICAL AND
DIALOGICAL RELATIONS

The notions of space and dialogue are closely related. In its broadest sense, a dia-
logue can be conceived of as an act of interchange between two or more positions
that are located in an imagined or real space. The existence of positions or, in more
dynamic terms, of a process of positioning and repositioning, touches the differ-
ence between logical and dialogical relations. An example given by Bakhtin
(1929/1973; see also Vasil’eva, 1988) may illustrate this difference.
Take two phrases that are completely identical, “life is good” and again, “life is
good.” In terms of Aristotelian logic, these two phrases are connected by a relation
of identity because they are, in fact, one and the same statement. From a dialogical
perspective, however, the two phrases are different because they are coming from
different spatial positions occupied by two people in communication, who in this
case entertain a relation of agreement. The two phrases are identical from a logical
point of view, but they are different as utterances: the first is a statement, the second
a confirmation. As a confirmation, the second utterance adds something that was
not included in the first one. The first utterance is not finalized in itself. Instead, it
is dialogically expanded by the second. This expansion can be strengthened when
the second utterance receives an intonation that expresses the ironic attitude of the
interlocutor. When the first speaker says, “Life if good,” and the second answers
with a little smile and in a mocking way, “Life is good!” then again we have two
statements that are logically and perfectly identical; but, the meaning of the second
utterance is, in fact, the opposite of the first one.
In a similar way, the statements “life is good” and “life is not good” can be ana-
lyzed. In a logical sense, one is a negation of the other. However, when the two
phrases are taken as utterances from two different speakers, a dialogical relation of
disagreement can be seen to exist. In Bakhtin’s (1929/1973) view, the relation of
agreement and disagreement are, like question and answer, basic dialogical forms.
Even when dialogue takes place between the individual and himself or herself,
this dialogue can only take place when we imagine a space in which different
speaking participants are positioned toward each other. This may be expressed in
phrases like, “I say this to myself,” “I try to convince myself,” or “I am negotiating
with myself.” Words like to or with suggest that different or opposed positions are
implied with a dialogical process that is taking place between them. Plato, who an-
alyzed the process of thinking in dialogical terms, emphasized the existence of dif-
ferent positions or voices in the process of internal communication:

I have a notice that, when the mind is thinking, it is simply talking to itself, asking
questions and answering them, and saying yes or no. When it reaches a deci-
sion—which may come slowly or in a sudden rush—when doubt is over and the two
voices affirm the same thing, then we call that “its judgment.” (Theaetetus,
189e-190a, cited in Blachowicz, 1999, p. 184)
 As this quotation suggests, the mind needs itself to arrive at a judgment. It re-
quires a contact with another part of the mind to accomplish the act of thinking.
This insight instigated philosopher Gadamer (1989) to speak of the “imperfection
of the human mind,” referring to the impossibility of the mind to be completely
present to itself:

Because our understanding does not comprehend what it knows in one single inclu-
sive glance, it must always draw what it thinks out of itself, and present it to itself as if
in an inner dialogue with itself. In this sense, all thought is speaking to oneself, (p.
422)

The conception of thinking in terms of dialogue between two qualitatively different

positions or voices is in apparent opposition to a Cartesian conception of the self, one
that is based on the assumption that the self is functioning as an undivided whole that is
directly accessible to itself and functioning in logical ways. As Johnson (1985)
thought, the Cartesian self is a “fixed entity, essentially isolated and disembodied, an
ego-logical thing, encapsulated in a machine of corruptible matter” (p. 115).
In summary and in contrast to logical relations, dialogical relations assume the ex-
istence of different spatial positions that are not to be understood as replicas of itself.
Instead, dialogical relations can only be understood in terms of qualitatively different,
spatially located voices involved in actual, remembered, or imagined relations.

THE DIALOGICAL SELF: BETWEEN INTERCHANGE

AND POWER

On the basis of the preceding considerations, the dialogical self can be conceived
of as a dynamic multiplicity of relatively autonomous I positions in the landscape
of the mind, intertwined as this mind is with the minds of other people (Hermans,
2002; Hermans, Kempen, & Van Loon, 1992). In this conception, the I functions as
a process of positioning and repositioning (i.e., the I has the possibility of moving
from one spatial position to another in accordance with changes in situation and
time). The I fluctuates among different and even opposed positions as part of
dialogical relations with internal dialogues as intimately intertwined with external
dialogues. The I has, moreover, the capacity to imaginatively endow each position
with a voice so that dialogical relations between positions can be established. The
voices function like interacting characters in a story involved in processes of ques-
tion and answer, agreement and disagreement, and negotiation and cooperation.
Each of them has a story to tell about its own experience from its own stance. As
different voices, these characters exchange information about their respective
me’s, resulting in a complex, narratively structured self. As participating in the col-
lective voices of the society and culture at large, some voices have more social
power than others, with the result that some voices are neglected, suppressed, or
just not heard (for a more elaborate discussion of this conception of the dialogical
self, see Barresi, 2002; Bertau, 2004; Hermans, 1996a, 1996b; Josephs, 2002;
Lewis, 2002; Valsiner, 2002).
As the previous description of the dialogical self suggests, it is based on an inti-
mate connection between a narrative approach and dialogical approach (Hermans,
2003). Advocates of a narrative approach, like Sarbin (1986), Bruner (1986),
Gergen and Gergen (1988), and McAdams (1993), have extensively discussed the
temporal dimension of narratives. Unquestionably, the temporal dimension is a
constitutive feature of stories or narratives. Without time, there is no story. How-
ever, stories are always told stories; this implies that there is always a teller and a
listener of a story. The spatial positions of teller and listener may be distributed
among two or more different people, but they can also be located in the self of one
and the same person. Even when telling a story to somebody else, the teller is at the
same time listening to himself or herself, noticing, recording, and evaluating what
is being told at a particular moment in time.
Time and space are seen as equally important for the narrative structure of the
dialogical self. The spatial nature of the self is expressed in the words position, po-
sitioning, and repositioning; terms that suggest, moreover, more dynamic and flex-
ible referents than the traditional term role (Harre & Van Langenhove, 1991).

CULTURAL COMPLEXITY AND MEDIATED DIALOGUE

As long as humanity has existed, it is arguable that people have tried to extend their
communication beyond the immediately given oral contact. In early times, people
invented means to communicate with each other beyond face-to-face contact (e.g.,
via drum beats and smoke signals). In our present era, technological innovations
have provided the means for advancing our dialogical possibilities in unprece-
dented ways. Due to increased mass transportation, television, newspapers, tour-
ism, the Internet, and e-mail, we increasingly live in a situation of cultural com-
plexity (Castells, 1989; Hermans & Kempen, 1998; Luke, 1995). As a result of
these innovations, people have, more than ever, the opportunity to broaden their
horizon beyond the groups and cultures to which they originally belong. However,
what do we mean by cultural complexity and how is it related to dialogue?
In an analysis that is relevant here, Hannerz (1992) proposed the concept of cul-
tural flow in opposition to the view that cultures have a single essence. In the con-
text of global dynamics, he distinguished among three dimensions of culture: (a)
modes of thought, involving the entire array of values, concepts, propositions, and
mental operations that people of some social unit carry together; (b) forms of ex-
ternalization, the different ways in which modes of thought are made public and
accessible to the senses (e.g., science, art, computers, roads); and (c) social distri-
bution, the ways in which modes of thought and external forms (i.e., a and b to-
gether) are spread over a population.
 Traditionally, anthropologists and psychologists have devoted most of their at-
tention to the first of the three dimensions. They have tried to understand the
shared knowledge, beliefs, values, and meanings of a particular group or society.
To some extent, they have investigated the relation between the first and second di-
mensions: the ways in which modes of thought are expressed in a somewhat lim-
ited range of manifest forms (speech, music, graphic arts, or other communicative
forms). The least attention has been devoted to the third dimension, the distribution
of modes of thought and external forms over a population.
As Hannerz (1992) argued, technology plays a major part in the second and
third dimensions. Media, in particular, allows people to communicate without be-
ing in one another’s immediate presence. Media functions as “machineries of
meaning” that are able to distribute new ideas and modes of thought in a speedy
way across large portions of a population. Cultures of complex societies make use
of writing, print, radio, telephones, telegraph, photography, film, disk and tape re-
cording, television, video, and computers. The expansion of such modes of exter-
nalization facilitates not only the construction of new meaning systems (impact of
the second dimension on the first) but also the distribution of such meaning sys-
tems in a globalizing world (impact of the third dimension on the first and second).
Given the interrelatedness of the three dimensions, there is an increase in complex-
ity in each of them.
The spread of technology and its associated cultural complexity have an impor-
tant implication for the process of dialogue. Increasingly, we find ourselves in a sit-
uation of “mediated dialogue” (i.e., dialogues with the outside world and with our-
selves are not only taking place face-to-face but they are also, and increasingly,
mediated by technologies that have the potential to expand our dialogical “reach”).
As members of larger communicative networks, we are exposed to a broadening
range of meanings, values, ideas, and mental operations. As participators in such
networks, we have the opportunity to become increasingly multivoiced (Hermans
& Kempen, 1998). Increasingly, the voices of other people, groups, communities,
and cultures become part of our private worlds and create new interfaces for
dialogical relations to emerge. Because the dialogical self functions on the inter-
face between internal and external dialogues, technological advances also mediate
between us and ourselves, in this way transforming the content and scope of our
self-dialogues (Hevem, 2000).

TRAVEL AND TRANSLOCALITY

The notion of cultural complexity is closely related to another issue, which is fo-
cused on the question of whether culture is geographically localized or not. Tradi-
tionally, many cross-cultural psychologists take geographically localized cultures
as the basic unit of their research. Investigators study the values, practices, ideas,
and mental operations of people of a particular culture and compare them with the
same aspects of one or more other cultures. Typically, investigators study cultures
that are geographically different and conceptualize them as centralized in them-
selves. Since the pioneering work of Malinowski and Margaret Mead,
ethnographers have based their insights on intensive dwelling in delimited “fields.”
Such a field was depicted as a centered and circumscribed place, like a garden,
from which the word culture derives its original meaning.
However, the conception of cultures as geographically located and centralized
in itself is increasingly challenged by recent developments in social anthropology
that are more sensitive to the dynamic relations between cultures. Clifford (1997),
for example, takes “travel” as a metaphor for capturing the relation between cul-
tures. Researchers are beginning to see ethnographic work not so much as local-
ized dwelling but more as a series of travel encounters. Like many other people, re-
searchers are increasingly moving from one culture to another resulting in insights
and theories that are focused not so much on the essences of cultures but more on
their encounters. Cultural actions and the construction of identities take place not
in the “middle” of the dwelling but in the contact zones between nations, peoples,
and locales. The metaphor of travel decentralizes the notion of culture and stimu-
lates an interest in diasporas, borderlands, immigration, migration, tourism, inter-
national cooperation, pilgrimage, and exile (Clifford, 1997). Encountering cul-
tures creates, in a Bakhtinian term, new “chronotopes”: places such as musea,
exhibitions, international conferences, and Web sites, where people of different
cultures meet to present their ideas and products to each other.

HYBRIDIZATION AND THE EMERGENCE OF MULTIPLE

IDENTITIES

The phenomenon of hybridization, closely related to cultural complexity and the

metaphor of travel, further undermines the idea of cultures as internally homoge-
neous and externally distinctive. As Rowe and Schelling (1991) argued,
intercultural processes lead to the recombination of existing forms and practices
into new hybrid forms and practices. Hybrid phenomena result from the transfor-
mation of existing cultural practices into new ones and play an important part in
the innovation of culture and self.
Hybridization may create multiple identities that represent new combinations
of cultural elements originating from different places and times: Mexican school-
girls dressed in Greek togas dancing in the style of Isadora Duncan; a London boy
of Asian origin playing for a local Bengali cricket team and at the same time sup-
porting the Arsenal football club; Native Americans celebrating Mardi Gras in the
United States; or Thai boxing by Moroccan girls in Amsterdam (Pieterse, 1995).
As these examples suggest, the process of hybridization has important implica-
tions for the construction and reconstruction of the self. Given the intimate connec-
tion between self and culture (Hermans, 2002; Josephs, 2002; Valsiner, 2002), hy-
bridization not only brings together heterogeneous elements at cultural contact
zones, but also has the potential to enlarge the heterogeneity of the position reper-
toire of the self.
Because the self participates in the increasing cultural complexity, travel, and
hybridity of our contemporary world, three features can characterize it. First, the
self is, more than ever, composed of a high density of positions: An increasing
number of positions populate the self, often leading to a cacophony of voices. Sec-
ond, the positions of the self are relatively heterogeneous: groups and societies that
were relatively homogeneous and closed in the past become more heterogeneous
as partners in a broader interconnected social system. The self as part of this social
system has the possibility of becoming more heterogeneous too. Third, the self is
subjected to larger “position leaps” than ever in history. The notion of position
leaps may be illustrated by an example drawn from recent studies of leadership.
In a discussion of recent trends in the literature, Van Loon (2003) proposed the
concept of a “dialogical leader,” who is able to make flexible movements between
at least three different positions: the entrepreneur, the manager, and the coach. De-
pending on the needs of the shifting organizational environment, the dialogical
leader takes one of the aforementioned positions; is able to move from one position
to another in a heterogeneous repertoire; and has the dialogical capacity to negoti-
ate between the different positions with attention to their specific purposes, memo-
ries, and experiences. The complexity of such leadership is further increased when
such a leader, working in a multinational corporation, is sent out to another country
with a different cultural history. The leader is then faced with a position leap: As a
coach in the second culture, he or she is faced with new problems, questions, and
challenges that may be very different from the coaching behavior that was found to
be effective in the culture of origin.
In view of these developments (complexity, travel, hybridity), much has been
changed since Triandis (1980) conceived of culture as defined by three criteria:
place (a local community), time (a particular historical period), and language (in-
telligibility). In our present era, we are becoming aware that intercultural processes
increasingly bring together elements from different places and times and has cre-
ated the “heteroglossia” that is so typical of contemporary intercultural communi-
cation. Certainly, these developments challenge our dialogical capacities
(Watkins, 1999) and our propensity to innovate ourselves (Hermans, 2002).

INNOVATION OF THE SELF:

THE INTRODUCTION OF A NEW POSITION

The innovation of the self can take at least three forms. First, a new position can be
introduced into the repertoire and included in the organization of the self. Poten-
tially, any new situation in a person’s life course may lead to a new position in the
repertoire. When a child goes to school for the first time, he or she meets a teacher
and finds himself or herself in the position of a pupil. In this position, the child is
exposed to new information and subjected to a broad array of new experiences,
which may further broaden the child’s position repertoire.
However, the expansion of the repertoire may be seriously limited as soon as
some positions have acquired a prominent place in the self-system. For example,
as a result of his or her upbringing, a particular individual may feel the need to have
every situation under control, in this way closing himself or herself off from expe-
riences that require a more receptive attitude. When a controlling position is devel-
oped at the cost of a receptive position, not only will many new situations be ap-
proached from a controlling attitude, but at the same time, this dominant position
prevents other positions that are experienced as a threat to the dominant position
from entering the self-system. As a consequence, the child is not able to shift from
a controlling to a receptive position with the result that the flexibility needed to
cope with a variety of situations may be seriously reduced. Therefore, the open-
ness of the self-system to new positions strongly depends on the existing organiza-
tion of the repertoire. Consequently, the potential of new situations to evoke new
positions in the repertoire is limited as soon as the self is organized in a particular
way in the course of a person’s development.
In a study of embodied dialogue in the first year of life, Fogel, de Koeyer,
Bellagamba, and Bell (2002) introduced a distinction that is directly relevant to the
innovation of the self: the difference between rigid and creative frames in
mother-child interactions. Whereas rigid frames are relatively unchanging over
repeated instances, creative frames emerge as a result of improvisational coactivity
with a broad array of possibilities for the innovation of the self. The authors give
examples of both rigid and creative frames in the interaction between Susan, an in-
fant of 15 months, and her mother. A rigid frame is observed when Susan wants to
climb up the slope of a slide but her mother wants her to climb from the steps. This
circular episode is repeated without many variations, and both parties involved in a
battle of wills seem stuck in this situation. In a creative frame, on the other hand,
the mother invites her daughter to play the “lion” game with a hand puppet. In the
past, mother has always played the role of the lion (roaring and scaring), whereas
Susan has always played the role of the recipient (being scared). A reversal of roles
is observed when the child puts, for the first time, the lion on her own hand with the
help of the mother and acts as if to scare the mother. In this particular situation, Su-
san is playing with a new I position and experiencing the corresponding emotions.
A new position is introduced into her repertoire and she learns to flexibly shift
from the position of the scared child to that of the dominant lion-adult and vice
versa; experimenting with the new position and its associated sounds, behaviors,
and emotions. For the development of the child, and for the innovation of the self in
particular, it seems important to provide the child with a variety of creative frames
to broaden the position repertoire and to contribute to the flexibility of moving
from one position to another (see also Lewis, 2002, and Schore, 1994, who arrive
at similar conclusions when discussing the dialogical self in relation to recent de-
velopments in brain research).
From a cultural-anthropological point of view, the issue of innovation in the
dialogical self was discussed by Gieser (2004) in his study of a phenomenon known
as “shape shifting.” Practiced by the Kuranko people of Sierra-Leone, shape shifting
can be described as the culturally supported ability of a man to transform into an ani-
mal so that it can give him a sense of power, control, meaning, healing, and identity.
Shape shifting is closely connected to a particular feature of the Kuranko people: the
tendency to spatialize internal events where memory is seen as happening some-
where else, personhood resides in social relationships rather than in individuals, and
the unconscious is represented by going into the bush. In a similar vein, shape shift-
ing is described as an inward travel from the conscious into the unconscious, ex-
pressed as an exterior movement from town to bush. As part of this ritual, a man who
wants to transform himself goes into the bush and identifies with the totem animal of
the clan (e.g., an elephant), which empowers him to extend his possibilities beyond
the ordinary. After returning to the village, he is respected by the other members of
the clan and may even receive the status of a hero as a model of the ability of the
Kuranko to tap the powers of the wild. He has, moreover, confirmed the moral bond
between his clan’s people and their totem animal.
Gieser (2004) analyzed the process of shape shifting as a dynamic relation be-
tween two domains of the self: the internal domain and the external (or extended)
domain (Hermans, 2002). An external position (the animal as object of shape shift-
ing) is transformed into an internal position (I as animal). As soon as the external
position is internalized, it becomes so dominant that it suppresses all the other po-
sitions in the internal domain. In this phase of the transformation, the power asym-
metries between the positions are pushed to the extreme, resulting in a
monological self. There is only one voice, the voice of the person as animal. The
shape shifter believes that he has transformed himself into the reality of another be-
ing. After the period of shape shifting, however, the new position loses its domi-
nance and becomes a normal dialoguing partner in a multivoiced self. The new po-
sition stabilizes itself in the repertoire, together with all the characteristics the
shape shifter attributes to it (power, control, and healing). Although the new posi-
tion has lost its absolute dominance in the self, it has the power to subordinate ear-
lier positions that were characterized by marginality and powerlessness (Gieser,
2004).
The phenomenon of shape shifting exemplifies how the self can be innovated by
the introduction of a new position. The process of shape shifting can be summa-
rized by referring to two subsequent movements: (a) from an external to an internal
position (an animal in the world becomes internalized) and (b) from an internal to
an external position (the animal recedes and takes its place in the external world
again). The result is a reorganization of the position repertoire of the shape shifter,
a reorganization that is supported by the collective voices of the community.
 From a dialogical point of view, the example of shape shifting is not very differ-
ent from the possibilities that cyberspace offers for the construction and recon-
struction of identity. As Talamo and Ligorio (2001) observed, cyberspace has be-
come populated by so-called collaborative virtual environments (CVEs). Rather
than enabling user-computer interaction, these environments foster communica-
tion and interaction among social actors. CVEs allow users to construct identities
by (a) choosing nicknames that can be very different from their real names; (b) em-
bodying their identities, for example, in the form of two-dimensional or three-di-
mensional objects or figures; and (c) talking, discussing, and negotiating about the
various identities. An example of embodiment is the use of so-called avatars
(Talamo & Ligorio, 2001), referring to objects that represent the participants in the
form of pictures, designs, or animations. Being personified by one or more avatars,
the user can express particular identities and hide others, in ways similar to a mask
worn at a Greek drama or a religious ritual. Presenting oneself in the form of ava-
tars allows the users to explore, often in highly imaginative ways, new identities
that may expand their existing position repertoire. The choice of nicknames may
represent identities that extend the self beyond those indicated by their first names
and family names (see the beginning of this article) and deviate from existing posi-
tions. Basically, the processes described in the case of shape shifting also apply to
the avatar game. The user identifies with the avatar as a new position in the external
domain of the self and internalizes its attitudes, values, and interaction styles that
may then lead to the transformation of the internal domain of the self, in this way
expanding and innovating the existing position repertoire.
From a dialogical perspective, a particular feature of CVEs, their democratic
potential, is noteworthy. Some researchers (e.g., Sproull & Kiesler, 1991) pointed
to the fact that some social cues (e.g., gender, age, or race) are not visible in
cyberspace, which permits the construction of a space that is less restricted by tra-
ditional role expectations. As a result of such expectations, the openness of the self
to alternative constructions may be seriously reduced. In this respect, CVEs pro-
vide users with a welcome place to experiment with the innovation of the self by
introducing new positions in a space that is less restricted by traditional power
structures.

INNOVATION IN THE SELF: FOREGROUNDING A

BACKGROUND POSITION

A second form of innovation can be found when positions move from the back-
ground of the system to the foreground, or to use another metaphor, when more
deeply layered positions are brought to the surface. In that case, positions that are
already part of the system become accessible as the result of a reorganization of the
self. An empirical example is provided by Lysaker and Lysaker (2001), who stud-
ied schizophrenia as a “collapse of the dialogical self.” They followed a client
through three phases—before, during, and after a schizophrenic period. They
found that particular positions that were active in the first phase (e.g., “I as a lover
of music”) seemed to disappear entirely in the second schizophrenic phase, but
could be activated again in the third phase. Such a finding suggests that particular
positions may be backgrounded for a shorter or longer period in a person’s history
as if they disappear entirely, but can be made reaccessible at some later point in
time. This form of innovation does not introduce a new position but is concerned
with the reorganization of the self as a system.
In The Varieties of Religious Experience, James (1982) was not only interested
in religious conversions and counter conversions of historical figures, but also in
sudden changes and reorganizations in the selves of ordinary people. An example
is the phenomenon of “falling out of love” (p. 179), illustrated by the case of a man
who suddenly stopped his relationship with a girl he had fallen in love with 2 years
earlier. When the man looked back, he told how he had fallen violently in love with
a girl who had “a spirit of coquetry.” Although he secretly knew that she was not
the right person for him, he fell into a regular fever and could not stop thinking of
her. After a long period of being plagued by jealousy and contempt for his uncon-
trollable weakness, there was a sudden change:

The queer thing was the sudden and unexpected [italics added] way in which it all
stopped. I was going to my work after breakfast one morning, thinking as usual of her
and of my misery, when, just as if some outside power laid hold of me, I found myself
turning round and almost running to my room, where I immediately got out all the
relics of her which I possessed, including some hair, all her notes and letters, and
ambrotypes on glass. The former I made a fire of, the latter I actually crushed beneath
my heel, in a sort of fierce joy of revenge and punishment. I now loathed and despised
her altogether, and as for myself I felt as if a load of disease had suddenly been re-
moved from me. That was the end. (p. 180)

In his analysis of this case, James (1982) considered it “an unusually clear ex-
ample of two different levels of personality, inconsistent in their dictates, yet so
well balanced against each other as for a long time to fill the life with discord and
dissatisfaction” (p. 180). James (1982) used the phrase “unstable equilibrium” to
characterize the specific organization of the self: “At last, not gradually, but in a
sudden crisis, the unstable equilibrium is resolved” (p. 180).
In our own research (Hermans, 1996a; Hermans & Kempen, 1993) on the reor-
ganization of the self we have found, quite similar to James”s (1982) findings, in-
stances of background positions suddenly coming to the foreground with the si-
multaneous suppression of existing foreground positions. One of our research
participants was Alice, a 28-year-old woman without any psychiatric history. She
described her personality as consisting of two “sides”: an “open side” that was very
familiar and clear to her and a “closed side” that was less familiar and played a role
somewhere in the darker background of her mind. As part of the research proce-
dure, I invited her to tell about her life from the perspectives of her open and closed
positions successively. From her open position (“I as a open person”) she told sto-
ries that centered mainly around the unproblematic relationship with her mother
and other people, whereas from her closed side (“I as a closed person”) she related
events that referred mainly to the problematic relationship with her father who had
left the family when she was 12 years old.
After the investigation, Alice was requested to rate her stories on two variables:
relative dominance (“How dominant was this aspect of your life during the past
week?”) and meaningfulness (“How meaningful was this aspect of your life during
the past week?”). It was found that, over a 3-week period, the stories of her closed
position became more dominant than the stories of her open position; the stories of
the latter position receded to the background. This change represents a clear exam-
ple of a “dominance reversal,” a radical change taking place in a period of an unsta-
ble equilibrium of the self (Hermans, 1996a; Hermans & Kempen, 1993). One of
the similarities between James”s (1982) example of falling out of love and the ex-
ample of dominance reversal of positions is that a radical change of the self takes
place with a limited degree of external causation. Apparently, the self can come to
a “revolutionary” period in which minimal causal factors can instigate maximal
changes in the self. Such changes can be understood as resulting from inner feed-
back loops that lead to the mutual strengthening of positions or structures of posi-
tions that together result in radical changes of the system as a whole. (For a discus-
sion of the notion of equilibrium in the self in the context of self-organization and
chaos theory, see Schwalbe, 1991.)
Similarly, the meaningfulness of the stories from Alice’s closed position in-
creased strongly during the 3-week period, with a simultaneous decrease of the
meaningfulness of the stories from her open position. Apparently, the increasing
dominance of her closed position was experienced as highly meaningful, although
this position was associated with a great deal of negative emotion. On the basis of
Alice’s diary notes and discussions of the results of the investigation, it could be
concluded that the increase of meaning of her closed position could be understood
as bringing hitherto neglected or suppressed experiences to the surface. Moreover,
Alice explained after the investigation that her participation in the project had
helped her to improve the relationship with her father. Altogether, this study sug-
gests that dominance reversal implies a foregrounding of hitherto neglected or sup-
pressed positions that can result in a expanded and enriched position repertoire.
Explorations in cyberspace, and in C VEs and multiuser dimensions (MUDs) in
particular, may “touch” and actualize positions in the self that are, neglected or
suppressed, hidden in the background of the repertoire. Traveling in cyberspace
not only offers an opportunity to extend the self-space beyond the ordinary and
usual, but also has the potential to undermine existing power structures in the self.
Moving through cyberspace and traveling through a wide variety of heterogeneous
positions may lead to sudden dominance reversals in the self so that forces are
brought to the surface that were hitherto neglected or suppressed. People who were
working for many years in a particular occupation may feel a call to change their
job; women may discover masculine sides in themselves and feel the urge to
change the nature of their social and sexual relationships; people living for a long
time in a particular country may feel the strong urge to move to another part of the
world in the conviction that they will find themselves.
Contemporary globalizing society and cyberspace are similar in some signifi-
cant respects. They are both spaces that are characterized by an increasing com-
plexity, by an increasing opportunity to travel from one site to another, and by an
increasing hybridization in the sense that they provide immense opportunities for
combining and recombining existing positions. Certainly, traveling through cul-
tures in a globalized space and traveling through the flow of societies in
cyberspace may be an adventure of short visits and passing encounters. However, it
also may enable visitors to actualize forces that are hidden, as precious possibili-
ties, in the background of their minds.

INNOVATION IN THE SELF: THE EMERGENCE OF

COALITIONS OF POSITIONS

A third form of innovation exists when two or more positions are supporting each
other or develop some form of cooperation so that they form a new subsystem in
the self. Positions that have similar purposes or orientations can easily go together
(e.g., I as enjoyer of life and I as playful), and particular societal positions (e.g., I as
a university teacher) are expected to be associated with particular personal posi-
tions (e.g., I as dedicated to my job).
However, less intuitive coalitions or changes in coalitions may also be ob-
served, as can be seen in the emergence of a coalition of positions that were previ-
ously strongly opposed to each other. As a psychotherapist, I assisted a client
(Fred) who suffered from extreme doubts about his own capacities. In the begin-
ning of the psychotherapy it became clear that there were three positions that
played a main role in his present life: the doubter; the perfectionist; and, somewhat
at the background but very important to him, the enjoyer of life. Although the latter
position seemed to be an enduring feature in his personal history, it was strongly
suppressed by the cooperation between the doubter and the perfectionist, the sec-
ond one compensating for the anxiety aroused by the first one. In the course of
therapy, Fred and I discovered that the perfectionist position could be tackled by
learning to delegate tasks to other people at the right moment and to cooperate with
other people more easily. Fred then learned to practice this new style of working
for more than 1 year. When we examined his repertoire again, we discovered that
the perfectionist and the enjoyer had formed a coalition, which was strong enough
to push the doubter to the background of the self-system. Fred was increasingly
able to enjoy a good job without completing it in every small detail, and he worked
more easily with other people. The new coalition represented an innovation of his
repertoire and showed how coalitions can be established between positions that
were initially opposed and excluding each other (for more detail of the case and the
methodology, see Hermans, 2001a, 2001b).
This phenomenon of a “coalition between opposites” can also be observed in
selves that are located at the interfaces between cultures. Bhatia and Rham (2001)
analyzed an account from a Pakistani American woman who was shifting between
oppositional voices from different cultural milieus: “Such a catch-22! Your class
mates do not think you are American enough, and your parents think you are too
Westernized” (Mani, 1994, cited in Bhatia & Ram, 2001, p. 305). In their comment
on this quotation, Bhatia and Ram emphasized that the battles of this woman with
her family, with the Muslim community, and with the American society represents
a dialogical negotiation that is more than a push-pull phenomenon. However dis-
cordant, the different voices may create a “symbiotic relation of ambivalence.”
They may live off each other in a dynamic loop, and the ambivalence becomes a
basis for the negotiation of the different parts of the self, although the coalition
may be associated with the feeling of pain and loss.
The notion of coalition also plays a central role concerning the Internet. As
Granic and Lamey (2000) argued, the complexity of the Internet emerges sponta-
neously from the interactions of the simpler components of the system. There is no
central control system and it is not the result of some brilliant inventor’s design.
Rather, the net functions as a decentralized order that emerges from the mass of
millions of users who electronically interact daily, setting the conditions for the
spontaneous creation of a higher order complexity. The complexity of the net is re-
alized through the system-wide coordination of many different coalitions or
spaces. These coalitions are nongeographically defined aggregates of people and
their electronic connection that share a particular function. Typical of the Internet
is that the same user may participate, successively or simultaneously, in a variety
of coalitions (e.g., scientists from different cultures, patients with different experi-
ences of a particular illness). Because internal and external dialogues are intensely
intertwined, the different coalitions in which the user participates can confirm,
supplement, enrich, or undermine existing coalitions in the self.

LIMITATIONS ON THE PR O C E SS OF INNOVATION

Although the self has the capacity to innovate itself in close correspondence with
the situation, there are powerful forces at work that make the self function in rather
conservative ways. Inspired by earlier theories on cognitive dissonance, Josephs
and Valsiner (1998) described how “circumvention strategies” are used as buffers
against the sharp edges of disagreements, conflicts, and contradictions. For exam-
pie, a woman may see herself as “the future wife of X,” but she may be warned by
her family members that X is not the right man for her. Somewhere she agrees with
her family members that a future marriage will be a great risk. However, she may
circumvent the contradictory position by saying to herself, “My love is so strong
that I will change him.” In this way, the original position is not only protected but
its powerful place in the organized system is further strengthened. The use of cir-
cumvention strategies suggests that self-positions, like people in a society, form
power structures with a relative dominance of some positions over others. Such an
organizational structure, however, reduces the multivoiced character of the self
and represents a force in a monological direction.
Conservative forces that function as an avoidance of complexity, ambivalence,
and conflict are also at work in societal structures. An example is Kaufman’s
(1991) study of newly orthodox Jewish women. Women who grew up in secular
Jewish homes in the United States felt that the secular values of their education
provided an inadequate foundation for their living. In their teens or twenties they
converted to orthodox Judaism, despite the limitations placed on women. They did
so because they believed that the orthodox religious system offered them a definite
place in the world and the feeling of being rooted in a long, durable tradition.
Arnett (2002) placed Kaufman’s study in the broader context of globalization, re-
ferring to the emergence of various kinds of fundamentalist movements in both
Western and non-Western societies. In agreement with other theorists (e.g.,
Giddens, 2000), he argued that many of these movements arose in the late 20th
century as a direct reaction to the changes caused by globalization. Apparently,
such a world view provides the self with a stable religious position that is based on
a belief in a sacred past, a hierarchy of authority with men over women, adults over
children, and God over all (Arnett, 2002; Marty & Appleby, 1993). From a
dialogical point of view, religious orthodoxy and the emergence of fundamental
movements can be considered as manifestations of collective voices that encour-
age a strongly hierarchical organization of the position repertoire with a simulta-
neous avoidance of internal disagreement, conflict, and ambivalence.
The Internet may be an attractive environment for fundamentalist communities
or for any other group with ideological, commercial, religious, artistic, scientific,
or entertaining purposes, to express their views and expand their influence in the
world. This means that the Internet as such is not automatically contributing to the
complexity and heterogeneity of the self. Rather, it has the potential to do so. The
question of whether the Internet, cyberspace, e-mail, short message service (SMS),
and other electronic devices are enriching the self and its dialogical capacities de-
pends on the historical background, needs, and aims of the user. At the same time,
these medias are so powerfully present in our contemporary society that they, in
their turn, influence and change our history, needs, and aims. Therefore, the effect
of electronic media on the mind of the person is an issue that concerns the evolu-
tion of mankind.
 THE CONTRIBUTIONS IN THIS ISSUE:
EXPLORATIONS OF MEDIATED DIALOGUE

The several contributions in this issue have in common that they illustrate, in one
way or another, the process of mediated dialogue in a digital age. In the following,
I briefly sketch, for each contribution, a connection with this theoretical frame-
work.
In his article on Internet-based personal Weblogs (“blogs”), Hevern showed
how technology is able to create a new form of dialogue that is very personal and
very public at the same time. W hen a user publishes a Weblog, he or she becomes
actively engaged in an array of self-presentation strategies within the public envi-
ronment of cyberspace. Unlike private diaries, Weblogs are inherently public; the
posting of items on a blog is a social act of positioning that invites readers to en-
counter some aspect of the blogger’s self, comment on it, and add to it. Unlike per-
sonal homepages, the publishing of a Weblog is an activity profoundly expressive
of an author’s experience of time, a fundamental condition for moving positions in
the dialogical self. The blogger crafts and preserves in and across time multiple po-
sitions, both in the internal and external domain of the self. These positions de-
monstrably evolve, shift focus, and interact with other positions as the rhythm of
the author’s life is chronicled each day. Weblogs are stimulating examples of the
convergence of space and time and they foster dialogical processes on the contact
zones between cultures.
In their article on MUDs, Ligorio and Pugliese are interested in the field of edu-
cation in which they observe a dichotomy between individualistic and contextual
concepts of learning. Whereas an individualistic concept is concerned with the de-
velopment of the talents of the individual learner, a contextual concept of learning
enables learners to co-construct a stimulating learning environment in which so-
cial interaction is central. The authors devised a learning environment in which
communicators no longer rely on visual indicators, typical of face-to-face interac-
tion. Instead, they work with new means and instruments such as nicknames, ava-
tars, various forms of embodiment, and virtual identities. In this way, new posi-
tions can be introduced into the repertoire where issues of realism and fantasy are
combined in novel and strategic ways. The results gathered from the authors”
study show how a specific repertoire of positions (collaborator, ironic, detective,
leader) functions in a highly contextual way. Different positions become promi-
nent as the cooperation between the players and their problem solving progresses.
This contribution shows how MUDs provide participants with an imaginative
learning environment that challenges the range and flexibility of the position rep-
ertoire of the learners.
SMS, discussed in Cortini, Mininni, and M anuti’s contribution, is a rapidly
growing medium of communication; particularly popular in circles of young peo-
ple in Europe and, increasingly, in North America and elsewhere. It fulfils the de-
sire of the users to position themselves within the interlocutor’s attention and to en-
ter his or her personal space. A specific feature of SMS is the peculiar mixture of
orality and literacy. SMS messages are necessarily short, as the number of charac-
ters is limited. Such a constraint imposes on the interlocutors an economy of words
and meaning, resulting in a curious slang made up of cut words. The texts pro-
duced in SMS communication are similar to oral dialogue, both in expressive aims
and linguistic features; the messages are usually informal. The result is a very pe-
culiar writing style that is the textual equivalent of a “second orality” that, in turn,
gives birth to a sort of “secondary literacy.” In this way, a new genre or combina-
tion of genres emerges with specific textual features (e.g., abbreviations, emotion
words, slang) that modify both external and internal dialogues. The mobile phone
can be considered an extension of one’s own body, and it accompanies the commu-
nicator wherever he or she goes. As such, SMS emphasizes the nomadic character
of modern identity (see the metaphor of travel discussed earlier in this article). This
new medium fits very well with the globalized context of the third millennium.
Annese’s contribution is focused on television, which she sees as a “social
space” that offers a variety of possible self-images through audience discussion
programs, its participants, and the disclosure of private stories. Although TV
watching does not permit any direct dialogue with the characters exposed on the
screen, this medium offers a great variety of role models and dialogical genres
from a variety of cultures. It allows viewers to compare themselves with a complex
and heterogeneous set of TV characters and to identify or disidentify with them, in
this way extending or restricting their own position repertoire (see the notion of
cultural complexity discussed earlier in this article). From a dialogical perspective,
the talk show is of particular importance because it represents a space of parasocial
interaction. Ordinary people represented on the screen as a simulacrum of the audi-
ence on the other side of the screen are presenting images of subjectivity to the
viewers. In this way, TV offers the possibility of a true multivoicedness, with a di-
versity of characters: the participants of the talk show, the audience at the back-
ground of the show, and the audience at the other side of the screen. Their similari-
ties, differences, contrasts, and contradictions represent dynamic forces that
require a continuous interpretation by a self that is faced with a complex variety of
possible positions. This contribution shows how the self is located in a highly dy-
namic space that is stretched between actual selves and screen others.
Historical changes in the notion of space are the focus of van Halen and
Janssen’s contribution. The authors compare D ante’s conception of space in the di-
vine comedy and a late-modern conception of space as expressed by Boombap, a
leading Web site of the Dutch hip-hop scene. Whereas Dante’s space can be re-
garded as exemplary of the traditional, authority-bound self-construction in
premodern times, Boombap reflects the virtual movements of late modern identity
management. In both examples, the spatial nature of self-construction plays a deci-
sive role. However, in Dante’s moral universe, space is closed, hierarchically con-
structed (hell, purgatory, paradise) and predefined; whereas the cyberspace of
Boombap is openly negotiated and co-constructed by people involved in processes
of positioning and repositioning. The two kinds of space correspond to different
types of narrative. D ante’s space is subordinated to a temporal organization. Peo-
ple follow their destiny, and the story in which they are located has a beginning, a
middle, and an ending. Cyberspace, in contrast, subordinates time to space. There
is a constant change and flux of narrative themes, and there is no closure. Whereas
D ante’s space is constructed from the viewpoint of the omniscient narrator,
cyberspace is rather a bottom-up construction that is made and remade by
dialogical processes as question and answer and agreement and disagreement.
This contribution shows how important the dimension of “open-closed” is for the
historical understanding of the notion of space.
As the several contributions in this issue demonstrate, dialogue becomes in-
creasingly mediated in a global and digital age. This mediation represents a deep
and irreversible change of the relationships among the inhabitants of our planet,
not only in respect to the form but also in the content of their dialogical relation-
ships; and in both their external and internal dialogues. In a sense, we are all
“parts” continuously involved in dialogue with other parts. Sturgeon (1953) said:

Multiplicity is our first characteristic; unity our second. As your parts know they are
parts of you, so must you know that we are parts of humanity, (p. 232)

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

I thank Vincent W. Hevern for his detailed editorial remarks.

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Copyright © 2004, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.

Threaded Identity in Cyberspace:

Weblogs & Positioning
in the Dialogical Self

Vincent W. Hevern
Le Moyne College

The rapid emergence of Internet-based personal Weblogs (“blogs”) reflects specific

technological innovations and new online practices with broad affinity for the self as
dialogical. This article employs qualitative analyses of the structural components and
selected postings from a spectrum of 20 English-language blogs. Weblogs display
multiple and shifting positionings in the form of ongoing, personally meaningful,
and hypertextually threaded themes. A Jamesian (1890) “stream of thought” quality
characterizes many blog entries when read chronologically. However, the active
posting of contradictory or competing personal viewpoints reflects the polyphonic
qualities of the dialogical self suggested by Bakhtin’s (1929/1973) analysis of au-
thorship. As such, blogs serve as explicit examples of Hermans’s (2001) systematic
model of the multivoiced self’s active encounter with social and cultural others. The
sequencing of commentaries in some Weblogs illustrates processes of cultural ex-
change by which authors thread pathways through overlapping but somewhat differ-
ent positionings in processes of negotiating new or changing identities.

Over the past two decades, both psychology and communications have found their
respective domains challenged by basic theoretical and practical developments re-
garding the nature of the self and forms of public interchange. The discursive turn in
the social sciences has set in deep relief the centrality of language, narrative, and the
impact of cultural tools in the development of the human person (Bruner, 1990;
Valsiner, 1998). Within this perspective, the nature of the self has been variously
characterized as “protean” (Lifton, 1993), “saturated” (Gergen, 1991), “multiple”
(Rosenberg, 1997), and “narrated” or “storied” (Sarbin, 1986). A particularly prom-
ising formulation— the self as “dialogical”— has been articulated by Hermans and

Requests for reprints should be sent to Vincent W. Hevern, Ph.D., Psychology Department, Le
Moyne College, Syracuse, NY 13214. E-mail: hevern@lemoyne.edu
others (Hermans, 1996, 2001; Hermans & Kempen, 1993). Likening the dialogical
self to “a society of minds,” Hermans (2001) adapted both the Jamesian (1890) no-
tion of the “me” as socially extended and Bakhtin’s (1929/1973) theory of dialogism
and heteroglossia in literary creation (Barresi, 2002). Hermans (2001) argued for a
decentralized self of multiple “I” positions in constant dialogue with each other and
with a similarly decentralized cultural universe of other selves and practices. Fur-
ther, Hermans (2001) underscored movement— a temporal ebb and flow— among
the positions within the I as the self dialogues with parallel positions among other
selves and the cultural world more generally.
Crucial aspects of contemporary culture are those new forms of mass communi-
cation media that profoundly affect the development and expression of human
lives (Levinson, 1998). Among these media, the Internet (“net”) has emerged as
the fastest growing and arguably most influential in its impact on human society
(Hamad, 1991). How humans function within the net’s cyberspacial confines and
are, in turn, affected by their experiences has begun to receive scholarly attention
(e.g., Gackenbach, 1998). In this light, a potentially fruitful arena of investigation
is the conjunction between the Internet as a growing collection of technologies
broadly engaging the self and H erm an’s (1996) dialogical formulation of the na-
ture of personhood.
Hermans (2001) asked, “W hat happens in the minds of people, and in their
practices, when they entertain intensive contacts with representatives of other cul-
tures without any bodily, localized contact?” (p. 273). Research on this question
has already proven productive. For example, Talamo and Ligorio (2001) studied
identity construction within an Internet virtual world; they charted varying dy-
namic processes of negotiation by which the self is constructed along strongly
dialogical lines. Hevem (2000) examined personal homepage construction as a
means of self-expression by members of socially marginalized groups; he identi-
fied multiple structural elements and forms of self-presentation that reflect on the
self as dialogical and their authors as motivated storytellers.
This article extends Hevern’s (2000) earlier analysis and addresses Hermans’s
(2001) speculation by examining a newly emergent net environment, the personal
Weblog (“blog”; Blood, 2002). At its simplest, a Weblog is an online page contain-
ing a collection of links and associated textual commentaries or annotations, pre-
sented in reverse chronological order, to which new entries (links & text) are added
on a frequent basis. Weblogs have shown explosive growth in popularity. For ex-
ample, one specific Weblog format, Blogger (2002), had more than 750,000 sub-
scribers in the early fall of 2002. Weblogs permit authors or “bloggers” to engage
in varying online practices of self-presentation, which I describe metaphorically as
“threaded.” Also, I argue that the self that emerges from these threaded activities
resonates closely with H erm ans’s (2001) positioning theory regarding the
dialogical self as it interacts within its own personal and sociocultural worlds. The
practice of Weblogging offers a concrete instantiation of such a dialogical self.
 How did Weblogs develop as a format of online expression? Evolving from
both personal diaries and annotated lists of favorite links at traditional personal
homepages, entire online pages— originally called “news sites” or “filters”— be-
gan to offer browsers selective content guides to the Web’s offerings by the late
1990s (Blood, 2002). Such sites that selected or filtered Web content were called
Weblogs (borrowed from author Jorn Barger) by Cameron Barrett in 1999 (Barrett,
2002; Blood, 2002). Since then, these early blogs have been complemented by a
vast host of other blogs.
Weblogs’ recent appearance is mirrored by the absence of scholarly research
about this media form; most published comments come from journalists and gen-
eral writers (e.g., Safire, 2002; Shulevitz, 2002). Blood (2002) authored a popular
handbook about Weblogging and the editors of Perseus Publishing (Rodzvilla,
2002) printed a collection of articles on Weblogs that had originally appeared on-
line. Some scholars argued about the role of Weblogs versus traditional forms of
journalism without addressing more personal uses of blogs (e.g, Lasica, 2002;
Palser, 2002). M ortensen and Walker (2002) related blogging practices to broader
social networks within which bloggers write. However, scholars from disciplines
like psychology and sociology have not yet published analyses of the roles played
by Weblogs in relation to identity construction or the strategies and tactics of
self-presentation that earlier researchers (e.g., Markham, 1998) examined in other
domains of cyberspace

METHOD

W eblog Collection

Data were derived from the online presentation of 20 personal Weblogs.1 As this
study began, the burgeoning growth of Weblogs was not mirrored by a correspond-
ing effort to build a comprehensive public census of available blogs. Rather, avail-
able but limited, directories offered guides to popular or thematically linked sub-
groups of blogs. Therefore, assembling an actual random sample of Weblogs for this
investigation was judged to be unfeasible, and abroad variety of blog types were cho-
sen instead from a review of other sources. These types included (a) explicitly jour-
nalistic or (b) political-ideological blogs and those of individuals (c) with deep inter-
est in Internet culture, (d) from socially marginalized groups (either gay men or
physically disabled persons), or (e) with a general personal focus. Criteria for inclu-
sion required that the authors had published their blogs for at least two months; in-
cluded a minimum of four entries in any single month; be written in English; and, if
possible, be identifiable as originating in North America (United States and Can-

*A listing of all blogs employed in this study and their associated Uniform Resource Locator ad-
dresses is available from Vincent W. Hevem.
ada). Note that authors chosen for inclusion in this study had been posting their blogs
online for a mean of 22.4 months (SD = 18.3; range = 4-64 months).
For each blog in the sample, the raw data consisted of (a) the current front page;
(b) the previous two to six weeks of archived postings (generally all materials
posted during June and July 2002); (c) any archived postings from September,
2001; and (d) any ancillary pages (e.g., those headed “About,” “FAQ” (Frequently
Asked Questions), or containing biographical statements or lists of links). The fi-
nal set of data consisted of 218 individual Web subpages (average per blog = 10.8
subpages, SD = 13.4; range = 4-66).

Data Analysis

A two-stage qualitative analytic strategy was employed to review the Weblogs

(Creswell, 1998; Wolcott, 1994).

First Stage. Using what has previously been called a form of digital ethnog-
raphy (Hevern, 2000), the content of the Weblogs was examined structurally.
Common elements or components across multiple Weblogs that reflected potential
mechanisms of self-presentation were isolated. Each of these elements was
grouped under one of three primary characteristics: textuality, graphical content,
or potential to promote interaction (or contact) between the author and blog reader.
Second stage. Subsequently, separate postings were analyzed in three
substages: First, the functional role of selected postings across multiple blogs was
examined, and a range of common forms and activities that repeatedly appear
among these data were isolated. Second, the ways in which the authors responded
within their blogs to the events of September 11, 2001 and their aftermath was re-
viewed as a common cultural-historical event that may have elicited what
Hermans (2001) termed “moving positions” within the self. This question was
posed: Did the subset of 12 blogs published in September, 2001 demonstrate a
flow and flux of positions by their authors? Finally, the collective postings within
individual blogs were examined to consider how strategically they might model as-
pects of dialogical processes in distinctive ways. These analytic approaches sought
to characterize Weblog practices largely at macro- and intermediate levels and left
open detailed examinations of microprocesses within Weblogs for future study.

RESULTS

First Stage: Structural Elem ents

All Weblogs are comprised of at least two structural elements: a title at the top of
the blog and a main channel of author postings. Titles are usually embedded within
a graphic icon that identifies the Weblog and often provides graphical unity across
multiple subpages of the blog. The column containing the author’s dated and
posted text (occasionally accompanied by graphical images) serves as the main
channel; entries in this channel are displayed in reverse chronological order (new-
est at the colum n’s top). Most blogs contain more than these elements. The main
channel is frequently complemented by one or two smaller adjacent channels in
which authors often place a variety of more enduring links and other items of infor-
mation. In this sample, 16 contained either two or three channels, 3 used a single
main channel, and 1 comprised two main channels authored by separate bloggers.
What types of items appear among the side channels? I identified 47 kinds of struc-
tural materials including textual (n = 26), visual or graphic (n = 13), and interactive in
- 8) elements (Table 1). Authors often provide readers with an autobiographical orien-
tation through a short rendition of their general life history or how a major illness or ac-
cident affected their life’s story. Personal interests and activities receive multiple forms
of expression via lists of favorite books or musical albums, sets of beloved poems or
song lyrics, personal preference inventories (e.g., sports teams, movies, foods, and per-
formers), and items detailing other leisure or hobby pursuits. Personal interests are fur-
ther expressed through various types of editorial writing including political or cultural
essays and reviews of music and books. The Weblog form situates the author’s activi-
ties within the clear temporal framework of the main channel. Further, past postings
are typically archived by date in easily accessible locations.
Weblogs display an interest in both visual display and presentation quality.
Each Weblog has a distinctive look and feel; they often have coordinated graphical,
typographical, and formatting schemes deployed in a consistent fashion. The re-
sulting blog is a personal construction intimately bound to but different from pre-
sentation forms created by (anonymous) others but available as templates online to
new bloggers. This practice is suggestive of the ways in which Weblog construc-
tion sites like Blogger serve as contact zones culturally, and offer a type of visual
social language to their participants (Hermans, 2001). The extended social world
of the Web author is expressed concretely in the display of many types of photo-
graphic images (e.g., family, friends, travel, and vacation sites). Similarly, an au-
thor’s creative interests may be shown in renditions of drawings and other forms of
artwork (or, textually, in fictional writing and poetry). A time-dependent form of
self-expression is occasionally found in the use of a Webcam— a type of online
television broadcast in which individual images of the blogger and home environ-
ment are continuously posted in real time.
Finally, bloggers offer their readers multiple paths by which to interact with
them directly. Blogs generally list means for readers to contact authors (synchro-
nously) via ICQ, software, via instant messaging (IM), or (asynchronously) via
e-mail. Readers may also be invited to sign an online “guestbook,” enter their
e-mail addresses in a database to receive announcements, or express their opinions
via an online poll.
 TABLE 1
Structural Elements of Weblogs

Textual (N = 26)
Archive o f past postings
Autobiographical orienting statement
Blogs read: Listing and links
Coordinate and other personal sites: Links
Current and favorite books and other reading lists
Disability or illness story
Editorial writing: Essays on culture, communications media, and so on
Family and friends: Links and biographical sketches
FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions)
Favorite online sites
Fictional writing
Hobbies and personal interest resources
ISSN number
Journals and diaries
Monthly calendar: Hypertext linked to archives
Music: Favorite album lists
Online resource directories
Personal homepages of others
Personal preference and interest inventories
PGP Public Key Block (Encryption Code Key)
Poetry and song lyrics
Press interviews, articles, citations
Quotes and extracts from own previous postings
Reviews: Movies, music, books
Search engines
Technical specifications

Visual-Graphic (N = 13)
Advertisements
Awards: Icons and links
Contribution links (PayPal, Amazon Honor System, and so on)
Icons: Weblogs and other sites
Personal artwork and drawings
Photographs: Family and partners
Photographs: Friends
Photographs: General images (travel, and so on)
Photographs: News events
Photographs: Self
Public service announcements
Web page counter: Icon and link
Webcam

Interactive (N = 8)
Announcement list for future news/updates
Contact: E-mail address
Contact: IM/ICQ address
Guestbook
Online discussion list (blog-specific)
Online store or commercial sales center
Polls
Wish lists (e.g., Amazon.com)
S eco n d Stage: Dialogical P r o c e s s e s

The main channel: Elements and activity analysis. At the heart of the
Weblog lies the main channel where authors regularly post and update items on-
line. Besides using date headings to separate entries, many Weblogs (60% of this
sample) employ time stamps so that readers can gauge when an item was pub-
lished. One half of the blogs also explicitly invite comments on individual postings
by providing a mechanism to record and display these responses, yet another inter-
active form. Therefore, readers along with the author can hold a sort of online con-
versation on specific postings while the author continues to add new items.
The main channel serves as a public space in which Weblog authors engage in a
range of self-presentation activities. I identified 11 distinctive types of post-
ings—each showing a differing performative intent (Table 2). Three elements fo-
cus on the self internally or reflexively, whereas 7 elements involve a more external
interest with “others”—be they persons, events, expressions, online resources, and
so forth. One element, embedding an image in the main channel, may assume ei-
ther focus.
Self-focused elements and activities employ two diary-like forms: In one, the
writer narrates the events of daily life; in the other, the author engages in a kind of
reflective self-colloquy, speaking out loud what otherwise would be internal and
inaccessible to others. Weblogs with a personal or quotidian focus employ these el-
ements extensively. A third type offers a self-description conveyed by a long list of
disparate personal facts or self-judgments about the self; they are sometimes
headed “ 100 things about [Author’s Name]”. Such listings—what Hermans (2001)
might identify as personal “positionings”—often reveal obscure, personally sensi-
tive, or apparently trivial aspects of the self. For example, Denys in his Weblog,

TABLE 2
Element-Activity Analysis of Main Channel Postings

Self Focused
“ 100 Things A b ou t...” Self-description list: Highlighting disparate elements of the self
Diary-like narrative: Describing, detailing daily life, business, & professional activities in time
Diary-like self-colloquy: Talking to the self aloud, reflecting, musing

“Other” Focused
Aggregated links: Constructing or reporting an event or concern via multiple sources
Allusive com ment-veiled reference and link: Challenging the reader to go offsite
Correspondence-e-mail with annotation or commentary: Exchanging viewpoints
Link and annotation: Describing, summarizing
Link and Commentary: Evaluating, judging
Quotation and Commentary: Evaluating, judging
Research results: Summarizing an active inquiry for personal or professional purposes
Dual focused
Embedded image: Illustrating, contexualizing
 Today is the fourteenth ... [<14thbrother.webmages.com>; no longer pub-
lished], informs his readers that “I’ve never seen a shrink .... Certain music makes
me cry ... . My limited [sexual] experience: 3 partners (was 2 until this m onth)....
I don’t think I believe in Jesus.”
Among elements with an external focus are two fundamental sorts identified as
links with annotations and links with commentaries. In both, there is a hyperlink to
another Web site with either a description of what the reader will find there or with
editorial comments that evaluate the content of the link. Commentaries tend to pre-
dominate in journalistic and political-ideological Weblogs. Therefore,
AndrewSullivan.com (AS) repeatedly illustrates extreme liberal bias and reporting
errors in the New York Times. In contrast, Wil Weaton Dot Net (WWDN;
www.wilwheaton.net) frequently lambastes the U.S. government—a position con-
sistent with the author’s self-description as progressive politically and distrustful,
in general, of both government and business.
Two additional elements of other-focused postings involve what may be called
aggregated links in which authors assemble multiple Web resources dealing with
the same topic and present them in a single extended posting. As noted in the fol-
lowing, several blogs in this sample employed such an aggregation when they re-
ported on the events of September 11, 2001. A second, related posting form may be
designated as a research report. Here, a Web author generates a set of resources an-
swering a particular question or dealing with an issue under investigation. For ex-
ample, Peterme.com (July 25, 2002) annotated eight online resources about the
“Internet and interpersonal relationships.” Such research reports reinforce the au-
thor’s identity as an expert evaluator.

Weblogging as a response to September 11, 2001. When the United

States experienced the air attacks at the World Trade Center and Pentagon, the in-
tense coverage by the commercial media was paralleled in cyberspace: Bloggers
began posting almost immediately and often did not stop for many hours, even
days. Twelve of the 20 blogs in this sample contain specific postings for that
month, for example:

• At the Scripting News (www.scripting.com), author Dave Winer uploaded 95

separate items during September 11 itself. Four photos posted online included a
live Webcam image of the World Trade Center on fire. His last message that day
summarized his experience: “Anyway, it’s time for me to sign off for the night. To-
day I started at about 5:30 AM, and typed and read and thought and felt every min-
ute of the day. I’m wiped. I’m also lucky—I get to come back tomorrow. Thou-
sands of Americans aren’t so lucky. Their families and friends won’t sleep so well
tonight. Say a prayer for all of us, and for the world.”
• Living near the scene of the attacks in New York City, Choire of EastfWest
(www.eastwest.nu/blog.shtml; no longer published) posted numerous personal
photographs taken on the city’s streets during the following week. His photographs
convey an “on the scene” realism that the commercial news outlets often did not
televise.
• Philo (“West” of East/West) explained one role of Webloggers that day in de-
scribing his blog partner, Choire, wandering the debris-filled streets of New York:
“It’s almost as if, judging by all of our email and the links from all over the world
that you [Choire] have become the eyes, ears, nose, mouth and lungs of Blogville.”

Three themes regarding September 11 and Weblogs were clear in this sample:
(a) sharing the experiences of others via postings was personally meaningful, (b)
experiencing multiple viewpoints in the form of visual displays and written de-
scriptions of events gave readers a better understanding of what had happened, and
(c) Weblogs and their readers formed a palpable and bonded community in the im-
mediate aftermath of the attacks.

Weblogs and identity following September 11, 2001 . A new genre of

Weblog—called warblogs—emerged in the aftermath of September 11, 2001.
These warblogs are concerned with the ramifications of the attacks and the “war on
terrorism” launched by the Bush administration. Their authors speak of being
changed by the events of that day: Their postings attest to such alteration in per-
sonal identity. Consider the process shown in one venue: Jeff Jarvis’s (2001),
WarLog: World War III (www.buzzmachine.com). He was

A block away from the World Trade Center ... when the first of the two towers col-
lapsed ... Completely engulfed in its debris, I joined a mob running away, screaming,
unable to see, unable to breathe anything but the black cloud.

He soon began to publish his blog as an explicit response to his September 11 expe-
rience. Three months later he reflected:

In politics, Fve endured not just change but ideological whiplash. I was never politi-
cally correct but I was liberal and from youth I held fast to pacifism ... But now our
generation has faced our Hitler in bin Laden and we find a mortal and moral need to
defend against evil. So I am now a former pacifist... I’m a goddamned patriot. Some-
times, I don’t recognize myself, (http://www.buzzmachine.com/001_12_01_cri-
sis_archive.html#7831246)

In subsequent months, Jarvis detailed his political opinions and personal life
experiences through lengthy daily postings. Inside his warblog he entered into an
intensive conversation with himself and many other online writers. His changing
outlook permeates an entire year of postings.
 Weblogging: Identity and alternative dialogical forms. The Weblogs in
this sample offer an assortment of forms; they reflect differing approaches to the
challenge of identity construction through the strategic use of alternative
dialogical processes. Consider, for example, these three Weblogs:

• AS: Andrew Sullivan is a gay, sexually active, confessing Catholic, an

emigre to the United States from Britain, a political conservative and social pro-
gressive, a former print editor for The Nation magazine who authors one of the
most influential journalistic blogs in cyberspace. As Sullivan’s contrasting identity
labels anticipate, this Weblog models a polyphony of voices within a single indi-
vidual. A menu on his blog juxtaposes “Homosexuality” with “Faith” and “Cul-
ture” with “War” and offers readers extended essays that articulate Sullivan’s con-
trasting stances (e.g., one essay posits “a conservative case for gay marriage” and
another “a pro life case for the abortion pill”).
• East/West: Philo in the San Francisco Bay area and Choire in New York City
are partnered in the production of a blog, although they are physically separated by
3,000 miles. They have been friends since 1990. However, living on either side of
the U.S., their “Website was launched in November, 2000 as a way for us to keep in
better touch and have an active part of each other’s lives. We’ve been keeping it go-
ing pretty much daily ever since.” (http://www.eastwest.nu/uspop.html)
• WWDN: In 1986, the 14-year-old actor, Wil Wheaton, starred in the well-re-
ceived film, Stand By Me, as a boy coming of age. The following year, he landed a
3-year role as young trainee Ensign Wesley Crusher in the popular U.S. television
series Star Trek: The Next Generation. The public persona Wheaton has carried in
the years since these roles strongly emphasized his youth, inexperience, and status
as an adolescent geek or misfit. Now 30 years old, married, father to two teenagers,
and deeply involved in both a Los Angeles comedy troupe and a computer gaming
company, Wheaton’s Weblog subverts the lingering persona while building a
bridge to his fans and the public. In emphatic, often outrageous ways, Wheaton
discusses his daily life, his self-doubts as well as his hopes, his struggle with his
old persona and its effects, and the experience of residual celebrity. In so doing, he
challenges his old “Wesley Crusher” image as a callow adolescent. Further, by us-
ing cyberspace to reveal selected aspects of his daily life, Wheaton offers the pub-
lic a kind of intimacy that would not be possible in person.

These examples illustrate ways in which specific Weblog practices resonate

with important qualities of the dialogical self. Voices within the self are varied,
even oppositional, and resist any simple attempt to harmonize their multiplicity
into an unstable synthesis. These voices bring their own histories whether in the
form of extended personal narratives (WWDN) or as collected essays crafted over
years in support of diverse self-positions (AS). The postmodern condition, which
eradicates traditional spatial boundaries, permits intimacy and social exchange
from afar physically—witness Philo and Choire—because, in cyberspace, “near-
ness is created by interest” (Weinberger, 2002, p. 49). Further, identity must be
continually negotiated because the self stands at a nexus of dynamic forces, both
cultural and personal, which resist stasis. Therefore, the once 14-year-old celebrity
finds in Weblogs a dialogical mechanism to transcend old dichotomies between
the persona as a cultural construction and as a personal achievement. Whether he
will succeed in building a suitable identity in the future remains uncertain, and his
Weblog acknowledges that his current solution to selfhood is tentative.

DISCUSSION

W eblogging a s Dialogical P ro cess

The decision to publish a Weblog engages a blogger actively in an array of

self-presentation strategies within the public environment of cyberspace. Unlike
private diaries, Weblogs are inherently public and the posting of items on a blog
is a social act of positioning that, minimally, bids readers to encounter some as-
pect of that self that fashioned the item. Unlike other media, the use of hypertext
links in Weblogs also invites the reader to assume the perspective of the author
by experiencing what the author experienced at that link. Weblogs usually pro-
vide avenues by which readers can further the encounter by entering into explicit
conversation with the author. The sites examined here frequently formed part of
extended social networks where bloggers commented on or replied to postings at
each other’s sites.
Unlike personal homepages, the publishing of a Weblog is an activity pro-
foundly expressive of an author’s experience of time, a fundamental condition for
Hermans’s (2001) model of moving positions in the dialogical self. The blogger
crafts and preserves in and across time multiple positions, both internal and exter-
nal to the self. These positions demonstrably evolve, shift focus, and interact with
other positions in the rhythm of the author’s life as chronicled daily. Sequences of
entries are reminiscent of William James’s (1890) stream of consciousness: The
diversity of postings may be quite broad, and specific items may show little rela-
tion among themselves. However, the ability of Weblogs to preserve the items in
sequence allows both reviewers and the blog author to identify enduring positions
at least retrospectively as these emerge historically.

Threaded identity as metaphor. In his sympathetic reflection, David Wein-

berger (2002) argued that, “the Web is an unnatural world, one we have built for
ourselves” (p. xi). And, structuring that new world, he argued, are novel forms of
space and time: space arising in the social encounter of individuals who find the
activities of others online meaningful and time emerging in the interwoven presen-
tation of stories and personal narratives throughout every nook and cranny of
cyberspace. In examining personal homepages (Hevem, 2000), I concluded that
the self was constructed dialogically by appropriating spatially organized elements
including narrative ones at a pace I would now judge relatively static. These data
argue for a more active proposition: that time serves as the primary organizing
principle for Weblogs. In this light, we must acknowledge, as Weinberger (2002)
argued, that “[W]eb time is ‘threaded’” (p. 60) in a variety of ways. Therefore, fol-
lowing his lead, let me suggest how threadedness serves as a broad and useful met-
aphor in this domain of cyberspace.
The concept of a thread or the activity of threading has held multiple meanings
in English over a long history (Oxford English Dictionary, 1989). The notion of
identity as threaded resonates with several of these meanings. I propose that at
least three facets of active blog practice are central to the formation of online iden-
tity and can be highlighted by invoking three distinctive, although overlapping,
metaphors of threading.

• Journeying or following a pathway: This aspect of identity construction is

grounded in the metaphor of an individual piece of thread or yam as it extends
through a piece of cloth. As such, identity is understood as an evolving journey and
is expressed when authors explore, weigh, challenge, expand, or alter their stances
across time on those individual topics appearing within their blogs. Bloggers travel
along connected paths through their lives that take on the richness of personal or
historical narratives. Over weeks, months, or years they tell tales arising from their
jobs, travels, projects, and other activities. They look back on what has happened
to them and forward to what might occur. They explain their motivations and offer
interpretations of the behaviors of others. Weblogs enable their authors to share
ongoing personal narratives of daily and seasonal life in ways that no other
cyberspatial form allows.
• Spinning: This sense of identity construction employs the metaphor of the
physical overlap of individual fibers in a thread or piece of yam. Identity is con-
ceived here as an ongoing process of constmction across both time and space, one
in which an author draws out and twists together a multilayered, overlapping set of
concerns, beliefs, and engagements among the postings. Identity resides in that
polyphonic stream of related positions that are shared in cyberspace. Hence, some
authors adopt identities as experts and demonstrate their right to this role by per-
forming it repeatedly and in public to the satisfaction of their readers. Other au-
thors may be quite new to an identity and invite their audience to travel with them
as they tentatively explore what their developing individuality may entail. Readers
serve as intimate witnesses to the spinning of an identity’s composite fibers. In a
modernist framework, identity is a final achievement, a completion that marks an
individual’s arrival at a fixed destination. In a dialogical framework, spinning pro-
cesses involving identity are neither fixed nor final.
 • Weaving a tapestry: Finally, identity construction extends by analogy to the
creation of a tapestry. Identity in this sense is formed out of an author’s decision to
structure a Weblog with an array of personally selected elements and themes that
invite readers to a conversation over the question, “What do you make of this au-
thor?” This metaphor—admittedly an extended meaning of threadedness—comes
closest to the activities reflected in personal homepages by their emphasis on the
spatial distribution of elements.

Let me conclude by citing the intriguing 2002 BBC report that women in Iran
were turning to Weblogs. The news analyst indicated:

The Web is providing a way for women in Iran to talk freely about taboo subjects
such as sex and boyfriends. Over the past few months there has been a big jump in the
number of Persian Weblogs that are providing an insight into a closed society.
(Hermida, 2002)

Hermans (2001) argued that cross-cultural psychologists need to focus particular

attention on contact zones internationally. The research reported here—of
Weblogs and their potential to mirror dialogical processes of identity develop-
ment— serves to reinforce his appeal and should spur further efforts to understand
the Weblog’s role in mediating identity within the human digital ecology across
the entire globe.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

An earlier version of this article was presented at the 2nd International Conference
on the Dialogical Self, Ghent, Belgium, October, 2002.

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Copyright © 2004, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.

Self-Positioning in a
Text-Based Virtual Environment

Maria Beatrice Ligorio and Annarita Celeste Pugliese

University of Bari, Italy

The recent conceptualization of identity positioning of the dialogical self (Hermans,

2001b) has many potentialities for education, where the relation between identity de-
velopment and learning is well recognized (Bruner, 1997). Moreover, new ways of
expressing the self, based on computer-mediated communication, made virtual envi-
ronments interesting for both dialogical self-theory and for education.
In this article, Hermans’s theory is used to analyze a case study of a dyad solving a
problem implemented in an exclusively text-based virtual environment, called
multiuser dimensions. Using the personal position repertoire method (Hermans,
2001a) adapted for the task, a list of specific self-positioning repertoires was identi-
fied. A finer discursive analysis showed complex relations between the different
positionings detected, and highlighted the relevance of the sequence of
microcontexts within the task. Results are discussed suggesting a fruitful encounter
between clinical and educational psychology for the understanding of identity devel-
opment while performing educational tasks.

The notion of self that is emerging from modem psychology has abandoned the
search for unity. More articulated concepts of self are based on the work of writ-
ers such as Bakhtin (1981), with his notions of dialogical multivoicedness and
polyphony; and Harre and Van Langenhove (1991), with the idea of
positionings. In this perspective, the self is conceived as socialized,
contextualized, historical, cultural, embodied, and decentralized. Hermans
(2001b) proposed a theory of the dialogical self by which to study the self as a
fluctuation of positionings, linked to context-related “voices.” So far, this theo-
retical approach has been used in psychotherapy settings where it has proven to
be a formulation capable of investigating changes and shifts in personality, cul-
tural complexity, and the experience of uncertainty.

Requests for reprints should be sent to Maria Beatrice Ligorio, University of Bari (IT), Palazzo
Ateneo - 70100 Bari, Italy. E-mail: bealigorio@hotmail.com
 Recent cultural approaches to education and professional training have placed
the connection between identity development and learning in the foreground
(Bruner, 1997). All that we learn strongly impacts the perception of ourselves as
learners and as persons, affecting motivation and self-esteem. Learning is seen as a
process building active and productive personalities. In this sense, the personal and
cultural positioning of the dialogical self (Hermans, 2001b) might enrich the un-
derstanding of how education could contribute to the development of identities
well equipped on facing the challenge of modem contexts.
Both education and the dialogical self are interested in communication as a
powerful tool to create narrative and reflective experiences. In particular, mediated
forms of communication offer new occasions to express the self. Communicators
no longer rely on visual indicators typical of face-to-face communication; and new
options such as nicknames, avatars1 embodiment, and virtual identities, enter the
“scene.”
New positionings can be experienced where issues of realism and fantasy are
combined in novel strategic ways (Bers, 1999; Bruckman, 2000; Talamo &
Ligorio, 2001).

NEW THEORETICAL QUESTIONS

Dialogical theory lets new questions arise. How can culture be defined depending
on context? How does the social dimension impact personal positioning? How
does positioning change in time and space? Does positioning influence perfor-
mances in a structured task? Those questions lead to a more general issue: how can
this particular theoretical framework enrich other fields, such as education?
Education faces a dichotomy between an individualistic concept of learning,
which gives importance to the talents of the individual; and a contextual concept,
which stresses the symbolic instruments to which individuals have access within
the cultural context of their learning situation. This means learners ought to under-
stand and create new contexts. Social interaction and mediated communication is
one of those new contexts modem society offers to users (Levy, 1994; Mantovani,
1996). The dialogical approach shares with education an interest for this new con-
textual field (Hermans, 2001b; Hevem, 2000). This implies that interactions in me-
diated environments can be satisfactorily studied by the dialogical theory of the
self.
This article attempts to analyze the emergence of dialogical positions within
mediated social contexts (such as a virtual environment) by looking at how the task
and, in particular, the different phases of a problem-solving task influences the rep-

1The Indian God called V isnu reincarnates with many faces, each of them representing a different
state of mood. Those faces are called avatars.
ertoire of positionings. In this perspective, positioning theory is applied to analyze
interactions within an exclusively text-based virtual environment called multiuser
dimensions (MUDs), where textual actions and conversation are combined (Van
Halen & Janssen, 2002). MUDs are computer-meditated games based on the cre-
ation of virtual worlds for social interaction. Users are typically anonymous and
act as “characters”: they play a role within a story and participate in building a ficti-
tious world. There are a variety of stories, characters, and purposes depending on
the different kinds of MUDs. However, the creation of a character and the identifi-
cation with it represent the core of a MUDs’s configuration. All these features al-
low players to have emotionally charged communication and, at the same time, ac-
complish pragmatic goals such as seeking solutions to problems (Bruckman,
2000).
Discursive practices in virtual environments show salient features for the
dialogical paradigm (Galimberti & Riva, 1997). Instead of a lack of social and cul-
tural cues as the Reduced Social Cues Model (Sproull & Kiesler, 1991) asserts,
computer mediated interactions occur through a net of symbolic processes origi-
nated in a shared construction of cultures, selves, and values (Mantovani, 1996).
Because of the technical configurations of remote communication, electronic in-
terlocutors are invisible to each other; however, at the same time they are “present”
(Short, Williams, & Christie, 1976) in a social and cultural manner. Roles, genders,
power positions, reasonings, emotions, and relations are uttered by a pregnant use
of written language (Spears, Lea, & Postmes, 2001) and by a meaningful exercise
of technical potentialities such as emoticons, nicknames, and avatars. Those are all
paralinguistic cues of computer-mediated communication (CMC). Although the
choice of the nickname and the avatar are explicitly representative of identity re-
construction, the use of emoticons allows communication of the emotional self.
Emoticons are encoded scripts to quickly express a wide range of emotions and
gestures. They are miniaturized faces composed of punctuation marks and sym-
bols such as “:-)”, which means a smile; or “:-(”, which utters a sad mood.
The type of discourse produced within a MUD along with the use of
paralinguistic cues generates a sort of new semiotic repertoire that overlaps spe-
cific subcultures produced by distinct virtual communities or groups (Serpentelli,
1992). In this way, the expression of a multiplicity of voices is encouraged by the
presence of ongoing microcontexts in which positions are linked to situated rela-
tions and tasks. In such a socially fluid environment, the new conceptual category
of position substitutes for the classical definition of role (Davies & Harre, 1990).
In the social psychology literature, role is often conceived as an ahistorical and
static condition in which a participant is involved in a fixed and centralized iden-
tity, and roles are correlated with personality traits (Argyle & Little, 1972). The
crucial passage from role to position is a central issue for the dialogical paradigm.
Moreover, it is a fundamental assumption to analyze the construction of self within
fluid contexts, such as CMC environments.
 In this study we explore the multiroles played by the selves of participant dyads
engaged in a problem-solving task. The focus is on the connections between
self-positioning and the sociocultural context produced by the specific task; like-
wise, the context produces microcontexts in which positions are influenced by the
specific situations within the task. The computer-mediated nature of the analyzed
interactions increases the possibilities of social construction of a multivoiced self.
Moreover, the specific type of personal, social, and cultural indicators—different
from those present in face-to-face communication—can change the positioning
through which the self is displayed (Hevern, 2002).

THE RESEARCH DESIGN

The research design combines the need to provoke specific events particularly rele-
vant for a problem-solving task (Newell & Simon, 1972) with the wish for an eco-
logically framed pattern of research, such as conversation in virtual environments.
A predefined “interlocution scenario” was constructed in the form of a loose script
to ensure that the target events (those considered crucial in the problem-solving
process such as information management, hypothesis formation, and verification)
would emerge during the interaction. At the same time, moments of free interac-
tions (FIs) were included; these preserved a perception of the situation as an inter-
action between real interlocutors acting in a realistic way.
A problem-solving task was implemented in a MUD called TecfaMoo located
on the server of the University of Geneva, which is used mainly for educational
purposes. Problem solving has always been considered an important task in educa-
tion. Through problem solving people can develop higher thinking skills where the
manipulations of objects (of different natures) are entwined with discourse activi-
ties. The relevance of problem solving has already been stressed by Vygotsky
(1978). In his view, the effects of interactions during a problem-solving task is a
sort of diagnostic test that allows one to recognize the zone of proximal develop-
ment (Vygotsky, 1978).
Based on Vygotsky’s (1978) considerations, specific curricula have been devel-
oped, including both problem based learning (de Grave, Boshuizen, & Schmidt,
1996) and other teaching strategies (Blandford, 1994). More recently, Scardamalia
and Bereiter (1999) developed a pedagogy of knowledge building where the heu-
ristic ability of learners to find explanations for problems, rather than just finding
the “right solution,” serves as the basis for knowledge building. The emphasis is on
the degree to which an explanation can make a problem more comprehensible,
rather than drawing solutions addressed to hypothesis testing or decision making.
The problem used for this research was designed originally for previous re-
search (Dillenbourg, Traum, & Schneider, 1996), but a few changes to that design
were introduced for this study. The problem-solving task was presented as a mys-
tery game in which the murderer of “Mona Lisa”—an art insurance agent—must
be found by ascertaining motive, access to the weapon, and alibi at the time of the
murder. The mystery is placed in a virtual hotel that includes 13 rooms and where
11 suspects (little robots) are hosted.
Each of the robots can be questioned, and they offer standard answers. Several
objects are scattered about in the hotel rooms; they all can be used, and some of
them provide useful information. In this version, the participant meets his or her
partner only in the virtual environment, and 1 hr is allotted to solve the problem.
All the players (both participant and confederate) employ virtual block notes
where any information gathered during the game is automatically recorded. Spe-
cial MUD commands permit players to interview the robots, explore the virtual
rooms, and read each other’s block notes.

Participants
Although the study presented here is based on a single case study, 25 participants
performed the task. Participants were recruited through a “call for participants”
posted in several MUDs and on MUD mailing lists. The participants’ ages were be-
tween 19 and 30 years old; 10 of them were women, and 15 were men. They were
all university students with some basic MUD knowledge. All the assignments and
arrangements were conducted through the Internet, and none of the participants
ever met face-to-face. Participants connected from different countries and were of
different nationalities. English was used both for recruitment and for all interac-
tions within the experimental task online.

Procedure
For each volunteer who answered to the call for participants, a day and time to meet
the partner and to perform the task was scheduled. Before connecting to the virtual
hotel, participants received a map of the hotel and the list of the MUD commands
available during the game. The participants’ real names were never used, and the
connection was enabled through a special login (Sherlock [S]) and a personal pass-
word. In this way, anonymous interactions were guaranteed and the virtual hotel re-
mained available only to the participants and the researcher. Participants connected
to the game were matched with a partner (named “Hercule” [H]) introduced simply
as another participant; but H was actually a researcher acting as a confederate. This
double role was possible thanks to a MUD editor called EMACS that sets multiple
windows on the same computer, each of them corresponding to a different connec-
tion. The researcher had two windows on the screen: one in which to perform the task
as confederate and the other to act as researcher equipped with special options such
as controlling passwords, monitoring participants’performances, and recording and
printing the interactions. The confederate always followed the same predefined
script composed of several standard phases, each of them aimed at provoking the
events included in the “interlocution scenarios.”

The Interlocution Scen arios

The concept of interlocution scenario is based on a strong communicative

interactionism perspective (Jacques, 1991) where personal identification is always
related to the interlocutors’ features and to the aim of the interaction. This ap-
proach forces researchers to take into account both the conversational style and
goals of each interlocutor and to consider each interaction in its uniqueness.
The interlocution scenario was designed to include (a) three dramatis personae
and (b) five events considered relevant for a problem-solving task. The three acting
dramatis personae were Kalimero (K; the researcher chairing the session), S (the
participant), and H (the participant’s partner who was actually the researcher play-
ing the role of confederate).
The interaction starts with a warm up during which the researcher K welcomes
the participant (S). The confederate’s (H) connection is activated by the researcher
in a few seconds. The researcher introduces the two partners to each other, reminds
them to use the map and the MUD command list previously sent via Netscape, in-
dicates the aim of the game, and mentions the time limit allotted to solve the mys-
tery. The interlocution structure is composed of five different phases aimed at pro-
voking events considered relevant during the process of problem solving. Three of
these phases are each repeated three times forming a cycle; one of them (the con-
flict) is placed before the last cycle, and the fifth phase takes place at the end of the
interlocution scenario. The five phases are as follows:

1. The initiative taking (IT) phase is guided by the confederate (H) and re-
peated three times. During this phase the confederate inquires about the initiative
to be taken: “So, what’s the plan?” Following this, he or she asks two questions
about navigation style: “Do we want to go/do it together or do we want to split?”
and “Who goes/does it first?”
2. The FI phase (repeated three times) during which the confederate simply
reciprocates the participant’s conversational mode as it happens in a natural inter-
action: He or she answers to S’s requests, asks questions, and gives comments and
inferences whenever the participant does the same; he or she remains silent when S
does not talk.
3. The information sharing (IS) phase during which the confederate inquires
about the way the participant intends to use the information collected in the block
notes. He or she asks, “What do we do with the block notes?” This question is re-
peated three times.
4. The conflict phase is activated by K before the third and last IT phase by
asking S his or her first guess and informing him or her that H has a different guess.
 5. The debriefing phase during which K asks both the participant and the con-
federate to go back to the starting point (the virtual hall of the hotel) and report the
final solutions.

The confederate formulates all the questions using the pronoun “we” and al-
ways gives valid hints leading toward the right solution. Figure 1 provides a repre-
sentation of the interlocution scenario flow.

Data Recording
All interactions were automatically recorded and printed. These transcripts con-
tain the conversational contributions of each of the dramatis personae and the fol-
lowing context indicators: time (when the interaction started), place (where did the
interaction take place), who (the name of who was writing or acting), action (the
command typed), arguments (the abbreviated name of the statement receiver, in
case of a communication, or of objects and places involved, in case of an action),

FIGURE 1 Interaction flow. IT1-IT3 = initiative taking Phases 1 through 3; FI1-FI3 = free
interaction Phases 1 through 3.
said text (the statement produced and actually received), and typed command (mis-
typed commands and statements).
Only who, action, and said text were automatically visible on the participant’s
screen. The other indicators were visible exclusively on the researcher’s computer
screen. The following figure displays a few examples of data recording as they ap-
pear to the researcher.
The examples reported in Figure 2 come from different protocols and show dif-
ferent types of distant communication and virtual actions. The first line is an exam-
ple of successful communication. The second line reports a mistyped communica-
tion command. The third line contains an example of virtual action: the participant
is reading the policeman notebook.

Data A nalysis

The method used to analyze the data was inspired by the personal position reper-
toire (PPR; Hermans, 2001a) adapted to a virtual context and the specific type of
task used. As Hermans (2001a) suggested, this method “can be adapted and re-
vised according to the purposes and needs of individual researchers or practitio-
ners in their specific settings and circumstances” (p. 324).
Applying the PPR method to a problem-solving task implemented in a virtual
environment, the following differences emerged.

The type of data available has a discursive nature. This implies that the posi-
tions will be ascribed through a discourse analysis, rather than through a
self-evaluation elicited by a questionnaire prepared by the researcher.

Time P la c e Who A c tio n Argument S a id Typed

s te x t command
5 :1 5 DHome H S ay S .K . So S ay So
w h a t's w h a t's
th e th e
p lan ? p la n ?

7:4 6 DHome H ' h e r do we

w a n t t o go
to g eth er?

1 0 :3 4 E n te r S Read P o licem a Read

n 's n o teb o o k
n o teb o o k to
H ercu le

FIG URE 2 Excerpts from the data.

 The nature of the “internal positions” is still the same described by Hermans
(2001a), but the external positions cannot be taken in consideration because inter-
action context is restricted around three dramatis personae. Instead of observing
external positions, we looked at the specific microcontextual moments of the inter-
action. We assumed that each specific event would trigger a different position.
The repertoire of internal positions we use is different from the more clinically
oriented one, listed by Hermans (2001a, p. 363). The context and task used in this
research generated a specific list of internal positions.
The specific internal positions were obtained through a methodology inspired
by conversational analysis (CA; Sacks, Schegloff, & Jefferson, 1974). CA allows
the study of everyday talk and discourse where all participants have the same rights
and decide by themselves the structure of the discourse (e.g., turns, silences, length
of the utterances, and interaction style; Sacks et al.). Two researchers read all the
protocols and extrapolated the most frequently found repertoire of personal posi-
tions. The positions identified were: (a) as collaborator (the participant is available
to discuss what to do, how to proceed in the game, the relevance of the data col-
lected, and the possible solutions); (b) as ironic (this position is characterized by a
strong use of the emoticons and funny virtual actions such as smoking a pipe or
participants who “look at Hercule to adjust their watches.” Most of the time, virtual
actions are inspired by the nickname assigned [S] and by the game); (c) as detec-
tive (when the focus is on procedural and metaprocedural aspects, such as how to
use the technical commands or inquiring about the reasons behind a decision to do
certain things instead of others); and (d) as leader (this position is clearly marked
by the intention to make decisions about what to do and why, both for the character
and the partner as well).

RESULTS

Given the exploratory nature of this study, only one protocol has been randomly se-
lected among the available data to serve as a case study. Each discursive interven-
tion was numbered and assigned to one of the positions in the list. For the purposes
of this study, we omit an analysis of virtual actions. Because the specific events
provoked by the interlocution scenario function as external positions, we report the
frequency of positions associated with each event. Table 1 reports the results gath-
ered with this procedure.
From Table 1 it is clear that the participant covers different positions, and the
frequency’s peak changes very rapidly. The participant switches from an initial po-
sition as collaborator (IT1) to the position as detective during the FI1. He keeps
this position also during both the first IS event (IS 1) and the second IT phase (IT2);
but later during the second FI phase (FI2), he is equally spread across three posi-
tions: collaborator, ironic, and detective. Beginning with the second IS phase
346
TABLE 1
Internal Positions Assigned to Each Specific Event of the Interlocution Scenario

M ic r o c o n te x ts
P o s itio n s : IT 1 F I1 IS1 IT 2 F I2 IS 2 C o n flic t IT 3 F I3 IS 3 D e b r ie fin g T o ta l

Collaborator 5 1 2 1 1 2 12
Ironic 1 1 2 6 10
Detective 5 2 3 2 1 1 14
Leader 1 2 3 4 4 6 10 1 31
Total 6 7 2 6 6 3 4 5 6 12 10 67

N o te . IT1-IT3 = initiative taking phases 1 through 3; FI1-FI2 = free interaction phrases 1 through 3.
(IS2), the participant plays the leader position at a progressively more frequent
rate. Only during the debriefing does he leave this position to assume the ironic po-
sition. Clearly, as the game progresses his tendency to lead becomes prevalent, in
contrast to his inclination to collaborate at the beginning of the game. During the
debriefing phase, the researcher is more active, and it seems that the participant
does not want the researcher to acknowledge his attempt to lead the game. It can be
assumed that the participant’s positions are influenced by the stage of the game and
by the active presence of the researcher.
Moreover, the following interesting circumstances were observed in the inter-
actions under review.

The Long Silen ce

Our case study is characterized by a clear differentiation between the interactive

stage during which the two partners were very much engaged in talking to each
other and a stage during which they explored the virtual environment separately
and no communication occurred. The silent phase lasted 9 min and 11 sec. These
data suggest that it is possible not only to move from different positions but also to
occupy a sort of silent position. It is not easy to interpret this behavior. Within com-
munication theory, silence is still a way to communicate; a precise meaning can of-
ten be assigned to silent interactions (Watzlawick, Beavin, & Jackson, 1967). Fol-
lowing Bakhtin’s (1981) dialogical perspective, it is the voice that gives meaning
to the interactions. The impression we received from this protocol is that silence is
a preparatory phase to subsequent dialogue. One participant advises (the utter-
ances reported are quoted from the original chat logs):

56. S.: “I suggest to split to question other people ... to save time.”

They undertake a separate navigation to save time and postpone discussion until
after they had gathered enough information. Information and inferences collected
during the silent navigation are later used as a basis for discussion. Therefore, si-
lence can be interpreted as grounding for later dialogical interaction.

Conflict M anagem ent

The conflict phase is managed by the participant taking a clear position as leader.
To the researcher’s question about his personal guess, one participant answers:

88. S.: “Hang a sec. Guess on the motive is the picture being fake.”

In this way, he avoids conflict by saying that he only has a guess about the mo-
tive for the murder but does not yet know who the murderer may be. In this situa-
tion, the emerging leadership style seems to be typically “relation oriented,” as de-
scribed in Fiedler’s (1975) Contingency model. According to this model, a
relation-oriented leader—compared to a task-oriented leader—takes care of har-
mony in interpersonal relationships during a problem solving.
In the response, “hans wanger is out, too obvious” (92. S.), the participant takes
for granted a conclusion without any discussion with the partner. The type of lead-
ership performed by the participant is tacit, based on explaining the reasoning that
leads to his hypothesis.

Peculiar Collaboration

Toward the end of the interaction, when the time for solving the problem is about to
expire, the participant uses the partner as a further source of information:

112. S.: “Let me read your notebook!”

115. S.: “Or better yet sum it up for me.”
124. S.: “Can you remind me what the colonel told you about being in his
room?”

In these instances, the participants’ behavior shows clear features of a task-ori-

ented leadership style. The conversation with the partner here aims only to solve
the problem; in this microcontext, little space is accorded to the socioemotional
and relational dimensions.

Using Irony

During the very last phase of the game, debriefing, the participant changes his po-
sition rapidly from leadership to ironic. This change suggests that a particular
meaning is given to this position. Looking into his utterances in detail, it is possible
to interpret the meaning of this new position. Before starting the debriefing, the
participant states:

128. S.: “Possible suspects on my side.”

With this affirmation, he shows clearly that he has his own suspects and that the
possible solutions are not built collaboratively. The partner then forces him to con-
sider a different hypothesis:

132. H.: “Yes, I think the painting is a good motive but why not Marie?”

This was actually the partner’s guess during the earlier conflict phase, but the
participant did not consider it at all. In fact he asks the following:
 133. S.: “Who’s Marie?”

After a short clarification, the participant decides to take into account the part-
ner’s guess and looks at both block notes for relevant information. At this point he
says:

139. S.: “Ok, ... Marie is a suspect.”

140. S.: “Although the only one lying seems to be Oscar.”

The participant does not want to show that he is so confident so as not to con-
sider at all the partner’s suggestion. Therefore, although his will to take into con-
sideration the partner’s ideas seems to be rather ostensible, in reality it could easily
be that he still remains true to his original position. When the researcher enters the
scene asking for a final report, the participant does not know how to solve this con-
troversy: from one side he wants to be polite and keep his face as collaborator (as
shown at the outset of the game), but from the other side he is pretty confident
about his solution. Irony becomes his way to solve this dilemma:

152. K.: “So did you find anything?”

153. S.: “Sure a nice cozy bar ;-)”
154. S.: “Let Hercule do the serious part ©.”

The participant now seems to be at the point of a real conflict between his solu-
tion to the task and the social need to be polite and collaborative with the partner.
Being funny and giving the floor to his partner helps him lower the level of con-
flict. This tendency to avoid conflicts, already seen in the conflict phase, is con-
firmed here once again.

DISCUSSION

The study presented here belongs to a stream of research that applies the theory of
the dialogical self to contexts differing from that of psychotherapy, its context of
origin. In particular, this study uses this framework to analyze performance in a
specific task—problem solving—considered particularly relevant to education.
New opportunities coming from CMC, such as collaborative virtual environments,
allow the building of problem-solving environments where partners never meet
face-to-face but yet can work together on a task. Dialogical self theory (Hermans,
2001b) and associated research methods were used to study interactions within a
virtual environment, and some striking conclusions can be drawn. These, we hope,
may contribute to the advancement both of dialogical and educational theory.
 The results gathered from this study show us that the general interactive con-
text—in our case a problem-solving task implemented in a virtual environ-
ment—produces a specific repertoire of personal positionings (collaborator, ironic,
detective, leader). A detailed analysis of both the internal structure of the
positionings and the network between them show how microcontexts within the task
are able to influence positioning. In particular, we found that it is not the type of
microcontext itself that is influential. Rather, it is the sequence of microcontexts that
provokes the emergence of certain positions and the shift from a given position to a
new one. In this case study, the participant seems caught in a dilemma between acting
collaboratively and assuming overall leadership, whereas the other positions (as de-
tective and the ironic) seem to be used as intermediate positions useful in managing
this conflict. Throughout the task’s interactions and the resultant multiple shifts in
positions, the participant appears constantly to seek a balance between focusing on
the task and a need to establish a useful relationship with his partner.
Some unanswered questions arise from the detailed analysis of the case studied
here. First, the question of the value of silence is raised: how can it be interpreted?
The dialogical self approach, based on Bakhtin’s (1981) multivoicedness, seems to
suggest that if no voice is present no interpretation is possible; on the other hand,
communication theory (Watzlawick et al., 1967) assigns a specific value to the si-
lence. Our interpretation holds that silence demarcates a type of relation between
positions because it seems to be a sort of preparatory phase for dialogue. More in-
quiry in this direction is needed to confirm our interpretation.
Furthermore, our results allow us to claim that each position can be performed
in different ways and that the actual meaning of specific positions can be extrapo-
lated only by looking to the entire performance. For instance, for our participant,
the collaboration had different meanings depending on the stage of the task. At its
outset, the collaboration looked more like a division of labor. The participant sug-
gests to his partner:

45. S.: “Want to do the questioning while I check other stuff?”

Later, in different microcontexts, he is willing to move the collaboration to a

more sophisticated level, discussing data and hypotheses. At the end of the task,
during the debriefing, the collaboration seems different yet again. The participant
integrates the partner’s statements:

166. H.: “Because the painting was fake. He insured it for a lot of money and. . . ”
167. S.: “Mona Lisa was upset.”

People position themselves according to value given to specific microcontexts;

nevertheless, it is possible to infer an overall intention by taking into account the
general task and its nature.
 We found a substantial difference between the types of collaboration (division
of labor vs. shared reasoning) as well as the types of leadership performed by the
participant (task oriented, relation oriented). Therefore, the same position could be
exploited in different ways even by the same person and within the same task de-
pending, in our judgment, on the specific sequence of microcontexts that devel-
oped within the task.
Positionings performed during a collaborative task contribute to defining the
self-perception of the participant. At the same time, a perception of the self as more
efficient leads to better performances. This is how education can take advantage by
adopting the dialogical theory of the self. This type of encounter could be consid-
ered part of a more general attempt to find new connections between educational
psychology and clinical psychology, started lately under the umbrella of
“socioconstructivism” (Salvatore et al., 2003). Clinical psychology may add rele-
vant dimensions to understanding the complexity of the learning environment,
where learners play a relevant role not only as “knowledge builders,” busy in giv-
ing meaning to a context, but also in directing personal development toward more
satisfactory and strategic positionings.
Progress in educational learning studies has focused on the behavioral, cogni-
tive, and social dimensions neglecting aspects related to unconscious, affective,
and clinical issues. In fact, many problems regarding the educational context are
not yet solved by educational psychology (e.g., how to help students with learning
difficulties, how to improve the relation between school and outside school, how to
deal with bully behavior, how to overcome dropping out, and how new technology
can be introduced in a efficient way into educational contexts).
Even if identity development has been recognized as an important issue in edu-
cation, it has been treated as an outcome or as an uncontrolled consequence of cer-
tain teaching and learning activities. Introducing dialogical self theory as part of
the educational program would help educators to address identity development in
terms of positionings. This means that educational contexts and tasks could also be
organized to promote desired positionings; for instance, those connected with col-
laborative and reflective strategies. In this way, collaborative learning,
metacognitive development, and self-regulation would not be exclusively treated
under their cognitive and social aspects but would also include corresponding
positionings.
The conclusions drawn from this study may call for a deeper analysis of what a
position is, how it is performed, and how microcontexts individually and in se-
quences influence the shaping of self-positionings.
The task we used is very different from those situations where the dialogical
self and method were originally applied, and their extension needs to take in ac-
count such diversity. We strongly believe that dialogical self theory has proven it-
self quite suitable for exploring the self within virtual contexts. The specificity of
the task used here and the generalizability of our findings are issues that need more
discussion. We proposed in this study a problem-solving task, which has important
implications for both work and learning situations. Further investigation in this di-
rection may lead to a better understanding of the emergence of the dialogical self
within educational and organizational contexts, performed by a concurrence of the
self-positionings of workers, their reciprocal relationships, and the creation of a
shared culture during the course of solving problems.

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IDENTITY: AN INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF THEORY AND RESEARCH, 4 (A ), 355-370
Copyright © 2004, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.

The Diatextual Construction of the

Self in Short Message Systems

Michela Cortini, Giuseppe Mininni, and Amelia Manuti

University of Bari, Italy

This article extends the use of the personal position repertoire beyond the psycho-
therapy domain, adopting it as a research method applied to the psychology of com-
munication. The aim is to investigate the features of short message system (SMS)
communication in a sample of late adolescents. Across 2 analyses on the same corpus
of 3,890 SMS messages, evidence has been presented that a composite index of con-
tents could be related to an overall index of dialogical positions. The results have
been supported by diatextual analysis (Mininni, 1992,2000), so as to better grasp the
relations among interlocutors, text, and context; thus recalling the dialectic process
of sense construction realized through communicative events. Consistent with the
predictions derived from previous research, the study suggests that new media actu-
ally emphasize the development of self positions.

Mobile phones are gradually becoming one of the most important new media. In-
deed, besides their most evident features of portable technology, mobile phones
also grant the interlocutors the possibility of exchanging written messages (short
message system; SMS), thus becoming a medium within a medium and conjugat-
ing the advantages of both oral and written communication (Mininni, 2002).
Therefore, from a pragmatic point of view, mobile phones reshape the features of
interaction, as SMS communication allows a more private and discrete reading and
a more reflexive reply.
The focus of this article is on the features of SMS communication, which is in-
vestigated in a sample of late adolescents, actually the most active users of this
kind of communication (Cortelazzo, 2000). Indeed, late adolescence represents an
unique stage within life development, marked both by the growing awareness of
having multiple positions and by the need for a metaposition to control this

Requests for reprints should be sent to Michela Cortini, University of Bari (IT), Palazzo Ateneo -
70100 Bari, Italy. E-mail: m.cortini@psico.uniba.it
self-fluctuation process. Therefore, conceiving life within the circus metaphor,
late adolescents could be imagined as acrobats who move very rapidly, changing
position, tiptoeing, and sometimes often rescuing lives. As actual acrobats, adoles-
cents too could not perform without a net to protect them. Similarly, the assump-
tion of a metaposition helps them to monitor the dangerous fluctuations of the self.
Then, the choice of this research object should be interpreted as a reply to those
dialogical self scholars (Hermans, 2001a, 2001b; Talamo & Ligorio, 2001) who
state that new media actually challenge the dialogical conception of the self, being
at a time a cage and an anchor for personal development.

THE MOBILE BRAINFRAME

Recent research on the dialogical self (Hermans, 2001a, 2001b) has focused atten-
tion on the relation between self and culture, stressing that self could be meant as
culture inclusive just as culture is self-inclusive.
Culture and self are thus the main ingredients of the dialogical self, which lives
through communication. Recalling the Bakhtinian notion of ventriloquation, each
speech act could be analyzed as a complex mixture of self and culture, which interact
within discourse creating even new possible scenarios for the self according to the
shared social norms given by culture. In this framework, a very important role is to be
attributed to mass media as they gradually substitute or support interpersonal com-
munication, understood as face-to-face interaction, thus with relevant implications
for dialogical self construction (Hermans, 2001 a, 2001b; Talamo & Ligorio, 2001).
As already stressed by Hannerz (1992), culture is understood as a web tied by
both individual meanings and by the different modalities through which such
meanings are socially distributed, thus implying a media-inclusive culture. The
most traditional critical studies on mass media communication (McLuhan, 1964;
Ong, 1982) and their most recent updates (De Kerckhove, 2000) have alerted us to
the power shown by technology, in influencing not simply the contents of commu-
nication, but rather the ways in which such contents are actually processed by peo-
ple. In this perspective, the historical evolution of communicative technology has
actually shaped the individual and social brainframes, thus marking the transition
from the alphabetic brainframe to the cybernetic one. Then, mass media could not
be conceived merely as vehicles for the expressions of contents and meanings, as
these contents and meanings are constantly transformed by the features of mass
media communication.
Therefore, granting that the individual brainframe is shaped by the information
technology that is most used, thus influencing the mutual relation between self and
culture, the analysis of SMS messages becomes a salient issue as it allows for the
investigation of the traces of the dialogical self in late adolescents. Acknowledging
the actual communicative power of mass media, this research proposes the notion
of the mobile brainframe, so as to underline the nomadic feature of post-modern
identity required by the globalized context of the third millennium.

SM S AND ITS U SER S

SMSs are short texts that contain only 160 characters. The implications of such a
constraint for communication are numerous and evident. First of all, the communi-
cation that derives is often compressed in a single concept message. Indeed, the in-
terlocutors are allowed to use a very limited set of words, meanings, or both, often
resulting in a curious slang made up mostly of abbreviations. SMS messages often
display a nonorthodox use of punctuation, morphology, and orthography, as well
as the use of emoticons (an analogical code that makes use of punctuation as to ex-
press emotions and feelings; e.g., “:-)”, which means, “I am happy”) that define the
SMS texts as a joy-filled writing modality with direct phatic aims (Cortelazzo,
2000). In addition, because of this restriction, SMS messages generally avoid po-
liteness strategies (i.e., formal greetings) privileging the in medias res communica-
tive format. Finally, although in phone calls the interlocutor who receives the call
picks up the phone and answers immediately, the format of SMS communication
allows a more meditated reply or at least no reply at all, thus stressing the double
nature of mobile phone communication: both reflexive and reactive, depending on
the aims of the interlocutors.
According to these features of SMS communication, adolescents seem to be the
preferred target all around the world (Cortelazzo, 2000). This can be explained
quite easily. First of all, in comparison with other media (e.g., TV and computers),
mobile phones are a cheaper medium; second, they grant a more private and inde-
pendent fruition. TV and the Internet are, in fact, technological goods generally
shared by the whole family whose main and explicit aim is to convey information.
On the other hand, mobile phones and especially SMS communication serve
uniquely personal aims and a phatic function of communication. Finally, another
motivation is related to adolescents’ life conditions, as generally young people live
with the family and are not economically independent. That is why a mobile me-
dium is ideal to mark the distance with their own family.

THE SELF AS A DIATEXT

A P sychosem iotic Approach to the Dialogical Self

This research aims at showing the discursive modalities through which the
dialogical self emerges from the communicative interactions developed in SMS
messages.
 To this end, the personal position repertoire (PPR) was used to extend its appli-
cability beyond the psychotherapy domain, thus showing its utility in tracing the
dialogical self (Hermans, 2001a, 2001b). The PPR has been conceived as an
ethnomethod to investigate the meaning people attribute to life experience while
moving between personal positions.
The theoretical research perspective is to be found in an intersection between
psychology and semiotics (Mininni, 2003b), following the promising example of
social constructionism (Gergen, 1985) with its efforts to overcome narrowminded
approaches to the study of human sciences and underlining the post-modernist in-
dividual condition that conceives identity as a discursive construction, as a text that
is constantly in progress (Shotter & Gergen, 1989).
Psychosemiotics considers any object in mind as formed in a dialogical form;
because in every discourse, even in thought, the “other” is always there. This
epistemological assumption supports also the suggestion to hold text-in-interac-
tion (or diatext) as the general way social cognition may be accounted for.
Indeed, the data from the SMS communication allow us to better specify the
self in terms of identity diatexts (Mininni, 1992, 2000, 2003a). The diatext is a
semiotic instrument for content analysis, which aims at catching the dynamic na-
ture of any communicative event through the analysis of the relation between text
and context (Mininni, 1992, 2000, 2003a). In this sense, any text could be consid-
ered as a diatext because it implicitly or explicitly aims at enunciating the commu-
nicative positioning of the interlocutors and the meaning they attributed to it. The
diatextual approach underlines the discursive practices through which the interloc-
utors actually acknowledge and negotiate their reciprocal intentions, thus mutually
shaping the enunciative situation. In deciding what they say and how it has to be
said, the interlocutors co-construct the possible world within which their joint (and
partially shared) intentions take on sense: the situation of enunciation. The diatext
could be conceived as a semiotic device that helps the researcher in understanding
the context as it is perceived and expressed by the enunciators, by the text produc-
ers. Concretely, the analyst outlines a diatext by singling out, first of all, the
self-image that individuals want to present and to validate throughout the text.
The adoption of such a diatextual perspective in psychosemiotics may contrib-
ute to a contextualist turn in human sciences. By introducing the notion of diatext,
cognitivistic and constructionistic perspectives may be reconciled in that context is
assumed to be a productive force outside the text, but within the text enunciators.
Diatext as a concept emphasizes the fact that the intralocutor must constantly asso-
ciate text meaning with context meaning. This cognitive effort is governed by the
negotiable dynamics of interlocution. Through the text, this notion refers to the
cognitive markers that shape the picture that interlocutors construct of themselves
and of each other, the social space, which is made relevant through interaction.
Diatexts may be divided into intralocutory and interlocutory diatexts. The
intralocutory diatext corresponds to communicative events characterized by low
interactivity when the protagonists of the sense-making process operate separately,
independently, or both (the source and the recipient) and thus syntagmatically, so
that the dialogical construction works in a sort of isolation. On the other hand, an
interlocutory diatext reveals itself in social encounters characterized by high
interactivity when the enunciative roles are co-present and act paradigmatically, so
that an interactional construction of the self occurs.
Therefore, the adoption of the diatextual analysis aims at echoing the theoreti-
cal and methodological guidelines highlighted by Hermans’s (2001a) PPR, con-
ceiving this notion as an interpretative PPR both to stress the pure qualitative re-
search perspective and to recall the notion of “interpretative repertoires” (Potter &
Wetherell, 1987). The interpretative repertories are meant as interpretative re-
sources: They are conceived as systematically related sets of terms, often used with
stylistic and grammatical coherence, and often organized around one or more cen-
tral metaphors.

DATA COLLECTION AND ANALYSIS

The corpus of data is made up by 3,890 messages sent and received by 80 psychol-
ogy students (mean age = 20, SD = 8; 65 women and 5 men) attending the Univer-
sity of Bari (Italy). After a brief research presentation during the “Psychology of
Communication” course (in the academic year 2000-2001), the students were
asked to voluntary collaborate by anonymously giving a selection of SMS mes-
sages written and received during the following week.
The messages were then analyzed by two separate judges who have focused at-
tention both on the common formats and contents that support self-expression in
SMS, resulting in the following taxonomy. During a second step, the whole text of
the messages was intended as a communicative unit; thus, the judges codified the
corpus according to three major dimensions: actual otherness, external positions,
and internal positions (Hermans, 2001a). Both the point of view of writer and re-
ceiver was taken into account to better analyze the expressive dynamics in this
sample representative of the southern Italian late adolescent subculture.
More simply, the external and internal positioning strategies that emerged from
the SMS messages were investigated together with the discursive indexes that re-
veal how the interlocutors actually figure out the reactions and expectations of the
recipient. Cohen’s Kappa was used to calculate interjudges’ reliability, in addition
to the simple X agreements/X total judgments, resulting in .81: k = (F0 - Fc)/(N -
Fc), where A is the total number of judgments made by each judge, F0 is the num-
ber of judgments on which the judges agree, and Fc is the number of judgments for
which agreement is expected by chance. Disagreements in codings were resolved
by discussing key terms and jointly reviewing the messages until a consensus was
reached.
 RESULTS

The analysis of the SMS texts has shown the diatextual dynamics^by which the in-
terlocutors co-construct—through the text—the meaning of the communicative
situation.
Actually, in their standard format SMSs are intralocutory diatexts as the
enunciator aims at communicating, ignoring if the actual other is willing or is able
to reply. Moreover, SMS messages that were received or sent without any reply
have been considered as intralocutory diatexts, whereas SMSs that actually start a
dialogical interaction (e.g., those whose aim is a direct question or a precise re-
quest) have been defined in terms of interlocutory diatexts. Notwithstanding, this
asyncronous and at-a-distance communication underlines the dialogical format of
the self because the simple fact of imagining the presence of an actual interlocutor
forces the self to assume peculiar social and personal positions (Hermans, 2001b).
This makes the process of self-perception so dynamic that identity actually could
be conceived in terms of fluidity more than in terms of closeness and compactness.
As for the superficial structure, the analysis of SMS messages has revealed a
textual sequence with new forms of cohesion and traces of plurilinguism and of
polyphonic construction of enunciation. Whenever possible, Italian is mixed with
English (or French or Spanish) and sometimes with Latin or a dialect, showing
transidiomatic self-expression (Jacquemet, 2002); or, in other words,
heteroglossic self-expression (Bakhtin, 1929/1973). Moreover, all the resources of
graphic code are used to shorten meanings and to express emotional involvement
in an iconic way.
The classification of the SMS proposed takes its origin from the notion of enjeu
(stake), which is the core of the situated action theory (Cole & Engestrom, 1993;
Suchman, 1987) and of the contractual communication theory (Ghiglione, 1986;
Mininni, 1992, 2000). The enjeu could be meant as the result of both the
affordances that characterize the enunciative situation and of the interpretative
schemata activated by personal aims, needs, and interests. Sharing the Palo Alto
School’s assumptions (Watzlavick, Beavin, & Jackson, 1967) on the communica-
tive stake, which always implies a perspective on both content and relation, the
analysis of the SMS messages has followed a double route focusing (on one hand)
on the mobile contents and (on the other hand) on the mobile positions constructed
through SMS practices.
Hence, as for the content, SMS has been classified according to the enjeu that
supports them.

Anonymous: The message hides the interlocutor’s identity.

1. “Ciao non so ki 6 ma sono sicuro dal numero ke 6 una ragazza molto
carina. Chiamami e C conosceremo. Ciao” [Hi I don’t know who u r but the
 number tells me that u r a very cute girl. Call me and we will get to know
each other, Bye.]

This example highlights the dialogical tension between what is known and what
is unknown to the interlocutors, between a figured and an actual world, which, in
this case, is meaning charged for the author of the message.

Circumstantial: The message describes what the enunciator is doing.

2. “ Stiamo prendendo il treno” [We are catching the train.]

This category of SMS recalls Bruner’s (1986,1990) self state of agency, which
refers to those activities that are done voluntarily by the participants to achieve
something and that are generally expressed by action verbs or by personal pro-
nouns; as in this case where the use of a “me” position intersects with that of an
“us” position, actually stressing the adhesion of the enunciator to a specific social
group.

Phatic: The main aim of this typology of message is to keep in contact or to

establish a dialogue with the interlocutor.
3. “Ehi ce sta faciti? Sta ve guardati Sanremo? Brave brave ... salutami il
ferrettatore (Luigi) e digli ke sto migliorando. Ciao” [Hey whatcha doin’?
Are you watching the Sanremo festival? Good girls, good girls ... say hi to
the blacksmith (Luigi) and tell him that I’m getting better. Bye.]

From a functional point of view, this typology of SMS is meaningless; but

adopting the Bakhtinian perspective, this message reveals the effort to conceive a
mutual chronotope, which is stressed both by the use of a common slang (“the
blacksmith”), by the heteroglossia, and by the rhetorical questions, which explic-
itly mark the need for communication and thus for dialogue felt by the author.

Event specific: The message is originated by a specific external event rele-

vant for interlocutors (e.g., a birthday).
4. “Tanti auguri a te, tanti auguri a te ecc. Ecc ... ! Spero stia passando
bene il tuo comply ancora auguroni baci Gio” (Happy birthday to you, happy
birthday to you etc. etc ... ! I hope you are having a nice birthy happy birth-
day again, kisses, Gio!)

Here again, the use of slang words and abbreviations typical of adolescent talk
(“birthy”) serves both as a social identity marker, marked by the sharing of a spe-
cific communicative repertoire, and as a link between self-positioning strategy and
context. This typology of messages shows that by respecting such social norms
and politeness rules (as in this case on the occasion of the birthday), the interlocu-
tors are influenced by context; as well, the context affects the positioning strategy,
thus overcoming the distinction between what is internal and what is external and
context embedded (Skinner, Valsiner, & Holland, 2001). Therefore, according to
the dialogical self theory, context plays a very important role in influencing culture
and in shaping the features of the figured worlds that are circumscribed and perti-
nent to specific situations.

Transactional: The aim of this kind of message is to construct a common

world between the interlocutors made up of social routines, common behav-
iors, attitudes, and well-known objects and events.
5. “Aueeee! Sabato vamos a bailar all together al divinae Follie? C’e Da-
vid Morales! Abbiamo le prevendite e i free drinks!! Dai ke C divertiamo!
Risp. Entro giovedi. Se non venite siete infamy” [Aueeee! On Saturday
vamos a bailar all together at the Divinae Follie? David Morales will be
there! We’ve got tickets and free drinks!! C’mon, we’ll have fun! Reply be-
fore Thursday. If you all don’t come, you’re rotten.]

Besides abbreviations, another typical feature of adolescent talk is the identity

shift, which emerges from communication as the interlocutors pass from a self-in-
dependent to a other-dependent self-communicative modality. The use of an
other-dependent communicative strategy implies that personal identity and action
is group inclusive as the social identity theory stresses (Tajfel, 1982; Tajfel &
Turner, 1986).

Scholastic: This category of messages does refer to the main occupation of

the interlocutors and to their social positioning as university students.
6. “Ciao bionda! Studi vero? Guarda ke oggi e domenica e NN si sta a
casa! Cmq volevo dirti ke domani non verro a lez. L’importante e ke posso
contare su di te” [Hi blondie! You’re studying, aren’t you? Listen, today is
Sunday and you CAN’T stay home! Anyway I wanted to tell you that tomor-
row I’m not coming to lesson. The important thing is that I can count on
you.]

Scholastic SMS messages underline the social positioning of the self (i.e.,
which relates to specific social roles that may be in conflict with personal position-
ing like that of being lazy).

Body-focused: This category of SMS messages generally makes reference

to the physical status of the interlocutors (health, fitness, etc.).
7. “Mi sono lavata I piedi x 3 volte e poi ho messo il borotalco. Ora ho i
piedi piu puliti del mondo” [I washed my feet 3 times and then I put talcum
powder on. Now I have the cleanest feet in the world.]
 In this typology of SMS messages, the self emerges mostly by the explicit refer-
ence to physical traits; on one hand stressing stable and permanent features, and on
the other hand a dialogue between internal positions and external states; therefore,
in opposition with the Cartesian claim of a marked dualism (Hermans, this issue).

Emotion focused: These SMS messages actually refer to the psychical and emo-
tional status of the interlocutors.
8. “Grazie mille per gli auguri! E ringrazia anche Schinzy e Sabaty (ho
un attacco di nostalgia) a presto” [Thanks a lot for the wishes! And thanks
also to Schinzy and Sabaty (I’ve got a nostalgia attack) see you soon.]

By these emotional repertoires, an interesting point is the social sharing and

communication of such an internal state like emotion, which is generally perceived
and experienced individually. In other words, the time and space distance between
interlocutors gives them the opportunity to shift from an internal to an external po-
sition, thus communicating their feelings and emotions again against the Cartesian
hypothesis of dualism.

Relational: This typology of messages highlights the relevance of the social

relationship—generally friendship—which defines the mutual positioning
of the interlocutors.
9. “Bellissima! Se non ci fossi io ke ti penso! E ki + di me! Ma ti rompo?
Dillo senza problemi se si! Come? Si? Be, vabbo, NN essere cosi sincera
adesso! E se ti chiamo?” [Gorgeous!! If I weren’t here 2 think of you ... And
who more than m e! Am I bothering you? If so tell me without problems! Par-
don? Yes? O, ok, DON’T be so sincere now! What if I phone you?]

Relational messages do represent the most representative typology of late ado-

lescents’ SMSs. Then, these messages could be conceiyed as inclusive of all others
typologies, as they focus on the relation between interlocutors more than on con-
tents or on their communicative aims. Relational messages express the need and
willingness to keep in contact with their own circle of friends by mobile communi-
cation; but at the same time, the contents may diverge from the relation between in-
terlocutors and focus attention on university, family, and amorous relationships as
well. Hence, this typology of SMS messages generally focuses on positive feelings
and affective judgments, which are actually expressions of the self and others’ po-
sitioning strategies (Hermans, 2001a, 2001b).

Gossip focused: This category of messages does represent the interlocutors

as spectators of the others’ affairs.
 10. “Caspita proprio Silvia fa l’arrabbiata ... Ke deve dire quella
poverina di Rosy?” [Geez Silvia is the one who’s angry ... what will the poor
Rosy say?]

Generally, gossip messages focus on a third person, thus reducing the

nonsharing area of the two interlocutors. In addition, gossip is a particularly inter-
active way of developing self-positioning, as the third person may introduce new
positions (Hermans, 2001b) that could threaten identity, thus creating the need for
social support and sharing. Moreover, gossip becomes a discursive means to dis-
tribute culture-inclusive meanings of the self.

Socially or culturally involved: These messages refer to the political or cul-

tural interests of the interlocutors.
11. “Mannaggia Anto!!! La manifestazione contro il Global Forum e
stata un disastro. Ti chiamo tomorrow x raccontarti, ora sono troppo stanca!
B ad ” [Damn it Anto!!! The manifestation against the Global Forum was a
disaster. I will call you tomorrow 2 tell you about it, now I am too tired!
Kisses.]

By this kind of message, the agent is socially and politically engaged, thus once
more linking internal states and emotions (“I will call you tomorrow 2 tell you
about it, now I am too tired”) with the external world (“the manifestation against
the Global Forum”) more specifically with the res publica.
As for the construction of PPRs in SMS messages, the analysis reveals that per-
sonal identity is shaped by the interlocutor’s features and by the communicative
enjeu (stake) that marks the interaction. In this perspective in SMS texts, the posi-
tion of the interlocutor is often taken as a reference point for the development of the
individual position, thus underlining its potential dialogism as it happens in the fol-
lowing example where the shift from a malicious proposal to the manifest joke is
marked by a foreseeable refusal:

12. “Sempre a dormire pensi. Peccato che non pensi quello che penso i o __
Ovviamente scherzo!!!” (You’re always thinking about sleeping. What a
pity you’re not thinking what l a m . . . . I a m joking, obviously!!!]

Here, the enunciator openly plays (“I am joking, obviously!!!”) with the
polysemy of the Italian word pensare (“to think about something”), whose refer-
ence to ’’meaning something” may be referred to both a cognitive shading of sense
(to have in mind, to conceptualize X) or to an affective one (to be interested in X).
The enunciator alludes to the different interpretations that the semantic fluctua-
tions of the verb “to think about” may recall, in the meantime playing with the po-
sition of lover and joker and assuming the latter as a metaposition, which helps him
“save face” and his relationship with the interlocutor. It is interesting to note that
the final position assumed by the author of the message hints at his first position-
ing, highlighting that the proposal should be interpreted as a mere joke; otherwise,
it may sound as an open violation of the relational and communicative contract be-
tween the two. As for the specific content of this message, it expresses the fluctua-
tion of identity between different social positions, between lover and friend. As-
suming the perspective of the recipient, the content implicitly shifts from the
assumption of the personal position “being passionate” as a lover to the personal
position of “being playful” as a friend, thus actually respecting his interlocutor.
Another common trait displayed by the SMS messages lies in the different strat-
egies to posit the self and the interlocutor both spatially and cognitively, as showed
by the following example:

13. “Buongiomo! Io mi sto facendo 2 bip quanto San Pietro a studiare

storia, tu stai raccogliendo i pezzi della serata etilica con gli amici? Tutto
ok?” [Good morning! I busting my beep as much as St. Peter in studying his-
tory, are you picking up the pieces of the ethylic evening with friends? Ev-
erything ok?]

This example posits both self and interlocutor in a common-specific frame of

experience, which is well-known by both partners of interaction and represents a
shared cognitive and affective horizon for the interpretation. The enjeu of such a
diatext lies in the fluctuation between “taking care of the self’ and “paying atten-
tion to the other.” Even if significantly influenced by the medium’s features (the
message content is actually reduced to the bone), SMS communication pushes the
interlocutor toward a goal-directed attitude; thus, in the meantime, revealing cog-
nitive and physical positionings of the self and of the other. The metaposition as-
sumed is the relational one, typical of supportive people.

14. “Buongiomo cara, X caso ieri sera hai provato a chiamarmi o erano solo
squilli? Purtroppo non sentivo il cell. E il tuo era gia spento” [Good morning,
dear. By any chance did you try calling me yesterday evening or it was sim-
ply a ring? Unfortunately I did not hear the mobile. And was yours already
turned off?]

This example reveals the need to restore a communicative and, in turn, rela-
tional routine. The interlocutor uses the SMS text to highlight his or her uneasiness
due to the incoherent behavior of the interlocutor (empty SMS messages). He or
she has lost control over the situation and tries to reestablish meaning by SMS
communication (“it was simply a ring” vs. “I did not hear the mobile”; “have you
tried to call me” vs. “it was already turned o ff’). The enunciator profits from his or
her scarce familiarity with technology to manage impressions and to convey per-
sonal self-image, which depicts it as solicitous, attentive, and sensitive.

15. “Sicuramente hai acceso il cel. Con la certezza di un mio SMS ... hai
ragione cucciola, ma se nn ti scrivevo nn era xke nn ti pensavo!! Ti Amo mi
manki gia da ora! . . . ” [Surely you turned on the mobile phone. With the cer-
tainty of getting a SMS of mine. You are right, little girl, but if I hadn’t writ-
ten you it wasn’t because I wasn’t thinking of you! I love you I already miss
you now!]

Diatext 15 accounts for the difficulty in managing distant relationships medi-

ated by phone interactions; thus, it focuses attention on the feelings of doubt and
uncertainty about the other’s comprehension and interpretation of the situation.
The desired perlocutionary effect is to “reassure” the solidity of the amorous rela-
tionship. The argument is constructed through a dialectic comparison between the
consonance of the enunciator’s and the recipient’s sense-making processes—I am
sure about you (“surely you turned on ... ”) and you are sure about me (“sure about
... ”) and the dissonance between their plans and goals—for example, I do not
agree with what you repute worthy: In a word, no message means I do not care.
The shortened and immediate textuality of SMS messages conveys the hypothesis
of equivalence between “being important for the interlocutor” and “thinking about
the other” up to the plausibility of being able to read the mind of the interlocutor.

16. “Allora ti mancano i miei SMS? Spero di no! Dovro anche lavorare ogni
tanto non posso continuamente inviare e-mail” [So you miss my SMSs? I
hope not! I have to work once in a while I can’t send e-mails all the time.]

In Example 16, the enunciator accepts a sort of paradoxical communication

(How could it be possible that the recipient should miss the SMS while the
enunciator is sending it?) as to stress that he is actually missing his partner, hoping
that she may feel the same (even if he states the opposite!).
Both of these two previous examples show and construct a managed self, pic-
turing the author as a reliable partner and claiming that whenever the interlocutor
may feel insecure about the relationship this would be due to media and not to the
partner.

17. “Ho ricevuto 1 strano SMS da te, era completamente vuoto. Che senso
ha inviare SMS vuoti?” [I received 1 strange SMS from you, it was com-
pletely empty. What’s the meaning in sending empty SMSs?]

In Diatext 17, the interaction is opened up by a banal error in the manipulation

of the mobile phone, which becomes a pretext to interact. Even if empty, the SMS
is meaningful, probably hinting at the interlocutor’s willingness to call; activating
a dialogical loop made up of questions that reveal the intention of the recipient to
keep in contact with the enunciator. Here, once again, the self assumes a relational
and other-oriented metaposition, which is surely in search of new stakes as to
shape and reshape their own social and personal positions.

DISCUSSION

The proposed classification accounts for the composed variability of the commu-
nicative aims achieved by the users through this kind of communication.
The features of SMS discursive practice seem to highlight a sort of natural bio-
rhythm that enhances the dialogism implicit in this communicative modality ac-
cording to which the phatic narrative is the most significant enunciative format.
Therefore, following Malinowski’s (1930) and Jakobson’s (1963) contributions,
the debate on phatic communication fluctuates between the minimalist practice of
futile and banal talk and the mutual recognition of the interlocutors’ physical pres-
ence. The latter serves both to express relational proximity to organize crucial
steps (openings and closings) within the interaction and to negotiate interest and
involvement; thereby giving a common plan to the communication.
Therefore, SMS literacy becomes a new communicative genre (i.e., a phatic
narrative); because, although there is a scarcity of expressive sources, the interloc-
utors move between the need to define the self and the willingness to interact with
the others. In this light, for instance, we may consider allusive rhetoric—one of the
most preferred communicative strategies in the corpus of data—with ellipses that
signal the enunciative meaning of pauses: a privileged means for the interlocutors
to reconstruct the frame of the interaction, to attribute sense to contents and rela-
tions, and to give his or her active contribution a posteriori; resulting in parallel
and mutual development of self positions. From a cognitive point of view, such a
strategic use of pauses marks the opposition between phatic narrative and competi-
tive narrative (an enunciative format) in which the other’s presence is merely func-
tional to a more efficient self-presentation (Cortini & Manuti, 2002).
As for the PPRs, a wide homogeneity is to be observed both in content and posi-
tioning strategies in SMS diatexts. On one hand, contents may be grouped into
three macrocategories: self (anonymous, body focused, and emotion focused),
other (phatic; relational; gossip focused; involved socially, culturally, or both), and
circumstances (transactional, event specific, circumstantial, and scholastic). On
the other hand, the internal positions of late adolescents focus on the personal posi-
tion of being a supporter or a victim, on the institutional social position of being a
student, on the sociorelational position of being a friend or a lover, and on few ex-
ternal positions; generally represented by the small circle of pair friends. These re-
sults seem coherent with those argued by the social identity theory scholars (Tajfel,
1982; Tajfel & Turner, 1986) who have stressed the crucial role played by the
group within the process of identity construction. To better investigate the interpre-
tation of the late adolescents’ world, the analysis underlines the affective uncer-
tainty of youth. It seems that what the adolescent acrobats actually search for is ex-
clusively relational. The personal positions, in fact, could be meant as a continuum
between being an independent individual who manifests affection (actor and sup-
porter) and being a dependent object of affection (victim). Conversely, the social
positions could range between a more institutional pole, represented by the social
role of being a student; and a more relational pole, marked by the role of friend and
lover (Sedikides & Brewer, 2001).
On the other hand, the actual others that emerge from the analysis of the mes-
sages are always pairs, stressing that the affective energy manifested by the inter-
locutors is constantly in search of a horizontal relation; thus marking the distance
from hierarchical relations, which generally characterize the adults’ world and
that, according to them, have nothing to propose in terms of new positions and
challenges for the self.

CONCLUSION

The dialogical construction of the self in SMS communication seems to push the
enunciators to think about (and to reveal) themselves through the interlocutor they
are sending the message to. The SMS enunciators entrust their project of identity
construction to a huge enunciative mobility; in some sense, they seem to control
the whole game of what they do with words (to communicate news, to exchange
gossip, to seduce, etc.) because it is from such a game of potentialities that the
power of themselves takes origin.
Then, the analysis of the SMS texts highlights some peculiar traits for the ex-
pressive modalities of the self: the prevalent role played by the phatic function; the
relevant pressure toward heteroglossia, mixture, and contamination of channels,
genres, styles, themes, and positions; and the great individual value attributed to
the affective plot that marks the linkage between the self and the world.
This investigation contributes to both theory and research methodology. As for
research methodology, this study has shown how the adoption of the PPR could ac-
tually make diatextual analysis more complete, stressing its applicability beside
the psychotherapy context.
In terms of theory, this study has yielded several interesting insights. First, as
for the dialogical self theory, once more it has been demonstrated how culture is
self-inclusive and self is culture- and media inclusive. Moreover, in terms of psy-
chology of communication, the analysis has suggested a possible classification of
SMS uses, musing on the relation between SMS as medium and its users, which re-
sults in a mobile brainframe.
 Finally, as for adolescence studies, this study has highlighted the importance of
peer communication to support the construction of self-identity by this cohort.
Moreover, although conceived as a mediated evocation of a transient identity (and
in such a sense, a “light” medium), the analysis of SMS communication has high-
lighted how this form of interaction could actually allow for the empowerment of
the dialogued plot of the self.

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IDENTITY: AN INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF THEORY AND RESEARCH, 4(4), 371-388
Copyright © 2004, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.

Mediated Identity in the

Parasocial Interaction of TV

Susanna Annese
University of Bari, Italy

Electronic media contributes toward modifying the self as they shape it as a

multivoiced construction. Television talk shows function as a space of parasocial in-
teraction where ordinary people represented on the screen offer involving images of
subjectivity for the home viewers. Through interpretative procedures, viewers inte-
grate screen suggestions in the positions’ repertoire of their self. This study hypothe-
sized that viewers co-construct identities through involvement in what they are
watching and employed focus group discussions and content analysis to investigate
this hypothesis. The results demonstrate recurrent comparisons contrasting the
screen “other” and the real self. This categorization marks a strong involvement of
participants and an interpretative reconstruction of television images. As such, iden-
tity is constructed in the dialogical relation between others and selves in a mediated
relation whose only result is a self traveling through different repositionings.

Social psychology and mass communication research have always been interested
in the study of identity. The most innovative contributions propose a negotiated no-
tion of identity that overcomes an essentialist approach. Identity is the product of
social practices in which the individual is involved. This relational and linguistic
perspective reflects social constructionism that assumes that

selves, persons, psychological traits, and so forth, including the very idea of individ-
ual psychological traits, are social and historical constructions, not naturally occur-
ring objects (Sampson, 1989, p. 2).

These theoretical afterthoughts respond to a change of cultural perspective that

conceives reality as interwoven in social relationships and proposes the self as an

Requests for reprints should be sent to Susanna Annese, Dipartimento di Psicologia, Universita
degli Studi di Bari, Palazzo Ateneo, Piazza Umberto I, 1, 70121 Bari, ITALIA. E-mail:
s.annese@psico.uniba.it
integral part of these relationships. Nowadays, social relationships develop toward
virtual forms, and mediated interactions contribute to the structuration of identity.
Electronic relationships contribute toward modifying the self as they shape it—not
as a univocal structure, but a plural construction originating in the technologies of
social “saturation” (Gergen, 1991).
The most important dimensions of interaction—self, other, and reality—are
constructed in the continuous flow of communicative and relational practices:

What we might call our orderly p e r s o n - w o r l d d i m e n s i o n s o f i n t e r a c t i o n ... emerge

out of, and are constructed within, a whole melee of disorderly, s e l f - o t h e r d i m e n s i o n s
o f i n t e r a c t i o n (Shotter, 1995, p. 165).

The social dimension of the interaction originates in the “joint action” (Shotter,
1984) between the self and the other, between the individual and the world.

ELECTRONIC RELATIONSHIPS AND

DIALOGICAL SELVES

Identity is a “process of self definition directed by the connection self/other”

(Galimberti & Riva, 1998, p. 437); it is a dynamic construction coming from a
multiplicity of people and voices in self-presentation (Hevem, 2000); it is com-
posed of many voices, each voice represents a position inside which the image of
the other is reflected (Hermans, Kempen, & van Loon, 1992). Its nature is dialogic
because the self is in constant dialogue with other selves of the sociocultural world
(Hermans, 2001). Its nature is transactional because its manifold meanings are dis-
tributed in its interactions with others. Bruner (1990/1992) wondered:

Isn’t the Self a transactional relationship between a speaker and his receiver... ? Isn’t
it a way of structuring its own conscience, position, [and] identity, ... towards an-
other? In this condition the Self becomes dialogue-dependent, (p. 100)

The awareness of the other relates to a practical moral knowledge that precedes
each other kind of knowledge. John Shotter and Kenneth Gergen (1994) defined it
as a “third type” of knowledge, neither theoretical nor practical or technical:

It is a form of knowledge/rom w i t h i n a relationship, in which, in its articulation, oth-

ers around us continually exert a morally coercive force upon us t o b e persons of a
particular kind, to assume a particular i d e n t i t y , and to exhibit a particular kind of s e n -
s i b i l i t y : that is, to be persons who act and make sense of the events and activities stud-
ied through the “proper” use of the “proper” terms, (p. 6)
Relational knowledge produces a dialogic reality, a co-construction of meanings
made through language. Discourse modulates identity; the social strength of dis-
course, the existence of the other in discourse, shapes aspects of the self. Accord-
ing to Harre (1995, p. 158), “the self, as the author of public and private discourse,
is not itself an entity that can be observed by the person whose self it is (p. 158). To
propose the self as a discursive construction means to conceive it as a modality and
not an entity, “the characteristics of articulation, dynamism, [and] versatility
emerge” (Mininni, 1995, p. 52). The notion of a fluid identity (Annese 2001), built
in interaction with the other, finds its apotheosis in the technological society where
social relationships are multiplied by spatial and temporal dispersion; and with
them, even the possibilities of the self are multiplied.
Through mediated processes, remote people and situations enter everyday so-
cial worlds by unhinging the nature of social interactions and altering the type of
experience, the intensity of involvement, and the depth of familiarity in them. It is
clear that alteration in social relationships drives the individual to interact with
substitutes for the real other, visible but “notional” people, “absent others”
(Giddens, 1990, p. 19). The concept of identity—what individuals are for them-
selves and for others—becomes problematic because relationships are
denaturalized and give life to a plurality of social worlds. The continuous change
of social situations produces a multiplicity of positions that generates the charac-
teristic of mutability in the self (Hermans, 2001).
The communicative function of television is a particular form of mediated rela-
tionship, which can be defined as “parasocial interaction” (Horton & Wohl, 1956)
or mediated “quasi-interaction” (Thompson, 1995/1998, p. 126). In it, the roles of
production and reception are separated; their relationship is an exchange of sym-
bolic forms that takes place in disparate contexts and in different times. If physical
co-presence is not an essential condition, then the “mediation/representation of
subjectivity through TV simulacra” (Galimberti, 1994, p. 144) is required.
Television production plans for the representation of the ordinary person who
produces conversational interactions suitable for public circulation. This represen-
tation offers meanings that are only potential because it can provoke discussions in
varied contexts that build effective meanings very different from the potential
ones. Audiences use TV meanings in a relational way: “They participate without
passive identification, they blur boundaries between viewing and living by endless
‘what happened then’ discussions and by bringing their everyday experience to
judge the drama” (Livingstone, 1990, p. 2).
Viewers can carefully process information, contextualize their elaborations in
the shared symbolic order, and so they can contribute to the process of TV produc-
tion. Through reception they can construct meanings rather than simply exchange
information. As Jensen (1991) remembered, “a discursive or interpretive concep-
tion of reception is a necessary constituent of a comprehensive theory of the audi-
ence” (p. 138). Viewers employ interpretative procedures to reconstruct meanings
of television programs; they order information received by television through
schemes or representations that allow them to appraise, select, complete, and reor-
ganize the perceptive material. They elaborate television texts through interpreta-
tive mechanisms that recall their mental schemes.
According to research in audience studies (Anderson & Meyer, 1988; Ang,
1991; Jensen, 1991; Lindlof, 1988), viewership is a process of negotiation “be-
tween a set of structured potentialities ‘out there’ and the person’s repertoire of
knowledge representations and processing strategies (Livingstone, 1990, p. 32).
By means of interpretation, viewers negotiate the information in television texts
with other factors such as their previous experiences of reception, gender, and so-
cial disposition toward the received information. In other words, reception is an ac-
tive process creating a parasocial interaction with production.
The TV genre of the talk show offers such a space of parasocial interaction to
the active audience. Ordinary people represented on the screen serve as a kind of
simulacrum for the audience on the other side of the screen and offer images of
subjectivity for their viewers. Through interpretative procedures, viewers integrate
screen suggestions in their self schemes; they mix symbolic “possible selves”
(Markus & Nurius, 1986) with individual ones, so that TV representation of sub-
jectivity drives them to continuous processes of identity construction.

RESEARCH WORK: FLUID IDENTITY IN THE MEDIATED

INTERACTION OF A TALK SHOW

This research adopts a socioconstructionist perspective, the emerging field of audi-

ence studies, and a qualitative methodology to explore the television construction
of identity. It seeks to point out ways by which viewers construct identities as a
comparison between real selves and screen others. Television programs drive
viewers to co-construct, in cooperative or conflicting ways, TV meanings through
their involvement in what they are watching.
This research work employs focus group discussions and content analyses as
methodological tools. The data are collected by in-depth interviews conducted as
group discussions. These are subsequently transcribed for content analysis by soft-
ware such as NUD*IST (Nonnumerical Unstructured Data FOR Indexing
Searching Theorizing). Focus group discussions respond to the need (a) to consult
viewers directly as suggested by audience studies; (b) for interaction between par-
ticipants and researchers according to qualitative research tenets; and, (c) for the
purpose of negotiating possible worlds, according to the socioconstructionist ap-
proach. Content analysis responds to the need to create semantic nets connected to
both discursive context and the wider sociocultural context through an operation of
interpretation. By emphasizing interpretative steps and qualitative results, content
analysis serves descriptive and correlational purposes because it is not possible to
hypothesize causal links in the relationships under review.

RESEARCH HYPOTHESIS

If “through their responses to television, people generate social identities” (Living-

stone & Lunt, 1994, p. 91), then the working hypothesis of this study is that audi-
ence participation in talk shows produces identity positioning through involve-
ment. Studio and home audience involvement engages participants in the
negotiation process of TV-based identity construction.
What is the nature of this involvement? It may be “hot” or “cool” (Liebes &
Katz, 1990), symmetrical or asymmetrical in relation to the screen representations
of identity. It can vary in relation to the way viewers perceive and appraise screen
identities; these can be accepted or refused by the viewer. Acceptance or refusal
mark viewer involvement, whereas assimilation to or contrast with TV representa-
tion reveals the modality of involvement. Therefore, focusing on the kind of in-
volvement is crucial and verifies whether and how viewers categorize television
simulacra of subjectivity. The more viewers are involved, the more they catego-
rize; they perceive more differences and similarities (Sherif & Hovland, 1961);
they reveal their positions in this double modality of categorization. The search for
similarity or disparity between representations produced by talk shows and mean-
ings produced by participants’ in-group discussions may reveal categorizations. In
their turn, such categorizations mark the strong involvement by viewers as signs of
indirect participation and serve to explain the television construction of identities,
the process of social negotiation of “audience discussion programs” (Livingstone
& Lunt, 1992).

RESEARCH DESIGN

The research design studied the meanings produced by four focus group discus-
sions composed of four or five participants per group. Each group was composed
of participants having the same social role: students, housewives, employed per-
sons, and retired persons. Different social roles were chosen to provide different
psychosocial contexts and ways of reception among participants. Choosing heter-
ogeneity between groups required homogeneity within groups for the purpose of
avoiding inequalities or inhibiting processes in conversational interaction.
Choosing participants who played the same social role was useful “to maintain a
reasonable amount of homogeneity within groups to foster discussion (Morgan,
1988, p. 46). The study included a total of 18 participants, men and women, aged
21 to 77 years.
 Participants first watched a November 1997 episode of a commercial net
(Canale 5) Italian talk show “Men and Women.” The show’s name underscores the
intention of its producers: letting ordinary men and women speak. There are no ex-
perts; the host alone interacts with guests and the studio audience. Second, the par-
ticipants in the focus group setting answered some open questions in an informal
discussion directed by an interviewer. The four group discussions were recorded
and transcribed for subsequent content analysis. Coding was performed by two an-
alysts to establish reliability. The content analysis employed NUD*IST software,
which allows the coding of different parts of the text through a scheme of catego-
ries organized in a tree-like system. The outcomes—the emergence of some cate-
gories and the relations among them—were tabbed in qualitative vectors.

DATA COLLECTION: FOCUS GROUP DISCUSSION

The decision to collect data through focus group discussions responded to the need
to investigate the social construction of meaning in the experience of reception, the
social action of making sense of television programs, and the discursive practices
by which the social action of reception takes place.
Each focus group discussion lasted 70 min, and every participant spoke. In two
groups (the housewives and pensioners), participants were friends who knew each
other prior to the study; in the other two groups (students and employed persons), par-
ticipants did not previously know each other. Interviews were conducted in varying lo-
cales: the students at the university and the other groups in familiar places of meeting;
the housewives and pensioners in their association centers and the employed persons
in one of their homes. Recordings of each interview were supplemented by field notes
written by the interviewer after the session. These were helpful in identifying group
dynamics such as strategies of interaction or conflict-resolution processes.
Interviews began by discussing the main theme of the target episode and then ex-
panded to include the receptive structures of the program, the genre of “talk shows,”
and television in general. A flexible interview protocol of six items was used. At times,
the interviewer simply decided to follow the flow of the conversation and either omit-
ted or crafted new questions according to the direction of the discussion. More specific
requests and more highly structured questions were employed only when a more inter-
esting matter was raised or it became necessary to explore the topic more deeply.
The interviewer had two types of interventions: “launches” and “relaunches”
(Blanchet & Ghiglione, 1991, p. 103) or “main research” questions and “leading”
questions; the former launched a theme, and the latter returned to specific themes
by using the same words of the interviewee. Other kinds of intervention included:

“Feel questions” (Stewart & Shamdasani, 1990, p. 83): The interviewer di-
rectly asks an opinion or an experience of the interviewee.
 “Anonymous questions”: The interviewer makes general requests to not di-
rectly involve an interviewee.
“Steering questions”: The interviewer focuses attention back on the main
theme, after digressions.
“Testing questions”: The interviewer tests the feedback of a concept by pre-
tending not to know or have understood.

Participants always answered spontaneously. On the whole, answers revealed

reciprocity and a cooperative strategy. The opinion of one interviewee sometimes
dragged the opinions of the others according to a “snowballing” effect (Stewart &
Shamdasani, 1990, p. 19), which displayed the cooperative style of interaction.
Two processes were activated to solve conflicts among differing ideas: a process of
transparency to arrive at a clear agreement or disagreement after a long discussion;
and a process of consent building, by which differences of ideas were explained as
disparate aspects of the same phenomenon.
Such a general collaboration of group members in the expression of both agree-
ment and disagreement is what Goffman (1967) defined as a collective “face,” an
interactional order aimed at the construction of meaning. In this way, group discus-
sions displayed a social model of reception.

DATA ELABORATION: CONTENT ANALYSIS

Because group discussions were conversations, the focus of the content analysis
lay in the conversational turns among participants. The four transcripts were com-
posed of a total of 3,493 such turns.
Data coding employed a hierarchal system of nonexclusive and a posteriori cat-
egories. The system was organized in a tree structure of five primary nodes (called
parents) vertically developing across two, three, or four levels with secondary
nodes (called children) providing a greater degree of specification. As a whole, the
tree came to include 73 categories.
Two analysts performed a double coding by classifying all the texts of the tran-
scripts independently. The measure of agreement between coders had a mean of
74%—an acceptable level of reliability.

OUTCOMES

Coding permitted an analysis of the frequencies for both categories and groups,
and a correlational analysis was conducted to identify the most meaningful rela-
tions among categories.
 FREQUENCIES OF CATEGORIES

The program, reactions to the program, the social reality represented on the screen,
and the effects of television were the most frequent categories in the discussion of
participants. Exploring the first category—program—one already notices that TV
representation of ordinary persons offers a “screen other” to be compared with the
“real self’of interviewees. In texts coded in the program category, there is arecurrent
comparison between the screen representation of the other and the real self lived by
the participants. This comparison always concludes with a contrast categorization
for the screen other. In the investigation of the second category—reactions—one no-
tices again the contrast categorization for the television program and represented
identities. In focus group discussions coded as reactions to the program, the contrast
categorization indirectly marks the strong involvement of the participants and,
above all, displays an interpretative reconstruction of television text by which partic-
ipants made sense of the screen representations of identity. The comparison between
the real self and screen other continues in the third category— social real-
ity—whereas negative categorization continues to appear in the fourth cate-
gory—effects.
The program category (see Table 1) includes the organization of the show, its
actors—host, guests, and studio audience—and the democracy in the show partici-
pation. The planning of the program was continually hypothesized and explained
by participants as an essential device in both the mechanisms of production and of
reception. An interviewee belonging to the housewives group hypothesized a god
who “chooses people” in the production strategies to widen the size of the audi-
ence as an effect on reception. The producers intentionally construct a screen other
to get greater attention from viewers.
The screen other is represented by the participants in the show. Their perception
is doubled because interviewees suggest both a motivation for and an evaluation of
the characters of the show. On one side, they try to understand why participants de-
cide to participate in this kind of program; on the other, they appraise their partici-
pation according to the reactions and effects they produce on a home audience. In
other words, they try to interpret the representation produced by television accord-
ing to their expectations as home audience members themselves. The interpreta-
tive process is a way to participate and to negotiate the construction of identity pro-
duced by television.
The interviewees always appraised the participation of guests and studio audi-
ences in the show in a negative way. This is a contrast categorization as they think
that no rationale could justify violations of privacy:

MARY: I feel//1 feel embarrassed for them/ because I think// but however is it
possible to go to a show and to behave like that? (Employed per-
sons-229)
 TABLE 1
Frequencies of Categories

F ir s t a n a ly s is S e c o n d a n a ly s is

Involvement — 0.66
Program 2.70 4.80
Planning 7.10 4.90
Host 2.60 2.90
Participants 6.10 3.70
Motivation 4.20 2.00
Evaluation 6.40 11.0
Democracy 5.10 8.40
Other talk shows 2.80 2.90
Other programs 1.80 1.0
Other mediated products 2.50 3.20
Reactions 5.40 3.50
Discussion 3.40 2.50
Emotional involvement 7.10 1.30
Similarities 0.46 3.40
Differences 0.37 0.51
Repercussions 1.90 2.60
Total 59.9 59.2
Social Reality 0.46 1.10
Theme 4.30 5.60
Private 3.80 5.60
Interesting 2.90 3.00
Involving 1.30 2.10
Correspondence 2.50 3.20
Ordinary person 1.80 1.90
Opinions espressed 1.30 1.60
Likelihood 2.70 2.40
Social usefulness 3.10 4.50
Total 24.10 27.80
Effects 6.40 5.70
Persuasion 4.60 1.80
Cause 1.4 2.50
Result 1.6 1.50
Learning 2.80 3.10
Antecedent 2.60 2.90
Consequent 0.46 0.46
Total 19.8 17.9
Uncoded 2.9 3.2

Such a negative evaluation shows a critical attitude toward the participants. This
attitude allows the interviewees to identify a captivating strategy: Through strong
personalization, by calling each participant in the show by name, the television
show activates a familiarity between studio and home audience.
 The category of participants produces in interviewees a sense of closeness be-
tween characters on the screen and viewers like themselves on the other side of the
screen. Further, they wonder about the validity of this proximity and of remote par-
ticipation. Above all, they wonder about the real democracy of participation in this
kind of program. They categorize it by contrast. They show skepticism and a criti-
cal attitude because they are aware of an asymmetrical relation in which participa-
tion is only pretended. They think that their role as audience is passive because talk
shows do not really allow free expression, they only feign to offer it. Interviewees
think this because television is not a means of direct interaction, but of mediated
communication.
On one side, interviewees’ categorization by contrast emphasizes a negative
evaluation of both the TV program and its participants. On the other side, inter-
viewees’ awareness of the contrived production devices and of their consequent
passive role shows their ability to interpret screen representations according to
their own intentions, expectations, motivations, and purposes. They show an active
role that is their form of participation in the parasocial interaction invited by such
talk shows. The same kind of interpretative collaboration also emerges in another
category, reactions to television programs (see Table 1).
Interviewees describe their experience of reception as social, because making
sense of this TV genre is a collective process. They receive this type of text essen-
tially as members of a group, family, friends, or colleagues. This TV genre gener-
ates discussions; it is a chance to construct meanings that go beyond the program
itself. It is an elusive text as it does not propose any specific solutions for the topics
presented on the screen. The lack of solutions drives viewers to complete their
elaboration of the topic by discussion. Therefore, they may discuss these issues
within the family, especially because the program itself does not offer any practical
solutions, but repercussions on real life may be negative. According to interview-
ees, this television genre may have far-reaching and indirect effects on daily life
that are harmful and damaging.
Another contrast categorization to both this genre and TV in general implicitly
reveals interviewees’ involvement. Despite their negative evaluations, interview-
ees acknowledge feeling involved because they are interested in the symbolic rep-
resentation of daily life, of social reality, achieved by such programs:

MAURO: I can take for example my fa-/ my family/ my mother and my father///
sometimes he parti-/ my brothers participate too/ however/ but seldom
because/ that is to say we are moderators/ when we see that one exag-
gerates/ one of the two exaggerates we say// but see that you are/ you
are at the same [level as] (Employed persons-286)

Interviewees look for causes of their emotional involvement in a metonymic re-

lationship between themselves and people speaking in television or in the personal
subjects discussed in such talk shows. They are perfectly aware that the TV genre
aims to secure their involvement, and they accept it.
The attention of talk shows to matters of personal privacy in the lives of guests
and the consequent representation of social reality are means by which production
strategies create involvement; they are devices to elicit such a reaction. Inter-
viewees perceive representations of social reality, produced by the program, in two
steps. Initially, they focus attention on the private subject of public conversation,
then they widen the focus to consider its correspondence with real life. This induc-
tive logic emerges in examining the category of social reality (see Table 1). By this
logic, interviewees make a comparison between a TV-based everyday world and
their real world; basically, they compare the screen other to the real self, which pro-
vides a contrast definition of represented social reality.
A negative evaluation emerged in the category of effects (see Table 1) too,
where persuasion was the effect most emphasized. Interviewees explain this as a
mechanism focusing on audience tendencies such as their interests, emotional
states, previous attitudes, and so forth. Interviewees thought that each program,
each TV genre, each character, and every television image actually hides an at-
tempt at mystification. Participants also thought that mechanisms of persuasion
and social influence naturally belong to television; thus, they show a natural dis-
trust toward television’s contents even if, ironically, they accept themselves as im-
plicated by them:

ANN: It is manipula-// it is manipulative/ that is they want that the/ the public
opinion is addressed toward a direction because they have already decided
what has to happen/// then they have to direct the masses toward that solu-
tion. (Employed persons-802)

This contrast categorization, this critical attitude toward television, makes in-
terviewees capable of monitoring the effects of persuasion. In fact, they think that
negative effects are always addressed toward targets different than themselves, to-
ward people who do not have the cultural tools and knowledge to neutralize such
effects. Some have called this the “ third person effect” (Duck & Mullin, 1995):
Everybody thinks that it is the other one who is affected by the strong influence of
the media. Therefore, housewives identify the third person effect in children and
old people; pensioners identify it in persons who live alone, especially sick people
and widows, even if these categories include themselves; finally students, young
people themselves, identify the third person in those who are even younger.
The negative effects of screen others on real selves are only the final example of
a pervasive contrast categorization made by interviewees in their focus group dis-
cussions. The more they perceive negative elements the more they categorize by
contrast; the more they show this modality of categorization the more they are in-
volved. Their involvement is the mark of their participation in the TV construction
of identity’s positionings.

GROUP FREQUENCIES AND CORRELATIONAL

ANALYSIS

To participate in the process of social negotiation as an active audience member,

the viewer needs to cooperate with TV production; involvement is the best mark of
this cooperation. The description of group frequencies essentially focuses on the
different nature of this involvement.
Liebes and Katz (1990) distinguished two dimensions in the relation between
reception and production: involvement and interpretative framework. The
correlational analysis explores the second dimension of interpretative framework.
It seeks to identify peculiar readings for the different groups by taking into account
the result of group frequencies.

Group Frequencies

Because the category of involvement is the most recurrent category, it is instructive

to examine this category’s specificity for each focus group.
The housewives group accepts the involvement created by this TV genre but
give it a negative value. They find it useless as it does not offer any finality. Such a
negative judgment reveals a strong categorization marking involvement.
The pensioners group speaks about a passive experience of reception, one con-
ditioned by inactivity and isolation of the domestic context. They differ with the
housewives only in the stronger involvement they feel.
Students try to explain their strong involvement by the representation of ordi-
nary persons and common sense. These elements are essential to explain the in-
volvement of the viewer both directly in the television studio and indirectly at
home. The studio audience offers a complete range of possible images of ordinary
people to increase home viewership.
A similar negative judgment is expressed by the employed people, but is offered
for different reasons. According to this group, talk shows do not produce any kind
of empowerment. Although viewer involvement is real, the only consequence is to
get the viewer accustomed to watch this kind of program.
In conclusion, there is a general acceptance of involvement, but it is explained
in different ways. The groups of housewives, pensioners, and students justify it by
the representation of social reality; in fact, their group frequencies identify the fol-
lowing hierarchical distribution: (a) involvement, (b) social reality, and (c) effects.
In contrast, the employed persons discuss their involvement according to the ef-
fects provoked; in fact, their frequencies show a different hierarchical distribution:
(a) involvement, (b) effects, and (c) social reality.
An overall contrast categorization marks involvement across groups but it is
produced within different frameworks. The first three groups relate television
characters to real ones, whereas the last elaborates the program as a text whose as-
pects must still be investigated because of their effects. Using Liebes and Katz’s
(1990) definitions, the first interpretative framework is a “referential reading,”
whereas the second is a “critical reading.” According to them, it is wrong to match
the referential reading with a positive evaluation and the critical one with a nega-
tive evaluation; both forms of reading may attribute negative or positive values to
the program interpreted. In this study, both referential and critical readings have
categorized for contrast the television genre by showing the strong involvement by
viewers.

Correlational Frequencies

According to Liebes and Katz (1990), the two dimensions of interpretative frame-
work (referential or critical) and involvement (hot or cool) can be intersected. The
result is a range of four types of reception, each type creating a form of opposition
to the audiovisual text.
By intersecting the outcomes of group frequencies—referential and critical
frameworks associated with hot involvement—the correlational analysis identified
a referential-hot and a critical-hot reading.
In the first type of reading, viewers try to contextualize TV representations in
social reality and look for similarities or possible relations. That is why this study
looked for a relation between social reality as represented and the involvement pro-
duced by overlapping two subcategories of social reality—“theme” and “corre-
spondence”— and the category of “emotional involvement”. Percentages of over-
lapping are higher in groups of housewives, pensioners, and students where a
referential reading had been hypothesized in the previous group analysis. For ex-
ample, in the correlation between the category of emotional involvement and the
subcategory of private theme, percentages are respectively 14%, 8.8%, and 15%,
versus 7.8% of the employed people group.
This referential-hot reading is based on involvement related to social reality as
it operates through two mechanisms: narrating and modeling. Narrating is a mech-
anism belonging to television discourse (Ong, 1986) and connects audiovisually
narrated experiences with personally lived ones. Modeling is a mechanism of in-
terpretation of private stories told in talk shows where viewers interpret them as ex-
amples through which they may elaborate their social reality.
This double mechanism drives viewers to attribute more value to real-life expe-
rience and to produce a negative categorization of the screen by creating a moral
opposition to television contents.
 The critical-hot reading is different because it is interested in the way contents
are introduced and in the effects these provoke. This study looked for a relation be-
tween the effect of persuasion and emotional involvement by overlapping the cate-
gory of “persuasion” and those of “similarities” and “differences” with contents of
the program. Percentages of overlapping are higher among employed people
(14.5% vs. 9.4% of housewives, 6.7% of pensioners, and 9.9% of students) for
whom a critical reading had been hypothesized in the previous group analysis.
Interviewees believe that talk show themes create involvement through an iden-
tification of similarities and differences with real life and that these effects are dan-
gerous. The most harmful effect is persuasion because it can transform the viewer
into a passive receiver of images of the self. This explanation clearly produces a
negative categorization and expresses, from the perspective of critical reading, an
ideological opposition to the manipulative intent of message construction.
Both referential and critical readings cooperate in constructing the meanings
produced by television; they differ in their choice of interpretative framework.
They share the social action of identity construction even if the identity
positionings produced are alterable because they follow the flow of technological
social practices.

DISCUSSION

The TV representation of ordinary persons—the identity built by TV pro-

grams—generated a strong level of categorization in interviewees, a mark of their
involvement (Sherif & Hovland, 1961). Employing a contrast categorization, in-
terviewees perceived the screen other as different from their real selves; viewers
constructed their self-positions by contrast with TV identities. In this way, they
showed their strong involvement as a sign of an indirect participation that serves to
explain processes of identity co-construction (Livingstone & Lunt, 1994). The
process of social negotiation worked by means of two dynamics: referential and
critical. The referential procedure drew a comparison between screen and real
identities, the critical stance examined the effects of screen identities on real ones.
Audience discussion programs offer manifold images involving the self: im-
ages of “personae” (Horton & Wohl, 1956, p. 216) both audiovisually present and
spatially and temporally absent. They can be accepted or refused by viewers whose
efforts at categorization imply an involvement as a sort of “quasi-participation”
(Thompson, 1995/1998, p. 142). The role of an audience is an active one where
“viewers experience a sense of involvement and participation” (Livingstone,
Wober, & Lunt, 1994, p. 372). They are social actors engaged in a “parasocial in-
teraction” (Horton & Wohl, 1956). This mediated way of interacting engages
viewers by means of indirect participation in the construction of the dominant fea-
ture of post-modern identity: fluidity (Annese, 2001).
 The contrast between the screen other and the real self emerges because each in-
dividual employs a self-scheme in categorizing others. Processes that evaluate, se-
lect, and categorize others help individuals define the ideas they have of them-
selves. Indeed, it is not even important if others are “real or notional” persons
(Harre, 1995, p. 146) or if the construction is cooperative or conflicting. In
self-awareness there is a motivational direction that drives individuals to perceive
others as different from themselves and, above all, to appraise, judge, and catego-
rize them with positive or negative attributes to interpret them according to their
own expectations.

“You” constitute for me (or the surrogate I constitute in place of you) someone who is
like myself,..., someone to whom it makes sense to address my remarks here,...; in
other words, you provide the motivation for my remarks. (Shotter, 1989, p. 144)

Self is a dialogical reality produced by interchange with other selves in social

contexts (Hermans, 1996); it is a decentralized construction produced by negotia-
tion in social relationships, and because of this its nature is mutable and alterable.
The “joint activity” between production and reception produces identity in the
parasocially interactive potential of TV. Self is constructed in the negotiation be-
tween “them”—the participants in the show—and “us”—the viewers of the show.
Participants in the show are “insiders” sliding from outside to inside the television,
“from margin to center, outside in” (Priest, 1996, p. 79), but they are different from
“outsiders.” The mediated relationship is in the contrast between “them” and “us”;
it is based on the interpretation of “them” according to “us”. These kinds of social
relationships, produced by technologies of communication, cannot generate stable
and durable identifications. Self is continually constructed according to different
technological discourses. For this reason, self exists not as an entity but as a modal-
ity changing positions according to social relationships.

CONCLUSION

Television is a new social space that offers varied images of subjectivity through
audience discussion programs, through its participants and through the disclosure
of private stories. They are mediated images of “possible selves” (Markus &
Nurius, 1986), the representations of future selves, what the viewers want or fear to
become. The need for coherence in the self-scheme drives viewers to evaluate TV
images by choosing receptive readings and strategies that confirm the concept they
have of themselves. The need for coherence drives them to categorize TV images
so as to co-construct their own identity in the social space of television. Televised
simulacra provoke in the audience processes of social categorization that are es-
sential for the formation of social identity (Tajfel, 1972).
 Self is a project that individuals build using the symbolic materials they receive
and organize them into a coherent story of individual identity; but it is a reflexive
project because the individual continually modifies it when symbolic resources
change. In technological societies, the resources are diversified; they come from
direct and mediated knowledge. Mediated interactions do not work simply “as
inspirers of apparent behaviors, but also and more slightly as prompters of those
fears, desires and aspirations that enter to constitute the identity of the people”
(Mantovani, 1995, p. 204). Therefore, images of the self are formed in a collabora-
tion between personal experience and communication. In this co-construction it is
always the individual who decides among the possible alternatives. The con-
structed self is dialogical and multiple because it is a dynamic repertoire moving
among context-related voices (Hermans, 2001); it depends on mediated relation-
ships, on the “joint action” (Shotter, 1995) between different voices in which each
voice tries to “warrant” its position (Gergen, 1989).
This kind of role for the TV audience activates a process of “secondary reception”
different from “primary reception,” which is the freedom for the viewer to choose
among varied mediated products. Secondary reception is more than a choice, it is a
chance for dialogue, a relational cue. Audiovisual products drive viewers to widen
their receptivity to a dialogue with others. In such a dialogue, they can elaborate
meanings different from those imagined by the initial production strategy, even in
contexts different from those sites in which they are first received. Relational cues,
unexpected meanings, and different contexts generate a “tertiary reception.” This is
the widest type of reception; the meanings elaborated by secondary reception are ne-
gotiated with the viewers’ broad background of knowledge, competences, and pre-
dispositions. Viewers negotiate the material offered by television “in ways that make
sense within [their] social and cultural situation” (Ang, 1990, p. 161). They appro-
priate television texts that extend symbolic resources available for the project of self.
This appropriation constantly suggests models and identities to viewers’ processes
of positioning; it continuously enlarges the repertoire of positions, which contribute
to molding the individual self (Hermans, 2001).
The appropriation of mediated experiences produces a different perception of
space, of what is near and what is far. Such perception modifies the sense of time,
too; it becomes mediated historicity including what is remote, what is not person-
ally experienced. Even the affiliation sense is modified. Contemporary forms of
mediated socialization originate in a society that is not based on physical proxim-
ity but on the use of the same mediated forms of communication. These alterations
take deep root in identity, in the ways individuals categorize the connection be-
tween self and other, in the ways according to which they interpret the boundaries
of their own identities. Although new symbolic resources enrich the project of the
self, at the same time they make it dependent on uncontrollable sources. The con-
sequent effect of disorientation thus produces an identity in continuous construe-
tion, an identity with boundaries as fluid as the social resources on which it draws:
“Our addiction from the social communication means that our understanding of
the others and ourselves ... is never complete” (Neisser, 1976/1981, p. 215).
Self is thus a never ending construction produced by fluctuation between per-
sonal and cultural positioning (Hermans, 2001).

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IDENTITY: AN INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF THEORY AND RESEARCH, 4(4), 389-405
Copyright © 2004, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.

The Usage of Space in Dialogical

Self-Construction:
From Dante to Cyberspace

Cor van Halen and Jacques Janssen

University of Nijmegen, The Netherlands

It is commonly acknowledged that Western modernization has changed the outlook

on identity, from the ascribed identity in premodem times to the identity manage-
ment in our late-modem times. Dante’s Divina Commedia and the usage of Internet
by visitors of a Dutch hip-hop site are analyzed to come to a more differentiated con-
clusion. Both examples clearly illustrate the dialogical nature of self-constmction.
The differences are to be found in the spatial distribution of the voiced positions. In
the case of the Divina Commedia, self-constmction is situated in a narratively de-
fined space where the distribution of dialogical positions obeys the preordained
moral structure of the medieval cosmology. The medium of the Internet, on the other
hand, facilitates a relatively open exchange between positions that are not bound by
time and space, resulting in a more tentative self-constmction. However, both exam-
ples have in common that exploration as well as demarcation are necessary to guide
the process of self-constmction.

In the literature on self and identity, it is by now a commonly accepted conclusion

that we have changed over the centuries in the way that we perceive, present, and
represent ourselves (e.g., Baumeister, 1987; Cote, 1996; Gergen, 1991; Giddens,
1991; Taylor, 1989). The historical relativity of self and identity is often bracketed
together with the claim that even such a deeply psychological domain as our own
personhood is strongly intertwined with the prevailing social practices and ideolo-
gies in contemporary society. The aforementioned authors explain the individual-
istic stance of today as a product of Western modernization, conceding that nowa-
days we live in a world where we are experiencing an unprecedented freedom to

Requests for reprints should be sent to Cor van Halen, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Department of
Psychology, Section Cultural and Personality Psychology, University of Nijmegen, The Netherlands.
E-mail:c.vanhalen@psych.kun.nl
choose our own course through life and where we are expected to do so on our own
terms. Taylor, followed by others, described this as a process of increased subjec-
tivism, with our own individuality becoming the measure for a meaningful life.
This is in marked contrast with, for instance, the medieval society where people
were assumed to see themselves as an inseparable part of the existing social and re-
ligious order. The erosion of the traditional value systems is for some authors even
reason to prophesize the demise of the unitary self with its conventional criteria of
personal coherence and stability and to herald the advent of a “protean self’
(Lifton, 1993) with its postmodern features of plurality, changeability, and expres-
siveness (cf. Featherstone & Burrows, 1995; Gergen, 1991; Turkle, 1997).
A concise description of the most important sociohistorical changes in self and
identity is given by Cote (1996). He starts from the observation that identity forma-
tion always involves a linkage between subjective aspects of self and the social
context in which the self is enacted. Structural changes in the social environment
usually incite corresponding shifts in the way people position themselves as indi-
viduals. Table 1 presents a simplified version of Cote’s historical framework, sup-
plemented with the identity criteria that are particularly valued in the different
stages of Western cultural history. As shown in the table, Cote distinguished be-
tween the premodem, the early modem, and the late-modem period. The transition
from premodem to early modem society took place roughly in the 18th to 19th
century under the influence of rapid industrialization and urbanization. The transi-
tion from early modem to late-modem society concerns the shift we are witnessing
today from a production-based to a consumer-based economy. Cote also distin-
guished between the personal and the social aspects of identity. The social identity
refers to the individual’s position in a social structure. The more private, subjective
part of identity is represented by the personal identity (i.e., how we shape and ex-
perience our own individuality).
Western history shows a shift in the social identity from an ascribed identity in
premodem times to a so-called “managed” identity in our late-modem times. In
the earlier ages, individuals inherited their social identity from the social status
conferred by tradition, church, and birth. In terms of personal identity, this meant a
heteronomous (as opposed to an autonomous) attitude (i.e., an uncritical adher-
ence to the social conventions). People were valued on their loyalty to existing
meaning structures (i.e., worldview, moral stance, communal practices, and tradi-

TABLE 1
Historical Patterns of Identity Construction

P rem odem E a r ly m o d e r n L a te m o d e m

Social identity Ascribed Achieved Managed

Personal identity Heteronomous Individuated Image oriented
Identity criteria Loyalty to tradition Personal unity Expressiveness and flexibility
tions). The shift from premodem to early modem times was one of increased in-
teriority. Social identity became something that had to be achieved by demonstrat-
ing a sufficient degree of self-actualization. On a more personal level, this meant a
more individuated identity based on a recognizable, integrated biography making
personal unity the measure of mental soundness. The market orientation of our
late-modern era requires a more strategic outlook on matters of personhood. It
turns the social identity into a commodity; something that has to be actively man-
aged, by “reflexively and strategically fitting oneself into a community of ‘strang-
ers’ by meeting their approval through the creation of the right impression” (Cote,
1996, p. 421). People start to mirror themselves in the strategic impression man-
agement that they see in today’s media. As a consequence, the inner criteria of per-
sonal unity are being replaced by the more transactional criteria of flexibility and
expressiveness.
A quick reading of the historical changes in Western personhood, however, car-
ries the danger of overstating the differences between past and contemporary
forms of self-construction at the expense of the commonalities. For instance, one
might ask whether cases of self-doubt or of a playful adoption of could-be identi-
ties were indeed absent in medieval times, as Baumeister (1987) seemed to sug-
gest. Similarly, one might ask whether the need for a certain personal coherence
and stability is indeed becoming obsolete, and whether this eventually leads to “the
erasure of individual self’ (Gergen, 1991, p. 49), as Gergen claimed in his presen-
tation of present-day multiphrenia.
Such an extreme interpretation of the nature of the self may be associated with
an insufficient differentiation between the implicit and the explicit aspects of self
and identity, between the “I” and “me” (James, 1890). Most people experience
themselves as an I (i.e., as a separate, more or less coherent, and autonomous
agent), and they address each other in this quality (Benson, 2001; Harre, 1998;
James, 1890; McAdams, 1997). It is a sense of self that we all have in common,
and it underlies all our actions; but that usually remains implicit (Lewis, 1991).
However, from time to time, people may find themselves in circumstances that re-
quire a more straightforward, explicit definition of the self. Such more outspoken
self-definitions are the products of active self-reflection and are often elaborated
through self-narration, discursive self-presentation, or social enactment. How this
is dealt with and how much personal investment is involved depends on the spe-
cific cultural and historical circumstances. It may take on a strongly individualistic
shape as often is the case in contemporary Western society, or take on the more col-
lectivist imprint of many non-Westem cultures (i.e., Markus, Mullally, &
Kitayama, 1997) and our own more tradition-oriented past (Giddens, 1991; Taylor,
1989). Hence, it is not so much the underlying psychology of self and identity that
has changed over the centuries, but the format of self-construction.
Regardless of its specific sociohistorical format, every self-construction and
identity formation may consist of cycles of intensified “selving” (McAdams,
 1997). Selving refers to the process through which we give shape to the feeling of
being an I (i.e., by apprehending our subjective experiences as an indication of
who we are). This peculiar interplay between I and me can best be regarded as a
double movement between expressing aspects of self in a meaningful way and ap-
propriating these objectified meanings as personally relevant (Josephs, 1998). Ex-
pressing aspects of self involves the coupling of personal experiences, feelings,
and considerations to recognizable scenarios or roles that can be exchanged with
others. This goes from I to me. Appropriating well-elaborated, meaningful scenar-
ios and roles as personally relevant is a matter of envisioning the person that one
could become; it goes from me to I. In short, selving implies a reciprocity between
exploration and demarcation.
The dynamic interplay between I and me lies at the heart of any self-construc-
tion. The precise relation between I and me, or the implicit and explicit aspects of
identity, however, can be rather fragmentary and uncertain. As Hermans (i.e.,
Hermans, 1996, 2001; Hermans & Kempen, 1993; Hermans, Kempen, & Van
Loon, 1992) repeatedly emphasized, the self, whether as I or me, is in fact distrib-
uted over many co-existing self-positions that belong to the person’s private and
social repertoire. The notion of the dialogical self expands on the Jamesian distinc-
tion between I and me by stressing the inherent multiplicity of the self. The self is
not so much a pre-existing, unified whole, but emerges from the dialogical ex-
change of relatively autonomous positions that in one way or another are of special
relevance to the individual. By juxtaposing these positions, moving between them,
and subsequently endowing them with their own voice, the individual is able to
make those positions more articulate; they become interacting characters “in a pro-
cess of question and answer, agreement and disagreement” (Hermans, 2002, p.
148).
Whether this dialogical process takes place within the confinement of one’s
imagination or in actual interaction with others, essential is its spatially distributed
nature (Hermans, this issue). When people think or speak about themselves, they
do so in anticipation of the fact that each utterance may evoke a reaction from a dif-
ferent position that puts the utterance in a different perspective. It makes the self a
decentralized phenomenon that refuses to respond to the Cartesian dichotomy be-
tween the inner self and the outside world (Hermans, 2001). As William James
(1890) already indicated, the self is actually an extended self that also occupies
others, material possessions, memories and future plans, actualized and potential
identities, imaginary voices and actual reactions of others, and so on. The central
problem of dialogical self-construction is to create order in this multitude or, fol-
lowing the spatial analogy of the dialogical self, to locate oneself in a universe of
possible readings. As Ciaran Benson (2001) put it, “Who I am is a function of
where I am” (p. 11).
The question of who and where I am is for many people reason to outline their
identity more clearly. As indicated by the theory of the dialogical self, this does not
happen in splendid isolation, but by conferring with real or imagined others; and it
is guided by the cultural standards of what counts as a worthwhile life and what is a
valid way of defining a fitting identity (Taylor, 1989). Culture operates in this
sense as a collective voice that organizes the meaning of the dialogical relations
(Hermans, 2001). However, given the fact that over the Western history the tradi-
tional canons of Christian faith have been superseded by more personal standards,
it becomes interesting to see how this loss of organizing power affects the spatial
characteristics of the self-dialogues.
To provide a more differentiated description of the historical changes in
self-construction, we analyze two examples that represent the extremes of Cote’s
(1996) historical schema. The first is Dante Alighieri’s (1319/2002) Divina
Commedia (Inferno) as a case of the heteronomous identity formation in
premodem times. The second is the usage of the Internet as a medium for
late-modem identity management by the visitors of theBoombap, a leading Web
site of the Dutch hip-hop scene (http://www.theboombap.n1//). In both examples,
the spatiodialogical nature of self-construction plays a decisive role. However, as
we see, the space that Dante creates in his mind is the closed, predefined space of
the classical narrative; whereas the cyberspace of theBoombap is more openly ne-
gotiated, using the new technologies of mediated interchange.

DANTE’S DIVINA COMMEDIA:

A CASE OF PREMODERN SELF-CONSTRUCTION

Dante’s (1319/2002) divina commedia is a poetic account of the author’s journey

through hell, purgatory, and heaven. It was written somewhere between 1307 and
1321 and it almost immediately earned a reputation amongst Dante’s contempo-
raries. Robin Kirkpatrick (1987) placed the Divina Commedia between the epics
of antiquity and the greatest novels of the modem era because it combines the qual-
ities of both:

Representing himself as the protagonist in the story he has to tell, Dante writes o f a
journey that is simultaneously inward and outward: inwardly, he sets himself to ex-
plore both the worst and best of which human beings are capable; outwardly, he aims
to investigate nothing less than the whole of the physical and spiritual universe, (p. 1)

Dante (1319/2002) is a forerunner of modernity in questioning his own identity

through introspection and a critical soul searching. At the same time, the Divina
Commedia is a period document in its extensive use of doctrines, metaphors, and
symbols that allude to a medieval Christian worldview with its closed and preor-
dained cosmology.
 Part 1 of the Divina Commedia— Inferno (Dante, 1319/2002)—begins with a
discomforting realization:

Midway through the journey of our life, I found myself in a dark wood, for I had
strayed from the straight pathway to this tangled ground, (p. 3)

In the middle of his life, Dante found himself in a desolate and impenetrable
forest, without actually remembering how he got there. He is lost and the easy way
out— a sunlit hilltop promising a clear view—is blocked by three savage animals:
the leopard, the lion, and the she-wolf. They symbolize Dante’s main character
flaws: lechery, pride, and greed. In Dante’s despair, the only thing left to do is to
confront the dark shadows around him that forebode the underworld. Guided by
the appearance of Vergilius, Dante starts to descend the abysses of hell; a journey
into the roots of human sin. Mirroring himself in the fate of the damned, Dante is
forced to recognize his own moral shortcomings. By subsequently climbing
Mount Purgatory, he has the opportunity to repent his past; and with a cleansed
soul he is granted a view at the heavenly spheres, after which he returns to the real-
ity of everyday life with renewed spiritual strength.
Modem readers will immediately recognize an identity crisis in the overture of
the first canto, or better, a midlife crisis where life has stagnated and the future
seems hopeless. It is a situation that Taylor (1989) described as

an acute form o f disorientation, which people often express in terms o f not knowing
who they are, but that can also be seen as a radical uncertainty of where they stand.
They lack a frame or horizon within which things can take on a stable significance,
within which some possibilities can be seen as good or meaningful, others as bad or
trivial. The meaning o f all these possibilities is unfixed, labile, or undetermined. This
is a painful and frightening experience, (pp. 27-28)

This certainly holds for Dante (1319/2002). His journey through hell, purgatory,
and paradise becomes no less than a form of systematic self-therapy to escape this
condition (St. James O’Connor, 1999; Taylor & Finley, 1997; Wertheim, 1999).
Dante (1319/2002) staged himself as the protagonist of the story, but simulta-
neously holds on to his role as a narrator by continuously commenting on the
events and the reactions of the protagonist. The Divina Commedia is written as an
ongoing dialogue. Throughout his journey, Dante is accompanied by the moral ex-
amples that he revered in real life: Vergilius, Statius, Beatrice, and Saint
Bemardus. They guide him on his way and also function as his more perfect alter
egos. He meets numerous characters from his own past, public figures in the Italian
society of that time, the great names from antiquity; in short, anyone who Dante re-
garded as being significant to his life. The number of dialogical positions in the
Divina Commedia is truly kaleidoscopic. It exemplifies the Bakhtinian notion of
inner thought as an exchange of utterances between imaginary positions that each
have their own voice (Hermans, 2001).
The voices are set in the hermetic cosmology with which Dante (1319/2002)
and his contemporaries were so intimate. Dante sketches a Ptolemeic world with
Earth and man at the center of the universe. Both created by God, Earth and man
are surrounded by the nine celestial spheres where the planets follow their set
trajectories and around which the firmament lies as the final decor. Beyond must
be God as the primum mobile, that is, the moving force that keeps everything
running. Within this Ptolemaic universe, Dante subsequently places a Christian
universe: high above us paradise, deep below hell, and in between Mount Purga-
tory. Paradise is the desired destination of all beings, as they want to return to
their creator. This fundamental desire is threatened by the evil that has come into
the world because of the fall of man and the revolt of the angels. This way, the
celestial and the human, the physical and the spiritual, the moral and the psycho-
logical, the personal and the divine, are all incarnations of one and the same
metaphysical design.
Dante (1319/2002) first enters hell to face its horrors. Here, the evildoers are
constantly reminded of their sinfulness, according to the principle of the
contrapasso, the ultimate reciprocity. Magicians and seers, who think they can
foresee fate, stumble around with their heads backwards, only able to look back.
Sexual sinners are swirling in restless, never-ceasing passion. The schismatics tear
their own bodies to shreds. The heretics, being sentenced to the stake, bum eter-
nally in their tombs. This way, the damned are put away at the place in hell that has
been assigned to them by the nature of their evil. The sexual sinners are sentenced
to the second circle of hell. According to Dante, the heretics are much stronger sin-
ners and therefore reside deeper in Hell, in the sixth circle. However, in the eyes of
Dante, the magicians and the schismatic even represent a bigger sin and are con-
demned to the eighth circle. In the deepest pits of hell, the traitors of benefactors
are found. Among them, the biggest traitor of all is seated—Lucifer, the archangel
who renounced God—chewing on Judas and the assassins of Julius Caesar. Taylor
and Finley (1997) characterized this spatial hierarchy of sins as one where, “the de-
scent is ordered in terms of increasing injury and unrelatedness to others” (p. 10).
In other words, it is a matter of loyalty.
The moral topology of hell (Dante, 1319/2002) is strongly flavored with the
author’s own rancor against those who destroyed his political career. As many of
his fellow townsmen in Florence, Dante took side in the conflict between the
Guelphs and the Ghibellines and, ironically enough, fell victim to the feuding
factions within his own party. In his absence, Dante was sentenced to death and
had to live in exile for the rest of his life. Quintessential to Dante’s reckoning
with his past, however, is his attempt to integrate his own frustration in the larger
theological framework of Christian salvation. The infidelity between people is
the profane version of the unbelievers’ lack of faith in the divine order
(Kirkpatrick, 1987).
With the manifestation of Lucifer, surrounded by the mortals who have for-
saken the loyalty of others, Dante (1319/2002) reached the touchstone of evil.
When he and Vergilius climb down the hairy legs of Lucifer, the whole perspective
suddenly inverts. Lucifer’s legs prove to be jutting out of the ground and, while de-
scending, Dante and Vergilius actually turn out to ascend from the darkness of hell
into the daylight of Mount Purgatory. The reversal that takes place between hell
and purgatory is not only Euclidian. It, above all, constitutes a spiritual and psy-
chological conversion. In 1274, at the Council of Lyon, purgatory was added to the
repertoire of salvation to offer man the possibility of repentance and purification
(Le Goff, 1981). Dante is the first who conceived it as equal to heaven and hell. The
turn from eternal punishment to purification is also symbolized by Mount Purga-
tory itself. The gradually mounting terraces of purgatory replace the ever-deepen-
ing circles and pouches of the infernal pit. The terraces are seven in number, repre-
senting the seven cardinal sins.
Even in the optimistic decorum of purgatory, people repent and suffer. They
walk in endless circles, again troubled by the same contrapasso as in hell. The eyes
of the envious, who could not bear to see others flourish, are stitched up with wire;
the greedy walk around with emaciated bodies and hollow sockets; and the proud
are burdened with heavy stones on their back. When Dante (1319/2002) talks with
one of them, he is also forced to stoop, symbolizing his own sinful pride. This way,
the seven cardinal sins have to be paid for, one by one and with painstaking punctu-
ality. Only then, grace is possible and the prospect of paradise and heaven is dawn-
ing.
Heaven goes beyond the imaginative powers of humans (Janssen, 1999). It can-
not be expressed in words, nor in pictures or music. Dante (1319/2002), however,
continues writing; and many illustrators of the Divina Commedia have tried to
translate his words in images. Botticelli, perhaps the greatest of all Dante illustra-
tors, comes closest to the borders of the attainable. Whereas his portrayals of hell
are full of details, heaven is drawn as an abstraction and we only see how Dante,
now accompanied by Beatrice, is floating up from sphere to sphere. When they
have reached the zenith of heaven, Botticelli limits himself to a minuscule draw-
ing, and the last page remains blank. Here, Dante finally experiences the mystical
unification that he sought with God.
With the Divina Commedia, Dante (1319/2002) created a whole universe in his
mind. The plurality of voices resembles the modernistic and even post-modernistic
kinds of self-construction that we are used to nowadays. The difference, however,
is that in Dante’s case this takes place in a carefully orchestrated space, where each
position has its preordained voice and place clearly marking out its moral function
in the story. The closed moral and topological arrangement of hell, purgatory, and
heaven transforms Dante’s self-construction in a journey with an ultimate destiny,
giving it a certain definitiveness that is absent in the more tentative identity negoti-
ations of today.

THEBOOMBAP:
A CASE OF LATE-MODERN SELF-CONSTRUCTION

Like Dante (1319/2002) in his Divina Commedia, the users of the Internet find in
the virtual communities of the cyberspace a similar extension of themselves where
they can freely explore and elaborate their identity. However, the crucial difference
is that Dante did this in the confinement of his own imagination and by applying
the rules of narrative composition. This makes the account of his journey through
hell, purgatory, and heaven an example of in vitro self-construction. Internet users,
on the other hand, immediately go into the public sphere and use the transmitted
reactions of real, albeit distant, others to mirror themselves. It is a newly emerged
form of mediated in vivo self-construction.
The Internet is one of the most, if not the most conspicuous technologies of so-
cial saturation (cf. Gergen, 1991). Electronic communication has enabled us to
sustain relationships with an ever-expanding range of other persons without hav-
ing to maintain face-to-face contact. According to Gergen, this mediated multipli-
cation of ourselves has led to an increasing population of the self with a wide vari-
ety of tentative part-identities to anticipate the fragmentation of our daily lives.
Post-modernist commentaries on the Internet (i.e., Rheingold, 1993; Stone, 1996;
Turkle, 1997) basically subscribe to Gergen’s diagnosis. Take, for instance,
Turkle’s claim that, “in real-time communities of cyberspace, we are dwellers on
the threshold between the real and the virtual, unsure of our footing, inventing our-
selves as we go along” (p. 10).
The cyberspace of the Internet has some procedural features that indeed suggest
such a transformation of our social behavior (McKenna & Bargh, 2000; Wynn &
Katz, 1997). First, the communication on the Internet is based on the digital trans-
mission of information through the computer terminal and the nodes and links of
the World Wide Web without the body playing a decisive role. It makes social ex-
change relatively anonymous. Users can easily hide themselves behind pseud-
onyms, nicknames, so-called avatars (emblematic images), and fake identities
without running the risk of being exposed (e.g., Talamo & Ligorio, 2001). Second,
because of the digital instantiation of the Internet, communication is hardly bound
by time and space. The Internet branches off in all directions on a global scale; rea-
son for the spatial analogy of “Web” or “net” (Wertheim, 1999). It is now possible
to connect to individuals of the same mind that one could not have found in any
other way. This way, the Internet houses numerous virtual communities that are de-
voted to a very specific interest or concern. They offer the surfers on the Internet
the possibility of a self-chosen niche in which they can explore a certain aspect of
their identity and test its feasibility before an audience that they can identify with
(McKenna & Bargh, 2000; Rheingold, 1993; Turkle, 1997).
All of the aforementioned characteristics make the Internet’s cyberspace a per-
fect playground for putting into practice certain part-identities that are not quickly
appreciated in real life. As Turkle (1997) put it, the Internet constitutes “a social
laboratory for experimenting with the constructions and reconstructions of self’
(p. 180). A student of ours, Sven Willemsen (2003), extensively studied this aspect
of the Internet by analyzing theBoombap, a freely accessible and very popular
Dutch hip-hop site. Like many Web sites, theBoombap has different functions for
its visitors. It acts as a newsgroup where the visitors find the latest news about the
hip-hop scene. It also houses a number of message boards. The boards act as the
virtual meeting place where the visitors can actively engage in online discussions
or perform on stage to improve their verbal proficiency, the raison d ’etre of every
self-respecting hip hopper. A part of the boards is reserved for theChittyChatChat,
the chatbox of theBoombap site. Willemsen followed the cascade of messages on
theChittyChatChat for a period of 2 weeks to get an impression of the ongoing con-
cerns within the Dutch hip-hop community. He also conducted 20 interviews with
active members of theBoombap community, asking them about the role of
theBoombap in their lives.
In the interviews, several reasons were mentioned to visit theBoombap and join
in theChittyChatChat. Of course, people wanted to keep posted about what is go-
ing on within the Dutch hip-hop scene, but they also appreciated
theChittyChatChat as a place to relax and engage with others who have similar in-
terests and a similar lifestyle:

Well, it relieves me of the daily stress, I suppose ... Some watch TV, I’m
chatting on theBoards or just checking. At work, I have to be serious and the
people I work with are much older than me ... They can’t bullshit anymore
. . . . And then I start looking there for the people that I can really hang out
with, you know .... (Thomas)

Important for the visitors is the certainty that you start off from a common
ground:

You know about each other that it’s OK with the roots. It’s something that
you don’t have to discuss constantly ... Hip-hop is a way of life and so it’s in
the middle of everything. (Herman)

Being in the company of like-minded people also has the advantage that they
are the kind of audience you want recognition from. It means that you matter in the
eyes of the proper persons:
 It’s cool to be at your job and to start a discussion about something and three
hours later just click it on and watch that it’s still going. It says something
about you, about people. It gives you some satisfaction ... Look, nobody is
coming there to zero replies, because then you’re just dissed. Look, because
when people ignore you, that says something, basically. (Hans)

To become accepted is not easy, because the veterans of theBoombap commu-

nity tend to act as gatekeepers. They are keen on exposing inexperienced visitors as
“newbies” or “wannabees.” Hans continued:

Look, I’m there basically to score points off people ... That’s my thing.
That’s hip-hop ... I come there to find the confirmation that I have more
knowledge than you. And if you come to tell me that the new CD of Nas is
dope, and I drop this to you straight away, that you should check out the new
Webfoolish record, and you don’t know it, that says enough! Then, for me
it’s clear. There’s always someone bigger . .. . (Hans)

This implies not only that the community functions as a self-regulating social
hierarchy, but also that the opposition between being a pretender or a genuine hip
hopper is the main dimension in preserving the social hygiene of the group. Being
sincere and not hiding behind a social facade is highly valued by the visitors of
theBoombap:

At a certain moment, it could happen that you read: “Ohh ... There’s Abdula
again with his sarcasm and criticism, and so on!” However, at a certain mo-
ment, I noticed that people started to appreciate that. That a lot of people
started to send me demos. Like: “Give me your opinion, because I know that,
coming from your mouth, it’s an honest one.” (Abdula)

Others, on the other hand, indicate that they appreciate the freedom of the
Internet to adopt another persona than the kind of person they are in real life:

People assume that the way in which people behave there [CvH/JJ:
theBoombap] is the same as in real life. However, I know about myself that
in ordinary life I’m much more silent. There, I’m stimulated to talk with oth-
ers that interest me. There, I have whole sheets of text. That people maybe
think: “Oh ... that’s how he is!,” but this person would be wrong then. It’s in
no way representative of how I present myself in life. It is part of me, but I
feel just freer there. The environment is less oppressive. (Herman)

This suggests a paradox between the significance of cyberspace as a play-

ground for self-construction and simultaneous need of the visitors to be taken seri-
ously. As a result, much of the mutual negotiations involve the delicate balance be-
tween the relative anonymity of the interlocutors, their sincerity, and the integrity
of the group.
This tension is also apparent in the exchange of e-mails on theChittyChatChat
site. The following excerpt involves what appears to be a rather severe transgression
of the social codes by one of the visitors. It all starts with an e-mail in which a certain
Dr Moriarty cast doubts on the reputation of theBoombap (in the tradition of the
Internet, the visitors of theBoombap generally use nicknames as pseudonyms):

From: Dr Moriarty / 02-20-02 /17:49

According to the visiting card that I got from an employee of
theBoombap, this site is: “Holland’s most respectable and consulted hip-hop
magazine.” If I were an employee of theBoombap, I would devaluate this
slogan as quickly as possible.

This immediately triggered a cascade of reactions, and the discussion quickly

degenerated in attempts from both sides to bring each other into disrepute:

From: K-Rock / 02-20-02 / 17:55

Moriarty, you just buy a Revu [CvH/JJ: A Dutch men’s magazine], dude,
and don’t bother the people here. Hasn’t the school of James accepted you,
or am I mistaken? Pffffff ...

From: Dr Moriarty / 02-20-02 / 17: 56

My dear K-rock, should I take advice from someone who has a hyphen in
his name?

From: Osco / 02-20-02 / 17:58

Better a hyphen than no period behind Dr, I always say ... Unless, of
course, it’s your first name.

The verbal dispute continues, but suddenly Dr Moriarty comes with a rather
enigmatic message:

From: Dr Moriarty / 02-20-02 / 18:39

You’ve just assassinated my character.

The whole discussion takes an abrupt turn when it suddenly appears that behind
the nickname of Dr Moriarty is actually hiding another person, namely Brasko,
one of the veterans of theBoombap community. Dr Moriarty, alias Brasko and ag-
gressive as ever, motivates his action as follows:
 From: Brasko / 02-20-02 / 18:59
Hahaha, think that I become angry. I dare to say that I’ve invented this, to
provoke absurd discussion on forums like this. Funny, how people start to
form groups to overpower the enemy. Bunch of sissies ... do you still dare to
give Brasko a big mouth?

The ensuing reactions show that the people who are involved in the discussion
feel betrayed by Brasko. In the e-mails, they reproach his attempts to discredit
theBoombap:

From: Riddle / 02-20-02 / 19:01

Well, if you talk about theBoombap, you’re talking about me; sure, I’m
going to react.

From: Stuck / 02-20-02 /19:16

Oh so you are playing undercover dickhead, gosh, how original.

The discussion gradually turns into a feud between Brasko and BoodeeBrown.
She just cannot stand that some people try to spoil the integrity of theBoombap
community, and she calls Brasko to account for his behavior.

From: BoodeeBrown / 02-20-02 / 19:17

... I find this really sad. What are you aiming at? Can you explain why
you are bitching all the time? Are you feeling too good for this world? If so
wtf are you still at the boards?

With this last remark of BoodeeBrown, we seem to be very distant from the
world in which Dante (1319/2002) lived. The reactions are direct and uncompro-
mising. This seems to suggest that the Internet affords an unprecedented freedom
to play with one’s own and each other’s identity. Nevertheless, the visitors of
theBoombap appear to be far more conservative than the post-modern qualities of
cyberspace seem to suggest. Many of the visitors feel personally involved, and crit-
icism is felt as a threat to the integrity of the community. This is especially the case
when the sincerity of the other interlocutors cannot be trusted.

DISCUSSION: A JUXTAPOSITION OF TIME AND SPACE

The process of Western modernization has changed our outlook on life as well as
on ourselves. The historical literature on self and identity describes an increased
individualization together with the erosion of clearly demarcated, firmly rooted
moral frameworks to guide the formation of identity (e.g., Baumeister, 1987; Cote,
 1996; Gergen, 1991; Giddens, 1991; Taylor, 1989). From a traditional, author-
ity-bound self-construction, we have moved toward a state of chronic identity ne-
gotiation and renegotiation. How are these changes to be understood? Were in-
stances of identity negotiation indeed absent in pre-modem times, and has our
late-modem identity become so virtual, flexible, and tentative that the whole no-
tion of personal unity and authenticity has fallen into disarray? The examples of
Dante’s (1319/2002) Divina Commedia and theBoombap suggest otherwise. Of
course, such isolated cases do not provide any conclusive evidence about the his-
torical prevalence of different formats of self-construction. Moreover, in compar-
ing both examples, one has to take into account their means of mediation. The
Divina Commedia is staged as a narrative, so that the positions and their successive
voices are, in fact, the product of Dante’s imagination. This is in marked contrast
with the Internet where the conversations are real and online, without a predictable
ending. Nevertheless, the Divina Commedia and theBoombap provide a setting for
self-construction that can be considered typical for the early and late-modem iden-
tity formation, as described by Cote.
The Divina Commedia (Dante, 1319/2002) and theBoombap community are
both characterized by the dialogical nature of the social exchanges and the spatial
distribution of the voices. As such, they are a perfect illustration of the fact that
selving (i.e., exploring and demarcating one’s identity) proceeds according to the
principles of the dialogical self: the embodiment of self through position taking,
and the enactment of a self from a position in close dialogue with the voices of real
or imagined others (cf. Hermans, 1996, 2001; Hermans & Kempen, 1993;
Hermans et al., 1992). This dialogical interplay of hypothetical or real positions
provides an excellent environment to act out part-identities; to test their viability;
and finally, to reject or embrace them in a new conception of oneself.
The organization of the exchanges, however, diverges. In accordance with Cote’s
(1996) outline of the historical changes in self-construction, Dante’s (1319/2002)
j oumey through the afterlife is premodem in the sense that his struggle to escape a ru-
ined life could only be solved by submitting to the doctrine of divine salvation. The
negotiations on the Internet, on the other hand, seem to possess all the features of a
late-modem identity management with its flexible and tentative adoption of chang-
ing imagoes. It replaces the classical ideal of self-mastery by the expressive individ-
ualism of contemporary life, as Charles Taylor (1989) would put it. This difference is
also reflected in the spatial distribution of the positions. In the case of the Divina
Commedia, the distribution follows the rigid composition of a closed narrative. This
is in contrast to the digital information technology of the Internet, which is essen-
tially nothing else then a platform for social exchange. The structuring of its content
is dependent on the people who use the Internet.
The Divina Commedia (Dante, 1319/2002) is the report of a journey, written
from the viewpoint of an omnipresent narrator who knows the destination of his
journey beforehand. As such, Dante’s story contains the typical elements of the
traditional narrative about personal development (cf. Bruner & Kalmar, 1998;
Gergen & Gergen, 1988; McAdams, 1997). In the center of the story stands the
protagonist who must navigate all kinds of obstacles to achieve his goal. Essential
in this configuration is the plot of the story; in Dante’s case, his final redemption.
The author must at least have a basic apprehension of the plot to determine which
episodes have been decisive in its coming about and how the episodes link together
into a plausible storyline. The plot is also the moment in the story when the author
and the protagonist have found one another and fuse into one person (Bruner,
1990; McAdams, 1997).
Because in the classical “master scenarios” (Bruner & Kalmar, 1998) of per-
sonal development the plot is so decisive for the narrative composition as a whole,
the spatial organization is subsidiary to its temporal configuration. The Divina
Commedia (Dante, 1319/2002), with its compelling succession of hell, purgatory,
and heaven, is a classic example of this. As we have already seen, all three spaces
follow the topological and spiritual layout of the Ptolemeic and Christian cosmol-
ogy. The nine ever-deepening circles of hell, the seven terraces of Mount Purga-
tory, and the nine celestial spheres constitute a kind of staircase toward final re-
demption and unification with God. Each of the numerous encounters in the
Divina Commedia is subservient to this end state.
Self-construction in the late-modern age of the Internet lacks such a spiritual
grounding, let alone the neat standards of narrative composition. The Internet has
created a cyberspace with an unlimited stock of virtual contexts to explore (e.g.,
Wertheim, 1999). It promises its users the freedom to express their own individual-
ity without being restricted too much by the constraints of daily life. As a conse-
quence, presence on the Internet has a high degree of tentativeness, resulting in an
open interplay of capricious positions. The positions are not the imaginary product
of the soul-searching individual, but are equipped with a voice by actual others.
This makes social exchange on the Internet more lifelike, yet also more unpredict-
able. As a result, late-modern self-construction on the Internet is less a matter of
making a journey than of surfing.
Virtual communities such as theBoombap survive on the Internet by virtue of
common interests and a continuous negotiation and renegotiation between the visi-
tors (Wynn & Katz, 1997). The course that those exchanges take depends on an on-
going play of action and reaction between the positions, without the certainty of a
final closure. The dynamics of spatial juxtaposition are more typical for the negoti-
ations than a temporal structuring. However, a minimum of social predictability
and convention is required to establish a mutual understanding. The same holds for
a shared confidence between the interlocutors in each other’s sincerity. This re-
striction of the postmodern attitude is necessary for a virtual community to func-
tion as a “safe haven” during identity surfing on the Internet.
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 Contributor Information
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