The Construction of Personal Identities Online

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Funded with £165,521 from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), this research, entitled ‘The Construction of Personal Identities Online’, will explore how people reinvent themselves in virtual environments.

Information and communication technologies are building a new habitat (infosphere) in which people spend an increasing amount of time and how individuals construct and maintain their personal identities online (PIOs) is a problem of growing and pressing importance. Today, PIOs can be created and developed, as an ongoing work-in-progress, to provide experiential enrichment, expand, improve or even help to repair relationships with others and with the world, or enable imaginative projections (the "being in someone else's shoes" experience), thus fostering tolerance.

However, PIOs can also be mis-constructed, stolen, "abused", or lead to psychologically or morally unhealthy lives, causing a loss of engagement with the actual world and real people. The construction of PIOs affects how individuals understand themselves and the groups, societies and cultures to which they belong, both online and offline. PIOs increasingly contribute to individuals' self-esteem, influence their life-styles, and affect their values, moral behaviours and ethical expectations. Virtual environments are therefore transforming the nature of personal identity.

“Who are you online?” is a question with enormous practical implications, and yet, crucially, individuals as well as groups seem to lack a clear, conceptual understanding of who they are in the infosphere and what it means to be an ethically responsible informational agent online. The AHRC project will fill this serious gap in our understanding. It will last two years.

The research will be partly descriptive, in order to analyse what a PIO consists in, and partly prescriptive, in order to establish what a PIO ought to be. It will also rely on a new and unconventional methodology, by replacing thought experiments with experiments in silico (simulations) in Second Life.

The first stage of the research (semesters 1 and 2), will critically compare and evaluate current philosophical approaches to personal identity (PI) by analysing how far they may be extended to explain not only PI but also PIO, and then assessing the merits and shortcomings of their answers to the new questions posed by PIO. The hypotheses to be tested are that classic approaches to PI can contribute to our philosophical understanding of the new phenomenon of the construction of PIO; that, however, none of them will turn out to be fully satisfactory by itself, when exported from offline to online environments; and that this shortcoming can help us both to refine our understanding of PI and to develop a new approach to PIO.

Following the results obtained in the first stage, during the second stage (semesters 3 and 4) the research will address the questions raised by PIO, in order to complement the already available approaches to PI. The hypotheses to be tested are that the construction of PIO provides evidence in favour of a dynamic, interactive and distributed (that is, socially- or network-dependent) interpretation of PI, as a relational rather than a substantive property; that this new, interactive approach will resemble the capacity approach but in a system- rather than a single, agent-oriented way; and that this approach can successfully compete with the others in explaining PI while overcoming their limits when it comes to PIO.

Research results will be disseminated through scientific articles, reports and workshops.

The AHRC requests that "Acknowledgement of support from the AHRC accompanied by the AHRC logo must be included in any publications, publicity or marketing material – including printed material such as books, exhibition guides, press releases or electronic communications such as a website. In the case of broadcast coverage (radio or television) of research that AHRC has funded, acknowledgement should also be given where possible." and that the following description should be made available: “Each year the AHRC provides funding from the Government to support research and postgraduate study in the arts and humanities, from archaeology and English literature to design and dance. Only applications of the highest quality and excellence are funded and the range of research supported by this investment of public funds not only provides social and cultural benefits but also contributes to the economic success of the UK. For further information on the AHRC, please see our website www.ahrc.ac.uk ”

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