Digital Identities: Creating and Communicating the Online Self - Softcover

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Rob Cover is Head of the Media and Communication Discipline and Associate Professor in the School of Social Sciences at The University of Western Australia. He researches and publishes on issues of media and identity, including digital media theory, queer theory, youth sexuality and representation, cultural concepts of population and migration, as well as sports, masculinities and media scandal. He has published over fifty journal articles and book chapters since 2000, and his most recent books are Queer Youth Suicide, Culture and Identity: Unliveable Lives? (Ashgate, 2012) and Vulnerability and Exposure: Footballer Scandals, Masculine Identity and Ethics (UWAP Scholarly, 2015).

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Digital Identities explores the ways technology and online media have infiltrated our daily lives, and how they shape and affect who we are, both online and off. Critical studies over the past century have pointed to the multifaceted nature of identity, with a number of theories and approaches examining how everyday people have a sense of themselves, their behaviors, desires, and representations. This book investigates how these cultivated forms of identity have grown more complex with the increasing ubiquity of interactive, digital, and networked media and communication, and how our perception of the self and cultural markers have changed. It details how digital users fashion not just a single online self-representation, but how they create different personas depending upon the digital platform, with whom they are communicating, and how they wish to perceive themselves, as well as how they have the capacity to co-create common and group narratives of identity through interactivity and the proliferation of audio-visual user-generated online content.

We have moved from making use of online communication as separate from other aspects of life to one in which digital media infiltrates and networks with almost all aspects of our everyday lives. Traces of our online identity are everywhere―social networking pages, blogs, Twitter, and more, all of which actively contribute to elements of our identity. Our identities are always "on." Digital Identities helps make sense of the implications for subjectivity and selfhood in an era of constant connectivity.