CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION
2.6 C HILDREN AND I DENTITY
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more so, such as brothels, or to create an ideal but real space that is the opposite of life “as perfect, as well arranged as ours is messy.” He calls these spaces
“compensatory” and gives as examples the Puritan colonies of North America, and the Jesuit settlements of South America. In the example Foucault provides is that of the ship, “a floating piece of space, a place without a place that exists by itself, that is closed in on itself and at the same time is given over to the infinity of the sea”. (1986:
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2.6 Children and Identity
A key development task for children and youth involves relationship formation with others (Bowlby, 1969). From these social experiences, sense of self emerges and develops over time and individual needs are fulfilled, such as companionship and being part of a group (Baumeister & Leary, 1995; Harter, 1999).
One of the most important developmental challenges of adolescence, from the perspective of most developmental psychologists, is identity formulation, the cultivation of a conception of one’s values, abilities, and hopes for the future. In cultures where media are available, media can provide materials that adolescents use toward the construction of an identity (Swidler, 1986).
Valentine and Holloway (2002) have investigated how children use ICT and what part it plays in the construction of their identities. Using questionnaires, diaries, focus groups, semi-structured interviews and online interviews, they show how children reconstruct and reconfigure their social relationships and identities in online spaces. Their main conclusion is that ‘their virtual activities are not in practice,
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disconnected from their off line identities and relationships . . . on-line and off-line identities are not oppositional or unconnected but are mutually constituted’ (Valentine and Holloway, 2002:316). They identify a number of processes through which ICT activities and the children’s everyday lives are mutually constitutive. For example, online identities are contingent upon and/ or reproduce already present class and gender inequalities. Information gleaned through online activities is incorporated into their offline ones (for instance, by feeding into their hobbies and interests. It is also clear from this work that different children use the internet in different ways:
For some children it emerges as a tool to develop intimate on-line friendships, while for others it emerges as a tool of sociality that develops everyday off-line social networks; for some it emerges as an important tool for developing off-line hobbies, and for others as a casual tool for larking about.
(Valentine and Holloway, 2002: 316)
In the digital world, the performance of identity is divorced from a direct interaction with these cues from the physical, and instead relies upon the texts we create in the virtual worlds we inhabit. These texts are multiple layers through which we mediate the self and include the words we speak, the graphical images we adopt as avatars to represent us, and the codes and other linguistic variations on language we use to create a full digital presence. Lemke (1998) points out the complexity of identity as it is performed and lived through texts in cyberspace, with his words:
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The ultimate display medium is reality itself, what we see, hear, touch and fee;
what we manipulate and control; where we feel ourselves to be present and living . . . A fast enough computer can simulate reality well enough to fool a large part of our body’s evolved links with its environment. We can create virtual realities, and we can feel as if we are living in them. We can create virtual realities, and we can feel as if we are living in them. We can create of full presence . . . We can change by acts of will . . . we can be the sorcerers of our dreams and our nightmares. . . . What is literacy when the distinction between reading and living itself is nominal? When a reality becomes our multimedia text . . .?
(Lemke, 1988: 298-299)
Using ideas from Agger (2004), Butler (1999), and Grosz (2004) Thomas (2007) contend that identity is always about the body, and the bodily states and desires of being (the historical and natural aspects of the body), becoming (aging through the natural forces of temporality, more knowledgeable and wise as we learn and experience the world, and growing with the playing out and accomplishment of fantasies and ideals we aspire to, belonging (our set of beliefs and ideologies, and the people and groups we align ourselves with), and behaving (entering into the discourses associated with the roles we adopt across the social spheres which we inhabit). Stemming from this, identity is characterized by aspects of self, others and community.
Thomas (2007) stated that there are a number of interlinking characteristics to be considered about the performance of identity in online spaces:
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1. The ways in which we perform aspects of the body: gender, age, race, ethnicity, and the ways in which we select some aspects to perform and exaggerate, while others we silence or hide.
2. The ways in which we perform, disclose and reveal emotions: happiness, sadness, insecurity, loss, grief, humour, pleasure, delight: these too are aspects of the body.
3. The ways in which we demonstrate affiliation and relationships to others, marking our desire to align, develop kinship with another, and to belong in the sense of belonging to a friendship.
4. The ways in which we appropriate various cultures, symbols and texts to produce an intertextual self, one which performs and creates a sense of belongingness to certain communities, ethoses, politics and groups.
5. The ways in which we adopt certain storylines and discourses, in purely social contexts, and in imaginative role-playing and online gaming.
(Thomas, 2007: 8-9)
Lacan (1977) developed some of Freud’s notions about the relationship between the subject and signification as they pertained to children’s development of a sense of
‘self’. When children first come to the notion of ‘selfish’ and first understand themselves to be separate identities from ‘others’. Lacan claims they start to see the
‘image’ of themselves from outside of themselves, just as if they see themselves in a mirror. He calls this ‘mirror stage’, and believe, ‘… the mirror stage … manufactures for the subject, caught up in the lure of special identification, the succession of fantasies that extands from a fragmented body-image to a form of its totality’ (Lacan,
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1977: 4). During the mirror stage, the child identifies with its integrated ‘whole’
mirror-image. Through the process of socialization, the child views these discursive images of ‘who’ it is, and comes to recognize itself as ‘self’ through this ‘specular image’ (Lacan, 2000). The child misconstrues itself to be that specular image which is not itself, but a reflected specular image of self, something that is ‘other’ than itself.
This creates an alienated sense of ‘self’ which is based on fiction, fantasy and desire, a mis identification of self in which:
This jubilant assumption of his specular image by the child … would seem to exhibit in an exemplary situation … in which the I is precipitated in a primordial form, before it is objectified in the dialectic of the identification with the other, and before language restore to it, in the universal, its function as subject … this form situates the agency of the ego before its social determination, in a fictional direction.
(Lacan, 2000: 45)
Bruckman (1994a, 1994b, 1997), Landow (1998), and Jakobsson (1990) argue that children are embracing cybercultures, so much so that living, composing, co-creating, coding and reading and texts of cyberspace have become a significant pastime for a new generation. Computer culture has become a more widely desired recreational activity. As video gaming comes online and invites children to play games against unknown challengers across the world, child participation in online communities is growing at an explosive rate.
Cyberspace provides children a space to build up their identity or an identity that
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haven’t appeared in their everyday life. In this research, researcher is trying to find out how children experience this process, and how other people (friends) see this.
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Chapter 3: Methodology
Reading youth means interpreting youth behavior, hypothesizing youth values and worldviews, and analyzing the trends and transformations of youth cultures.
Reading youth writing means recognizing young people as social actors and cultural producers and as innovators of cultural change.
Reading youth means taking a long and critical look at what young people are saying, writing and producing, the mixture of so called youth voice.
In this research, to explore children’s blog usage, a qualitative study was taken from July 2009 to June 2010. Exploring everyday life of children; where they go, what they do, how, when and why they use blogs, and the relationship between blog and their privacy practices.
Three methods were used to gather data: participant observation, interviews and documentary data.