Homo Digitalis – in Search of a Patterned Usage Identity

Abstract

There is a great debate around the ways identity is shaped online, mainly as a result of understanding the online as networked individuals. The present papers tries to open the discussion on whether the quasi-synonym words constantly used to talk about the online communication cyber, virtual and digital define the same reality or whether they can be associated with particular aspects of the identity forged within the computer mediated communication. The search for the differentiating aspects is carried out against the backdrop of technological development which inevitably alters with every new aspect unveiled a new side of each individual's identity.Keywords: Identity, Cyber, Virtual, Digital, Historical Development1 IntroductionMore than four decades ago, Clifford Geertz [1] began the analysis of his The Interpretation of Cultures by referring to Susanne Langer's views on great ideas which, as she understood, appear all of a sudden to offer a solution to all the questions unanswered before or to shed a new light on those that had already been answered. Recontextualisation appears to be a sort of a key in reading the world as it has never been done before. But the overuse of such terminology and the suitable-in-all-fields feature it may hold for a time eventually backfires. Such great ideas alongside their great wordings wear out becoming nothing more than buzz words. Strictly speaking, as Geertz suggests, the great ideas only transiently suffice the multitude of fields they may comprise of on various degrees.On the other hand, before proving their worthlessness and passing into the oblivion of the scientific discourse, such concepts become the primary focus of epistemological debate under constant struggles to enlarge and to fine tune their meaning. Far and away, the greater the complexity of the era is, the bigger the number of concepts defining the way the scholars narrate about their surrounding realities. Today, such concepts are, among others, memory, trauma and identity emerging as intrinsic to all social sciences discourses and combining in various ways to become sufficient in depicting the constantly changing cultural realities. The large array of fields which incorporate in their texts such concepts on the other hand erode their capacity of deciphering realities and the constant scientific hype around them might eventually render those useless. A fortunate way of escaping from a conceptual uselessness lays within the use of determiners, functioning both to delineate the filed in which they are used and to grade various particular usages within a certain field.With an ever increasing pace of development and ubiquitous presence, the field of computer-mediated communication makes no exception. The scientific discourse constantly borrows from adjacent narratives of social science leading thus to a networked conceptual frame pretty much in the sense of the networked individual it seeks to analyse. This is, in fact, the purpose of this article: to try to define a type of identity stemming from the contemporary use of technology, the digital identity.2 IdentityIncorporated in the anthropological discourse of the 60s and 70s of the 20th century, the concept of identity migrated from one discipline to another and changed its meaning quite a few times [2], [3]. Of the multitude of definitions and perspectives the concept incorporated over the years, only those useful to this paper will be reviewed here.Generally speaking, the central meaning today, resulting from the binary opposition with otherness, could be narrowed down to an intricate exercise of self-identification with a group or the self-identification of a group, whereas such identification is, in fact, a constant cultural negotiation for achieving various degrees of sameness or, on the contrary, paradoxically, various degrees of difference. Identity is so seen as a process of constructing (rather than the construction itself) based on independent (or individualistic) and interdependent (or collectivistic) cultural construal's` [4]. …