Life beyond the screen: embodiment and identity through the internet

This paper explores on-line and off-line identities and how relationship are formed and negotiated within internet environments that offer opportunities to meet people on-line and move into relationship off-line. To do this it draws on an analysis of users experiences of internet dating sites that are designed for those who wish meet others in the hope of forming an intimate relationship. Locating analyses in the context of the individualized sociability of late modernity, it is argued that virtual interactions may be shaped by and grounded in the social, bodily and cultural experiences of users. It is shown that disembodied anonymity that characterizes the internet acts as a foundation for the building of trust and establishing real world relationship rather than the construction of fantasy selves. The paper concludes with a discussion of the wider significance of this for understanding disembodied identities and interactions and the impact of cyberspace on off-line sociability.     

Chinese youth performing identities and navigating belonging online

This paper examines the experiences of belonging of young Chinese internet users through an analysis of their online identity practices. Drawing on a qualitative research project about online citizenship practices of 31 young Chinese citizens from mainland China, I explore their experiences of belonging on two online platforms (Weibo and WeChat) and the identities formed and sustained through these experiences. The results show that young people experience different senses of belonging in different social media spaces. Their strategies in navigating these experiences are informed by (a) their perceptions of online spaces as private or public, and (b) using online identity performance as a supplement to or escape from identities in physical life. I argue that young Chinese internet users experience different senses of belonging by flexibly appropriating the affordances of social media platforms for communication and networking; these senses of belonging play a key role in forming and sustaining their identities, and are crucial for their wellbeing.     

Sexual and gender identity work on social media

How do sexual and gender minorities use social media to express themselves and construct their identities? We discuss findings drawn from focus groups conducted with 17 sexual and gender minority social media users who shared their experiences of online harms. They include people with gay, lesbian, bisexual, trans, queer, asexual, non-binary, pansexual, poly, and kink (LGBTQ+) identities. We find that sexual and gender minorities face several challenges online, but that social media platforms provide important spaces for them to feel understood and accepted. We use Goffman's work to explore how sexual and gender minorities engage in ‘front region’ performances online as part of their identity work. We then turn to Hochschild's concepts of ‘feeling rules’ and ‘framing rules’ to argue that presentations of self, or front region performances, must include the role of feelings and how they are socially influenced to be understood.     

THE SOCIAL IMPACT OF BROADBAND HOUSEHOLD INTERNET ACCESS

Broadband changes everything. Or so we are told. But does it? There is only one way to find out - follow people who move from narrowband to broadband internet access and see what changes. This paper reports exactly this kind of analysis using data from a two wave European panel study (e-Living) and the lagged endogenous regression approach to see if switching to broadband increases the time spent online, the use of online communication services, the breadth of internet activities and the amount of online spend, and whether it decreases the time spent watching TV and the level of social leisure activities. The results suggest, in the main, that switching to broadband made little difference for this group of early broadband adopters who were already heavy internet users. There was no evidence of an online spend or social leisure substitution effect although there was evidence of a reduction in time spent watching television, and an increase in email in use, time spent online and breadth of internet use. In all cases however it was the previous levels of behaviour that were the most significant and switching to broadband was, in general, one of the least strong effects.     

Community without Propinquity Revisited: Communications Technology and the Transformation of the Urban Public Sphere

Recent discussions of the Internet have touted "virtual community" and a capacity to enhance citizen power in democracies. The present essay (a) calls for a more rigorous understanding of community; (b) suggests that relationships forged with the aid of electronic technology may do more to foster "categorical identities" than they do dense, multiplex, and systematic networks of relationships; and (c) argues that an emphasis on community needs to be complemented by more direct attention to the social bases of discursive publics that engage people across lines of basic difference in collective identities. Previous protest movements have shown that communications media have an ambiguous mix of effects. They do facilitate popular mobilization, but they also make it easy for relatively ephemeral protest activity to outstrip organizational roots. They also encourage governments to avoid concentrating their power in specific spatial locations and thus make revolution in some ways more difficult.     

VIRTUAL COMMUNITY CARE? SOCIAL POLICY AND THE EMERGENCE OF COMPUTER MEDIATED SOCIAL SUPPORT

This article argues that the emergence and growth of internet use in Britain has important implications for the analysis of social policy. It attempts to outline a research agenda for social policy in relation to one particular aspect of internet use, that of on-line self-help and social support - what we term here virtual-community care . The article presents data on patterns of home based internet use in Britain and outlines some contemporary debates in social policy about the importance of self-help and social support. It also considers how the internet is being used for self-help and social support with a particular emphasis on the emerging situation in Britain. Three illustrations of on-line self-help and social support are presented: two from newsgroups, which are part of the 'uk.people.* hierarchy': one concerned with disability and one with parenting issues; and one web based forum concerned with issues surrounding mortgage repossession. Drawing upon this illustrative material the article discusses some emergent issues for contemporary social policy discourse: the rise of self-help groups; the privileging of lay knowledge and experience over the 'expert' knowledge of health and welfare professionals; the nature of professional-client relationships; the quality and legitimacy of advice, information and support; dis/empowerment; and social exclusion.     

Reconfiguring Friendships: Social relationships and the Internet

Debate on the social role of the Internet has centred on whether its use will tend to isolate or connect individuals, undermining or reinforcing social ties. This study moves away from this focus on more or less connectivity to explore the degree to which people use the Internet to make new friends and, thereby, reconfigure their social networks. The analysis identifies those who create new ties through the Internet and investigates under what conditions these online ties migrate to face to face settings. The analysis is based on data from the 2005 Oxford Internet Survey (OxIS), a national probability sample survey of individuals aged 14 and over in Britain. The findings indicate that about 20 per cent of Internet users have met new friends online, and about half of these individuals go on to meet one or more of these virtual friends in person. Sociodemographic characteristics, such as being single, shape patterns of Internet use, and are related to the greater propensity of some individuals to make online social relationships. However, experience with the Internet and the ways people choose to use the Internet, such as for chatting or communicating more generally, are most directly associated with who makes new connections over the Internet and who does not. These findings suggest that the Internet plays an important role in reconfiguring the social networks of many users. Also, multivariate analyses indicate that the dynamics of online friendships are driven more by the idiosyncratic digital choices made by users of the Internet than by any mechanistic social or technological determinism.     

Queering Menstruation: Trans and Non-Binary Identity and Body Politics

Menstruation has been historically known as a function of the female body that affects women. Trans and non-binary people face this biological function as a potential social signal of gender/sex identity. This research involves virtual ethnographic content analysis of menstruation discourse written by or informed by trans and non-binary people in addition to 19 interviews with trans and non-binary participants. The research yields analysis within three gendered/sexed social spheres that trans and non-binary bodies contest: (1) the gendering of menstrual products; (2) men’s restrooms; and (3) health care. The findings depict the variety of strategies trans and non-binary people employ when navigating and interpreting menstruation in relationship to their gender/sex identities.     

Doing Disability: Disability Formations in the Search for Work*

Disability theorists have spent much time discussing how disability is defined. The theoretical roots for these debates reside in the medical, structural, and minority models of disability. The medical model views disability as equivalent to a functional impairment; the minority model sees a lack of equal rights as a primary impediment to social equality between able and disabled populations; and the structural model looks to environmental factors as the cause of disability. While debates over how to define disability are informative, there is currently an insufficient amount of empirical research looking at how people come to identify themselves as having a disability. Rather than focus on how disability is (or should be) defined, herein we look at how disability identities are constructed as people search for work. We show that people's interactions with employers and employment agencies have important influences on how disability identities are constructed. We borrow from the “doing gender” and “racial formations” paradigms to introduce an interactive approach to looking at how disability identities are constructed. We introduce the concept of disability formation to highlight how disability identities are continually negotiated through interactions with employment agencies and employers. Our findings are based on focus groups with 58 people who self‐identified as having a disability and were working or searching for work.     

Absent in theory,invisible in practice: Queering HBSE for a more inclusive social work profession

A sound theoretical foundation is a necessary element of social work education that prepares students to confront the challenges of practice with critical knowledge of the human experience. Queer theory is a strength-based framework for understanding sexual and gender identities that fall outside of the current social norms, and offers a highly relevant and useful pathway for the education of social work practitioners. Despite its utility for enhancing understanding and acceptance of gender and sexual minority (SGM) people, it is underutilized in social work compared with other disciplines. Additionally, this study reports on the gender and sexual identities of social work students and their endorsement of help-seeking behaviors related to issues of gender and sexual nonconformity. These empirical-based perspectives undergird the tenets of queer theory and support its application in research endeavors aimed at better understanding the human experience. A theoretical and empirical-based argument is made for the queering of HBSE to strengthen both explicit and implicit curricula in social work education. This study expands on the limited usage of queer theory within social work and directly challenges the normative and binary nature of sexual and gender identity evident within the professional literature and implications for education and research are offered.     

One cleans,the other doesn't

ABSTRACT

The title of this article conveys the idea which shapes it: that the positioning and identities of ‘the one’ and ‘the other’ are affected by the performance of different social practices. The highly symbolic activity of cleaning inverts the distribution of groups that would usually be divided according to the one/other dichotomy, in that gendered, class and racial others usually clean for their social ‘betters’. This redistribution allows for a look at the dynamics of social and psychic identification within an altered or inverted frame. In three different discursive locations — psychoanalytic theory, feminist film and theory, and advertising and popular culture — I examine diverse representations and implications of cleaning scenes. Each scene symptomatically collapses or merges sexual difference with other social distinctions conventionally marked by the labour involved in cleaning. As each of these discourses is concerned with articulations of identity, whether explicitly or critically (psychoanalytic theory and feminism) or implicitly (advertising and popular culture), these scenes reveal crucial links between social and symbolic practices and the vicissitudes of gender identity. In effect, gender emerges as a cleaning strategy, a representational system that masks or obfuscates the significance of other social differences.     

From Work as Sex to Sex as Work: Networks, ‘Others’ and Occupations in the Analysis of Work

While once upon a time the social science of work and organization neglected or marginalized gender and sexuality, we have now lost sight of what people actually do, that is to say the activity of work. Gender and sexuality have been identified as crucial to organizational dynamics and, notwithstanding different theoretical emphases, this paradigm has become increasingly influential. We argue (contrary to most of its protagonists) that — within this model — the significance of sex and gender for organization rests principally on their role in the production of identities rather than in what they can tell us about production or work in any wider sense. The article highlights parallels with the ways in which prostitution is now generally understood, whether the emphasis is on subordination or agency. This literature also emphasizes gender relations and identities, even where the focus is on re–writing ‘sex as work’. We argue that this focus neglects the wider networks in which all work, whether mainstream or otherwise, is embedded and that a full analysis must take due account of both these networks and the discursive production of identities. Examples — of work in the finance and sex industries — are used to substantiate this argument and a case is made for the importance of the Chicago School’s analysis of occupations.     

Being Authentically American Indian: Symbolic Identity Construction and Social Structure among Urban New Indians

This study investigates the individual and group level reconstruction of a racial‐ethnic identity. Specifically, we investigate the experience of “new Indians,” or people who did not previously identify as American Indian, but are now reclaiming this racial‐ethnic heritage. Because many new Indians lack both official (tribal and/or federal) recognition of their Indian status and the phenotypic traits associated with Indians in popular culture, their authenticity as American Indians is often questioned in interactions with others. We document how new Indians work to reconstruct the symbolic meaning of authentic Indianness by emphasizing specific values and actions rather than biological lineage. Moreover, we demonstrate how new Indians achieve interactional validation of their redefined Indian identities in the context of a proximate social structure.     

THE USE OF THE INTERNET AMONG ACADEMIC GAY COMMUNITIESIN TAIWAN : AN EXPLORATORY STUDY

The rise of the internet has tremendous impacts on homosexual communities in Taiwan. The internet has created a medium where homosexual people can form virtual communities to seek for emotional support without fearing the disclosure of their sexual preferences and causing unwanted negative consequences. The internet has become a medium where homosexual communities can share information with each other and voice their concerns to the public. Thus, the internet may become what Ithiel de Sola Pool (1984) called 'the technology of freedom' for homosexual communities. The purposes of this paper are set to discuss whether academic homosexual individuals perceive the internet to be more fair and impartial in terms of news reporting than traditional mass media and to investigate why they use the internet. This paper employs a questionnaire survey method to collect data for the questions. The quantitative analysis of survey data (N=701), from a self-completed questionnaire using modified snowball sampling of gays and lesbians from Taiwan. Principal component analysis with varimax rotation led to seven factors that account for 66.31% of the variance. These factors are social interaction and information, entertainment and relaxation, personal revelation, preference, privacy and escapism, pass time and, novelty-seeking. Correlation analyses also suggested that respondents' demographics, internet usage frequency and, time are associated with their use motivation. As an exploratory study of an academic homosexual population and their internet use behaviour in Taiwan, this study raised more questions than it intended to answer. The use of individual media by this group needs further study.     

Do Workplace Gender Transitions Make Gender Trouble?

This article examines what happens when an employee makes the transition from one recognized gender category to another and remains in the same job. Drawing on in‐depth interviews with transmen and transwomen in Texas and California, we illustrate how a new social gender identity is interactionally achieved in these open workplace transitions. While transgender people often are represented as purposefully adopting hyper‐feminine or masculine gender identities post‐transition, we find that our respondents strive to craft alternative femininities and masculinities. However, regardless of their personal gender ideologies, their men and women co‐workers often enlist their transitioning colleague into gender rituals designed to repatriate them into a rigid gender binary. This enlistment limits the political possibilities of making gender trouble in the workplace, as transgender people have little leeway for resistance if they wish to maintain job security and friendly workplace relationships.     

Queer youth,intoxication and queer drinking spaces

Research on intoxicating substances and gender has developed considerably in the last 30 years, especially in the social sciences as feminist scholars highlighted the contradictory discourses about young women’s intoxication. Nevertheless, there still remain significant gaps if we are to fully understand the role and meaning of intoxication for all young people and not merely for heterosexual, cisgender young people. As a way of exploring the possible limitations of this legacy, we will examine the qualitative data from 52 in-depth interviews with self-identified LGBTQ young people. Our analysis explores the relationships between meanings of intoxication and sexual and gender identities, drinking spaces, and the extent to which notions of masculinity and femininity influence alcohol consumption and drinking practices among LGBTQ youth. As gender expressions among young people, especially those who identify as LGBTQ, become increasingly nuanced and fluid, understanding the role of social and cultural practices of alcohol consumption in the performance of sexual and gender identities may increase our understanding of the ways in which sexuality and gender influence alcohol consumption.     

SOFTWARE DEFAULTS AS DE FACTO REGULATION The case of the wireless internet

Today's internet presumes that individuals are capable of configuring software to address issues such as spam, security, indecent content, and privacy. This assumption is worrying - common sense and empirical evidence state that not everyone is so interested or so skilled. When regulatory decisions are left to individuals, for the unskilled the default settings are the law. This article relies on evidence from the deployment of wireless routers and finds that defaults act as de facto regulation for the poor and poorly educated. This paper presents a large sample behavioral study of how people modify their 802.11 ('Wi-Fi') wireless access points from two distinct sources. The first is a secondary analysis of WifiMaps.com, one of the largest online databases of wireless router information. The second is an original wireless survey of portions of three census tracts in Chicago, selected as a diversity sample for contrast in education and income. By constructing lists of known default settings for specific brands and models, we were then able to identify how people changed their default settings. Our results show that the default settings for wireless access points are powerful. Media reports and instruction manuals have increasingly urged users to change defaults - especially passwords, network names, and encryption settings. Despite this, only half of all users change any defaults at all on the most popular brand of router. Moreover, we find that when a manufacturer sets a default 96-99 percent of users follow the suggested behavior, while only 28-57 percent of users acted to change these same default settings when exhorted to do so by expert sources. Finally, there is also a suggestion that those living in areas with lower incomes and levels of education are less likely to change defaults, although these data are not conclusive. These results show how the authority of software trumps that of advice. Consequently, policy-makers must acknowledge and address the power of software to act as de facto regulation.