Identities and every day life in internet chat rooms

Abstract

Cyberspace, especially computer mediated communication, has had a huge impact on people's lives and the societies they live in. In recent years this impact has increased as more and more people are logging onto the internet. This increase in societal and individual impact, as well as usage, has caused a boom in social science research into cyberspace. These changes have caused researchers to rethink previously accepted notions about identity, place, space, globalisation, the body and community. Current cyberspatialliterature suggests that the internet, and in particular, computer mediated communication, is a new and exciting mode of communication, through which participants engage with other users across a multitude of nationalities and countries without limitation. The literature also suggests that the openness and unrestricted nature of cyberspace allows for interactions without traditional constraints such as location, age, sex, race, appearance and so on. Researchers suggest that online, people can be whoever they want to be; that identity becomes fluid and ever changing. However, much of this research lacks a strong empirical grounding to support these claims. This thesis aims to address these issues through new empirical work. Through observations of chat rooms and interviews with chat room users, this thesis questions concepts about cyberspace being a novel and exciting form of communication where identity is fluid and participants are free from the boundaries of location. The empirical research suggested that there is far more diversity than research shows in the way that people use chat rooms. Through focusing on the concepts of escape and routine the observations and interviews showed that chat rooms are far more embedded in everyday life than is currently portrayed. The empirical research also focused strongly on how people use chat rooms with regard to identity; challenging postmodern notions that identity online is about fluidity and change. Empirical research showed that participants use of chat rooms echoed the work of Goffman with regard to performances of identity whilst maintaining a central core self, rather than the work of the more postmodern researchers where there is no core self, only performances, and where identity is about fluidity and multiplicity.

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