Final Thoughts

Hello everybody!

Today is a sad day because today’s post is my final post – which means I’ll be concluding my final thoughts, as well as tying my data and findings back to my thesis.

In the beginning, I stated that my thesis would argue that the factor of anonomity for the citizens of Habbo Hotel allows for a realistic formation of identity – one that parallels the users real-life identity. In contrast, Twitter users construct an aspirational identity (alternatively referred to as “the best-self” or Goffman’s “front-stage”) in which they market to their social network, as well as the larger Twitter community.

Looking back at my thesis, I don’t think I was completely wrong, yet I don’t think I was completely right either.

I think time and time again, I was able to justify my thesis – especially through the participant observation stages. During my Twitter observation for example, I noted consistent trends of “Me-Tweets” where users would only Tweet positive things about themselves to their followers. This trend continued when I analyzed community Twitter accounts, where the notion of the ‘favourite’ or ‘re-tweet’ was used as a means of validation for the aspirational identity these users would create for themselves. Interviewee B also justified my thesis through the majority of her answers – e.g., purposely constructing Tweets to receive the ‘re-tweets’ and ‘favourites’, observing others who Tweet in a way that contrasts with their real-life identity, etc.

My thesis pertaining to Habbo was also justified, when I noted a Habbo user confiding to another user about their real-life identity due to the factors of anonymity, escapism, and reciprocity. Even during the Habbo interviews, the amount of users who stated the contrast between their online and offline identities was significant – especially when they themselves noted the reason for this was due to the factors of escapism and anonymity.

However, during the Twitter interview, interviewee A stated something that put my entire study into perspective.

“Something one must understand is that you cannot compare your profile or how you act on Twitter to how you act in real life; “life offline” is so broad and there are so many aspects to it so it’s impossible to try to compare life as a whole to Twitter…They’re just completely different scenarios [reality and ‘virtuality’] and cannot be compared to prove someone’s authenticity as a person.”

Although I agree that in the larger picture my thesis is justifiable in terms of how identity is constructed and functions between these two virtual communities, I do agree that identity is subjective to each individual user in both virtual communities. You can see that in both interviews, users approached the notion of identity in ways that contested my thesis. For some Twitter users, the platform is used as an extension of their real-life identity – an alternative or virtual setting to be themselves. Habbo functions similarly in the way that many users use it to be someone they’re not – e.g., joining mobs, role-playing as babies or animals, etc.

So to conclude, as stated by interviewee A, inevitably, it is difficult to portray your entire identity on a virtual platform – especially since the notion of identity is subjective to each individual user.

Interview #2: Habbo

This time around I thought I would do something a bit different. Instead of posting a formal transcript of my Habbo interview, I thought, “hey, maybe I should film the experience for my readers instead!” Which is exactly what I did.

Rather than conducting a structured interview, I asked Habbo users one open-ended question (which is actually my research question): How do you compare your real-life identity to your identity on Habbo?

And these were the results. Enjoy!

Interview #1: Twitter

So a couple of days have passed since I’ve last posted. Over the course of the weekend, I created an interview schedule (which is a guide interviewers use to conduct structured interviews) in order to find answers to my second research question: How do the citizens of Twitter compare their offline identity to their online identity?

My interview schedule consists of six questions relating to the second research question. For the interview, I decided to interview two people. This way, it is easier to compare and contrast the individual subjectivities that arise in relation to identity construction and identification in the online and offline worlds.

I will label each respondent as either A or B. Both answers for each question will be posted together, rather than separately. So let’s get started!

1. How would you describe yourself in real life?

A: I would describe myself as an; outgoing, funny, and easy to get along with type of person in real life.

B: I would say I’m a kind, humorous, and an outgoing person.

2. How would you describe yourself on Twitter?

A: On Twitter I believe I have the same characteristics as I do in real life, because my Twitter essentially just a medium in which I use to express my thoughts, beliefs, information etc.

B: Humorous and entertaining at times.

3. Do you think your profile is a mirroring representation of your offline identity?

A: I do believe it is, but something one must understand is that you cannot compare your profile or how you act on Twitter to how you act in real life; “life offline” is so broad and there are so many aspects to it so it’s impossible to try to compare life as a whole to Twitter. Essentially Twitter is emulating an open discussion in real life, in that case it would represent it perfectly (in my case), but in settings such as; someone walking down the street, or on a bus, you cannot expect them to exactly mirror the persona they have on Twitter, because a person is expected to act differently sitting on a bus opposed to a person speaking within an open discussion, where expression is encouraged. They’re just completely different scenarios and cannot be compared to prove someone’s authenticity as a person.

B: Back when I first started tweeting, I think a huge part of the entertainment value was getting an amazing amount of ‘retweets’ and ‘favourites.’ So in order to get the ‘retweets’ and the ‘favourites,’ you would have to tweet based on trends, or even tweet overly personal things (well you didn’t have to, but that in itself was almost like a trend). So I would, but eventually found it immature and strange. Looking back at it now, I wonder why I did that exactly, but now I have completely changed my Twitter personality to one that is more organic to my offline personality. This basically means that I tweet things that don’t get a lot of replies or ‘favourites’ etc. but it’s more true to my thoughts and feelings.

4. Have you ever noticed a difference between your friends’ personality in real life and their personality online? 

A: No. I just realize that my friends cannot act the way they do on Twitter in every setting, but in more casual or laid-back settings there are rarely any differences.

B: Yes. There are definitely tons of people who use Twitter to voice their opinions – especially people who do not normally voice these things in real life. People seem to also use it and show off a different version of themselves. By this I mean using words they normally would not use,in order to try to seem “cooler” by promoting ideas or values that do not correlate with their real life personalities.

5. What makes you want to delete a Tweet? 

A: Deleting a tweet for me is basically taking back what I said. The difference with social media and real life is that we have the opportunity to review what we say, evaluate it, change our opinions and take it back. So basically, if I say something that I do not believe in or regret saying, I would feel compelled to delete it.

B: If I tweet something in the moment out of anger or sadness etc. and I don’t feel the same way afterwards, I will most likely delete it.

6. What does a ‘Re-tweet’ or a ‘Favourite’ mean to you?

A: A favourite or retweet is very subjective, because it means different things for different people. Meaning, a girlfriend favouriting a tweet she is displeased with could be her letting you know that she saw the tweet; while some people may use it to flirt; others may genuinely love the tweet and favourite it. The same things apply to a retweet. Again, it’s very subjective and it heavily depends on who is doing the “favouriting” or “retweeting” and their experience/relationship with me. 

B: Depends on whom it is from or how many I get. In my earlier tweeting days, it meant that people agreed or liked what I said. The more ‘retweets’ or ‘favourites’ I got, the cooler I felt about my tweets. But now, if my tweet is ‘retweeted’ or ‘favourited,’ I take it as, “these people understand me.”

My next post will follow the same structure, but instead I’ll be interviewing users on Habbo!

Participant Observation #2: Habbo Hotel

Welcome to the virtual Habbo world! Habbo is a virtual hotel where users can create avatars to explore public and private rooms created by the community. Similar to yesterday’s post, my aim is to discover the different ways in which identity is constructed on Habbo through participant observation. I’ll be using the three themes (physical structure, social structure, and interpersonal relationships) as the framework for my analysis.

To begin, I created a Habbo account under the pseudonym MMEDIA3B03. Upon registration, I was prompted to create an avatar in order to enter the virtual world.

The avatar is a part of the physical structure of Habbo. It is used as a representation of one’s self within the virtual community. For some, the avatar is a projection of their own identity, while for others, it is an experiment to form a new identity.

As the new kid on the block, I had to find a way to integrate myself into the community. My avatar only served as a physical identity with no substance. In other words, I felt like a lost avatar within the larger community.

A sense of community is what gives these individual avatars an identity. The social structure of the hotel rooms allow users to create and enter rooms on the basis of their own personal interests. During the observation period, I entered rooms of various categories (e.g., adoption centres, hospitals, army bases, etc.) which served as a social space for the various sub-communities. These sub-communities is what gives individual identities a collective identity within the larger virtual community. Let’s use the army base as an example:

This is a hotel room referred to as the US Army Base. As we can see, all the members of this sub-community are donned in uniforms. If we compare and contrast my avatar on the bench, and the uniformed avatars sitting by the computers, we can easily identify the uniformed avatars with a specific community. My avatar however, is unidentifiable – indicating that the uniform is significant in marking a users identity.

Whereas uniforms are used as a method of identification within the larger Habbo community, ranking is a method of identity construction used by the sub-community to identify each other.

As we can see, this users biography consists of the title (USA) PFC (V). PFC stands for private first class of the US Army, and the V stands for the training this user has completed. The title in itself demonstrates the language of this collective identity. Only users who identify with this particular sub-community are able to translate and understand the significance of this ranking. The rank structure in itself defines the status and prestige of the individual user within the sub-community in which they belong.

This practice is known as role adoption or role playing within the social structure. Role adoption is a significant form of identity construction within the Habbo community. Throughout the duration of my observation, I had come across a variety of role adopted identities including babies, animals, army men, and nurses. The individual hotel rooms are constructed around these role adopted identities. For example, the hospital:

As we can see, these users have adopted the roles of nurses and patients. This scene mimics the real life structures and procedures of a real life hospital (i.e., consulting, health cards, and furniture). Other than creating an identifiable personality within a fairly anonymous environment, role playing is a means for users to create either an aspirational identity, or an identity in which users are unable to demonstrate offline.

The last thing I observed during my observations was interpersonal relationships. I noticed a significant contrast between how interpersonal relationships function on Twitter and Habbo. For one, reciprocity is a social expectation on Habbo. During my two hour observation period, I had been approached countless times, received an infinite amount of friend requests, and engaged in dialogue with numerous users. But what I found to be the most interesting was this users ability to confide in a fellow community member about his offline identity.

In my Twitter observation, I mentioned “Me-Tweets” that were almost always positive in nature. We can see however, that this user doesn’t need to only portray his aspirational best self. He is able to portray a truthful representation of his offline identity. Unlike the distorted interpersonal relationships that form between Twitter users, the interpersonal relationships between Habbo users mirror the relationships formed in real life (i.e., support structure). This is due to three main factors: reciprocity, anonymity and escapism.

The contrast between the construction of identity between these two virtual communities is significant. Whereas, Twitter encourages a one-dimensional representation of identity (the best self), Habbo is a virtual space which encourages a pluralist representation of identity. In other words, you can be who you want to be.

To conclude, these are the following ways in which identity is constructed within the virtual community of Habbo:

• Through the physical structure of the avatar
• Through the social structure of role adoption
• Through the interpersonal relationships afforded by reciprocity, anonymity, and escapism

For my next two posts, I will be moving away from participant observation, and onto my next methodology – interviewing. Through this particular methodology, I will aim to find answers to my second research question:

• How do the citizens of Twitter compare their real-life identity with their virtual identity? What about the citizens of Habbo Hotel?

Until then, enjoy the rest of your weekend!

Participant Observation #1: Twitter

Hello and welcome back! I have a lot to cover today, so let’s jump right in!

As a quick recap, the three themes I intend to explore are:

• Physical Structures
• Social Structures
• Interpersonal Relationships

So for the last 48 hours, I have spent a lot of my time on Twitter observing and analyzing just about everything there is to observe and analyze on Twitter. In order to explore how the three themes mentioned above are factors in the ways in which identity is constructed within virtual communities, I stalked and creeped observed and analyzed live tweets, individual profiles, and conversations.

Straight away, I observed that the physical and social structures of Twitter function simultaneously – especially in relation to the friendship model. The physical structure and social practice of “following” and “followers” allows Twitter users to subscribe to a users Tweets, which allows their updates to appear on your Twitter feed, and vice versa.

What I’ve noticed however, is that despite the amount of followers you have, or how actively you Tweet, reciprocity is not a technical requirement, nor a social expectation. In other words, it is not a part of the Twitter culture. The lack of interpersonal communication within the Twitter community transitions me to my next point, in which I consistently observed a pattern of what I like to refer to as “Me-Tweets” – a social structure.

What I mean by “Me-Tweets” or “I-Tweets” are Tweets that that refer to the self. Although Twitter is a community in its own right, the lack of interpersonal communication means that the focus of the social experience within the larger community becomes the self.

The physical structure of Twitter plays an important part in the construction of a user’s identity. The physical structure of Twitter “followers” is similar to Michel Foucault’s notion of the all-seeing Panopticon.

When all-eyes are on the self, identity is often self-consciously constructed. In particular, many of the “Me-Tweets” I observed were often (but not always) positive in nature. For example, let’s take a look at a particular profile I observed. I will refer to her as Profile 1. Profile 1 is a user with approximately 1200 followers (stating the amount of followers puts Foucault’s notion of the Panopticon into perspective). The majority of her “Me-Tweets” are most often positive in content, and pretentious in nature. For example:

It is also important to note that out of her 1400 photos, majority are taken in a way that are (subjectively) physically appealing, and regularly feature other individuals. With all 1200 pairs of eyes on Profile 1, the user is compelled to showcase her best-self – i.e., Goffman’s notion of the “front-stage” (in this case, front-stage means a fun, happy and social image), indicating that the panoptic physical structure of Twitter is subjected to a self-conciously constructed one-dimensional representation of identity, as well as a rather a carefully crafted representation of the self to others.

However, despite the socially structured “Me-Tweets,” and the physically structured Panopticon, Twitter still functions as a (virtual) community.

Throughout my observations, I came across a variety of sub-communities which have formed on the basis of shared interests. The ability to identify with a particular sub-community is a key factor in the construction of identity on Twitter. However, since the sub-communities still function in the ways mentioned above (i.e., generated “Me Tweets” that are self-consciously constructed due to the Panopticon), the “interpersonal” relationships that are often formed are inadvertently distorted.

Let’s use the community of “Black Twitter” to illustrate my observation. “Black Twitter” is a cultural community in which primarily black users focus on the issues of interest pertaining to the black community. For example, let’s take a look at a compilation of a user’s Tweets (I’ll be referring to him as Profile 2) who identifies with “Black Twitter”:

Since Profile 2 identifies with a particular sub-community, the content of his Tweets are self-consciously crafted for his target audience. In other words, his Tweets are tailored. From the outset, Profile 2’s identity is already constructed through his association with this particular virtual community. Yet the lack of reciprocity (none of his Tweets have generated a traditional response) questions the integrity of these “interpersonal” relationships. So how is the structure of interpersonal relationships able to function if reciprocity is neither a technical requirement, nor a social expectation? If you refer to the images posted above, you can see that Profile 2’s Tweets have generated a total of nine favourites from users’ who also identify with “Black Twitter.” “Favouriting” is a method used by the wider sub-community to validate the identity of the user. These distorted interpersonal relationships function on the basis of tailored Tweeting and validation from the wider sub-community.

“Often we lose our identity trying to please or placate others.”

– Mary Manin Morrissey

To conclude, these are the following ways in which identity is constructed within the virtual community of Twitter:

• Through the physical structure of the Panopticon (followers)
•  Through the social structure of  “Me-Tweets” and tailored Tweets
• Through the interpersonal relationships formed through validation from the sub-community

Tomorrow’s participant observation will be conducted on the exciting virtual community of Habbo Hotel!

ASL?

That’s Internet slang for age, sex, location – an abbreviation used to obtain information about a user. Also, a clever introduction on my part.

Hello, and welcome to my blog! For the next week or so, I plan to live my life in the online world of virtual communities. “Why?” you might ask? For the purpose of conducting a (cyber)ethnography of life online, of course!

So what is a virtual community, and why do I want to conduct a (cyber)ethnography of life online?

A ‘virtual community’ is a community of people sharing common interests, ideas, and feelings over the Internet (Oxford Dictionary). This is however, an inclusive yet misleading definition. It is inclusive in the fact that it is attributed to all types of communities in the online world, yet misleading in the ways in which it implies that all virtual communities function similarly. The different types of virtuality are indeed, real. Each type of virtual community functions as its own individual culture. For example, a citizen belonging to the Twitter community will differ in its character and quality from a citizen belonging to the Habbo Hotel community.

My intent for this (cyber)ethnography is to explore the construction of identity within two virtual communities that have contrasting cultures. The two contrasting virtual communities I have chosen for this study are the two mentioned above – the social media community of Twitter, and the MMO (an abbreviation for massively multiplayer online game) community of Habbo Hotel.

For the focus of this study, I intend to explore the following themes:

1. Physical Structures
2. Social Structures
3. Interpersonal Relationships

Which will allow me to answer the following research questions:

1. How does the notion of identity compare or contrast between these two virtual communities? E.g., the ways in which identity is constructed.
2. How do the citizens of Twitter compare their real-life identity with their virtual identity? What about the citizens of Habbo Hotel?

Finally, through exploration, and data analysis, I will be able to defend my thesis, in which I argue that the factor of anonomity for the citizens of Habbo Hotel allows for a realistic formation of identity – one that parallels the users real-life identity. In contrast, Twitter users construct an aspirational identity (alternatively referred to as “the best-self”) in which they market to their social network, as well as the larger Twitter community.

In terms of methodology, I will employ two (cyber)ethnographic methods – participant observation and interviewing. For the interview portion of this study, I will construct an interview schedule. Since I will be integrating myself into the virtual community of Habbo Hotel, I (or my avatar) will be known under the pseudonym of “MMEDIA3B03.” In regards to Twitter however, I will be using my own personal account. The duration of this process is approximately a week in length, in which I will spend roughly 1.5-2 hours a day either observing, or interviewing. My aim is to produce six blog posts by the end of this study. The blog posts will be extensive in length, and qualitative in its analysis.

So for my first task, I will simply observe my Twitter timeline, which will be followed by a thorough analysis in the next blog post. I will end this post with a quote. Just a little food for thought:

“It’s like everyone tells a story about themselves inside their own head. Always. All the time. That story makes you what you are. We build ourselves out of that story.”

– Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind