spaghetti, Poster

Poster compiles several quotes from different articles in an attempt to illustrate his point that technology, more specifically the Internet, has had a huge impact on culture as a whole. He further examines this cultural revolution in terms of the identity of the individual. When referring to "virtual reality," poster states, "By directly tinkering with reality, a simulational practice is set in place which alters forever the conditions under which the identity of the self is formed" (539). Here, Poster recognizes that because the environment in which individuals form their self identity has been altered as a result of the Internet and technology, those identities are different than they would be without the context.
Self identity is now defined when "...We reduce and encode our identities as words on a screen, [and] decode and unpack the identities of others" (542). This particular quote made me think of a concept from one of the communications courses I am taking this semester. We learned one does not "own" one's identity. Our identity is defined by how other perceive us. The only control an individual has in defining his or her self to the rest of the world is in the choices he or she makes. For example, we say something about ourselves and/or we want others to perceive us in the way we dress, what we choose to say, what we choose to reveal about ourselves, and in what situations. So in relation to this quote, we choose how we want to convey our self identity to others in the sense that we choose how to present ourselves on the internet. Our real identities, however, are defined by how others unpack what we choose to share.
Poster also examines the dynamics of communication in this new virtual community. He pulls a quote which references that with the Internet, the communication is now between the many and the many. I began thinking about a video I watched in my IT class, "Using the Web for Research." the video was on an anthropological perspective of Youtube. In the video, the narrator, a college professor, observes the way in which people speak when broadcasting themselves on youtube. He found that people would always address their audience saying, "hello youtube!" This is an example of the notion of communicating with the many. Here, users are addressing no one person in particular. There are merely addressing the masses. The broadcaster is constructing a self identity he or she wishes to relay to the rest of the Internet community.
I think, that this is an example of the shift in our culture from multiplicity to individualism. The emphasis is on the self. People are more concerned with the way they construct their self identity than others. So it could be argued that while the individual does not own his or her identity, he or she can construct it and manipulate it more in the Internet community than in traditional communities.