From the Private to the Public: Online Identity

Abstract

will demonstrate later, this can have profoundly pos-itive and negative impacts on our offline identities. However, the need to establish reputation and credibility, not least for online shopping and other financial transactions in cyberspace, means that increasingly we are displaying stable online identities which are explicitly linked to our core identities. The decreasing importance of anonymity online is given concrete expression in the rise of Web 2.0 technologies, 4 most notably social networking. In this more visible online environment, our identities are grounded in our friends in the network. This leads to the very antithesis of anonymity, as many people become exhibitionist in an attempt to stand out from the rest of the crowd. Thus, more of what traditionally we would have regarded as private information about ourselves is vol-untarily pushed into the public domain, the implications of which is what this chapter is all about.