Using photo-diary interviews to study cyborgian identity performance in virtual worlds

Abstract

People's identities (i.e., who they are) are increasingly performed in both physical and digital spaces. Individuals become cyborgs as they extend their presence and bodily senses through digital bodies (e.g., social media profiles, blog posts and avatars). To gain insight into how people make sense of who they are in the face of their digital extensions, a photo-diary method is advanced in this paper. Using a single photo-diary entry and its associated interview, this short paper illustrated empirically the material and discursive practices a user of the virtual world, Second Life, enacted to dynamically draw boundaries to construct her and her avatar's identities. © 2012 IFIP International Federation for Information Processing.