Identity in the Cyberspace: The Social Construction of Identity Through On-Line Virtual Interactions

This paper refers to the recent theoretical advances on the dialogical construction of self, applied into a particular interactive educational 3D virtual world. The aim of this study is to analyze how identities are built and maintained in this type of not-immersive cyberspace, where the 3D interactive environment is completely generated by the computer, planned, and built by a community of learners and practice (Brown & Campione, 1990; Wenger, 1995). During the online connections, users are personified by an “Avatar” and through it they can walk, fly, look around the virtual world, build and manipulate the 3D objects, perform virtual actions, and chat with other users. The assignment given to the community is to construct an educational world, called “Euroland”. A selected sample of excerpts from the textual chats generated while visual interactions are taking place is analyzed, supported by related screen-photos, using the ethnographic method (Geertz, 1973; Duranti, 1992). The analysis shows how identities are built in such environment through social interaction and dialogical processes. It is concluded that cyber identities seem to be highly congruent to the development of the recent psychology that considers identities as multiple in their conceptualizations (Gergen, 1991; Glass, 1993), “voiced”, and “positioned” (Hermans, 1996). INTRODUCTION The particular cyberspace studied in this paper is an educational 3D, desktop, and Internet based virtual environment populated and built by students, teachers, and researcher. The virtual environment has been developed within a corss-national project (Italian and Dutch), founded by the European community, monitored by the University of Nijmegen (NL), and supported by the University of Rome (IT). Main goal of the project is to set up a community of learners and practice (Brown & Campione, 1990; Wenger, 1995) able to construct cultural 3D objects through mediated communication and active knowledge building. In order to achieve this goal, several communication tools were made available, both text and visual based, synchronous and asynchronous, all embedded into a virtual environment created with the Active Worlds (AW) (http://www.activeworlds.com) technology (Ligorio & Trimpe, in preparation). AW is a desktop 1 The word Avatar comes from the Indian culture and means “reincarnation”. The reference is in particular to a God called Visnu that was able to reincarnate him-self through several and different faces. In the Internet the word Avatar is used to describe the “object” representing the user and it can be a two or three-dimensional photo, design, picture or animation. 2 The Active Worlds Inc. developed this software and made available a special “universe” only for educational purposes, where citizenships are given only to the registered people in order to monitor the access to the worlds.