Rory Ewins
University of Edinburgh, UK

Who are you? Identity and interchange in academic weblogs

People from all walks of life are using weblogs to create a presence for themselves on the Web and to participate in online debate. In recent years the format has been increasingly adopted by academics, both as a teaching tool and to disseminate and discuss their own research interests. Academics are increasingly turning to blogs to exchange ideas about their discipline, their wider field, the academy, and beyond. But doing so raises questions about personal and professional identity with implications for academic life beyond the blog.

Anyone who has written a blog over an extended period has confronted, consciously or unconsciously, questions of online identity: not simply about what it means to be labelled a 'blogger', but about what role one's track-record and accumulated posting history have in creating a sense of personal identity within different online communities. Academics, like others seeking to use blogs as part of their professional writing lives (for example, journalists), are faced with potential conflicts between the personal and professional aims of blogging; and, because of the public nature of weblogs, the self-reflection encouraged by the form, and the analytical frame of mind of many academics, serve as useful case-studies in exploring these potential conflicts.

In this paper I explore what it means to have an academic online identity, and compare different academic approaches to blogging and its potential pitfalls. The aim is to identify features specific to academic blogging, and to suggest strategies for using blogs as a complement to academic life; and to explore these emerging online identities in the light of works by Madan Sarup, Walter Truett Anderson, and other commentators on identity in the postmodern world, revisiting and in some cases challenging such perspectives. Sarup
(1996) explored identity's constructedness and heterogeneity, and Turkle (1996) described how people "mixed and matched" identities in the online environments of e-mail and MUDs; but weblogs, while they afford opportunities for identity construction and reconfiguration, also offer evidence that identity is not as easily reconfigured as some have suggested.

References

Walter Truett Anderson, The Future of the Self: Exploring the
Post-Identity Society (Tarcher/Putnam, 1998).

Madan Sarup, Identity, Culture and the Postmodern World (Edinburgh
University Press, 1996).

Sherry Turkle, Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the
Internet (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1996).