Digital me, digital you

Increasingly many of us are spending more of our time online, creating, repurposing and sharing content, searching and consuming content and communicating with others. All of these activities leave behind a trail, a digital footprint, a record of where we have been and what we have done. More significantly, in psychological terms, we are developing our personal digital presences, and modifying our digital profiles. These are some of the essential elements that constitute an individual's digital identity - who we are in a variety of contexts in digital environments - how we present ourselves and manage our impressions in our digital lives. A useful model that can be applied as a framework to aid our understanding of the interaction between individuals, tools and technologies, other people and the wider learning ecosystem, is the model developed by Engestrom and his colleagues (building on the work of Leont'ev, Rubinstein and other social constructivist theorists) which we now know as Activity Theory. My version of the model, which I have used to describe the essential elements and actions that help to build a digital identity are shown in the image above, overlaid against the original model.

I thought it useful to apply some statements by leading theorists to a few of the pathways/relationships within the model. For example, Marshall McLuhan made specific reference to the relationship between people and technology when he declared 'we shape our tools, and thereafter, our tools shape us.' The symbolic Interactionist theorist Charles Cooley saw the impact of community upon the behaviour of individuals when he wrote 'We see ourselves reflected in the eyes of others'. Clearly, digital identity is a complex proposition to talk about. The relationships between the elements in the Activity model are not as clear cut as the diagram might make us believe. The slideshow below, which was presented today at a research seminar at the University of Reading might shed some more light on the question of how we formulate, maintain and modify our digital identities, but there is much research still to do before we can better understand who we really are when we venture online.

Presentation of self in digital life from Steve Wheeler

Digital me, digital you by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.