Hi Maha — I found this post just now, thanks to @edifiedlistener (thanks Sherri). It’s particularly lovely to read after our meeting at #altc a couple of weeks ago. As you say above, the real and the virtual simply interweave. Our meeting (joyful as it was!) was not fundamentally different to or “other than” our many online interactions. It was *as* complex, and contextual, and simply another strand to our relationship.

Perhaps like you both, I also feel it’s very important that we have these discussions about digital and networked identities with our students, so that they too can reflect on what it means “to be” – online, offline, in the world. In higher education we typically help students do this with respect to disciplinary knowledge & practice, e.g. learning to be a software engineer, learning to be a historian, etc., but that is no longer enough.

One source which I’ve drawn from in my own research, and shared with students, is the Foresight “Future Identities” report (2013). It a wonderfully succinct summary of some of these issues, great for prompting discussion:

“In the early years of widespread internet usage, there were concerns that the internet diminished ‘real’ identity, and prevented face-to-face human socialisation, with online identities being seen as very different from those in the offline ‘real’ world… As people have become accustomed to switching seamlessly between the internet and the physical world, they have begun to use social media to pursue friendships, continue conversations, and make arrangements in a way which dissolves the divide between online and offline…”

And the final sentence is a great summary:

“The internet does not produce a new kind of identity, but has instead been instrumental in raising awareness that identities were more multiple, culturally contingent and contextual than had previously been fully appreciated.”

Thanks Maha 🙂