Cultural Identity Politics in the (Post-)Transitional Societies

How modern technology shape-shifts our identity
Vladimir Davčev
Abstract
This article addresses some aspects of virtual reality as part of our social reality. For most
people, the Internet is more of a medium than a technology. Moreover, it is a shapeshifting,
borderless medium firmly in the hands of ordinary citizens bent on turning it
to extraordinary ends. The anonymity of cyberspace enables an endless space of possible
identities that humans can construct in online communication. Online characters are
an expression of real-world experiences, desires, fantasies and ideas; they are connected
to the offline world. If we know the endowment of an individual with different types of
capital, we cannot deduce his or her online identities. Thus, cyberspace offers a niche
for each of these specific facets of selfhood. Some people even talk about how we can
“deconstruct” ourselves online. In cyberspace, the correlation between the choice of
the name (or the picture that represents us) and our identity is not completely free
from everyday cultural and political norms as the net utopians had imagined it to be.
I give a several examples of how this was done through social networks in so-called
“Macedonian cyberspace”.
Keywords: social network, cyberspace, identity, Macedonian blog community,
Macedonian cyberspace
In modern civilization man is posited as the subject of knowledge in science and
technology, animating the utopian projects of industrial civilization, and culminating
in great urban conglomerates, as in the sealed universe of commodities which
constitutes the omnipresent mall. Technology, “defined as the system of tools and
techniques by means of which people relate to environment and secure their survival
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