Cultural Identity Politics in the (Post-)Transitional Societies

Cultural Identity Politics in the (Post-)Transitional Societies
stream of online arguments. Others may use cyberspace as an opportunity to exercise their
positive characteristics, or to develop new ones in a process of “self-actualization”. Online
romances, even those involving a clearly recognized element of fantasy, can be growthpromoting.
In some cases people may express a negative trait in an attempt to work through
it. They are trying to transform the negative feature of their identity into a positive one, or
perhaps change their attitude about that feature. A gay person who learns to accept his or
her homosexuality as a result of participation in an online support group has changed the
valence from negative to positive.
Whether we view something about ourselves as positive or negative can become a
complex issue. Is it good or bad that a person tends to be quiet Sometimes we have mixed
feelings. We are ambivalent. The various environments and styles of communication on
the Internet serve as a flexible testing ground for exploring those intertwining pluses and
minuses. In back-channel e-mail, a fellow lurker in a listserv for professionals may help the
quiet person learn the value of being silent in some situations. In a chat room, that same
quiet person comes to realize the freedom and delight of spontaneously opening up, and
how that leads to friendships.
The virtual world is quite different from the in-person world. Digitizing people,
relationships and groups has stretched the boundaries of how and when humans
interact. Identity, in traditional concepts, is established in early years of life and remains
relatively stable. In post-modern approaches, it is considered as pluralistic, dynamic,
and floating. Each person would have multiple identities. According to the postmodernist,
identity would develop itself in the form of phases and consolidate itself
more and more in the course of time. Post-modern scholars such as Judith Butler see
the assumption of fixed identities as ideology and an expression of domination. They
argue that all groups and individuals construct their own identities, stress difference and
multiple identities identities that are free-floating, not connected to an essence - and
performances (which means that one can be anything and anyone that one wants to be
and communicates to be). Kenneth Gergen (2003: 56) argues that new communication
technologies (especially mobile phones) undo the “bounded and centered self ” and
that “identity becomes fluid, shifting in a chameleon-like way from one social context
to another” because “film, books, magazines, radio, television, and the Internet all
foster communication links outside one’s immediate social surrounds”. According to
Baym (1998), new ways of communication enable one to participate in ulterior systems
of belief and value, in dialogues with novel and creative outcomes, and in projects
that generate new interdependencies. New affective bonds are created outside one’s
immediate social surrounds. “We can be multiple people simultaneously, with no one of
these selves necessarily more valid than any other. These varied identities can have varied
degrees of relation to the embodied “self ” (Baym, 1998: 41).
I suspect that most people online share many characteristics of their offline identities
because they want to make contacts online that also work in the offline world, which
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