LEGACY COLLEGE OF COMPOSTELA

(Formerly: Philippine Institute of Medical Science and Technology)

Dagohoy St. Poblacion, Compostela, Davao De Oro
Telephone No: (084) 400-9392 / Email Address: Legacycomp@yahoo.com

SECOND MODULE

Name : _______________________________ Score : _________

Course/Major : BSCRIM 1 G Year/Sec. : _________
Course Code : GE 101
Course Title : UNDERSTANDING THE SELF

Lesson 4: Who Am I in the Cyberworld? (Digital Self)

General Introduction
Knowing thyself is the fundamental factor to be known as a living creation on earth. Every individual has to
navigate from within thyself to master and improve by its nature as a person. In this course, we are challenged to be
motivated upon understanding oneself. Brace yourself and enjoy the course.

Lesson 5: WHO AM I IN THE CYBERWORLD? (DIGITAL SELF)

Introduction
These days, more people are becoming active in using the Internet for research, pleasure, business,
communication, and other purposes. Indeed, the Internet is of great help for everyone. On the other hand, people
assume different identities while in the cyberspace. People act differently when they are online and offline. We have
our real identity and online identity.

Learning Outcomes

At the end of this lesson, you should be able to:

1. define online identity;

2. compare real identity versus online identity;
3. describe the influence of Internet on sexuality and gender; and
4. discuss the proper way of demonstrating values and attitudes online.

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 ACTIVITY:

Three Facts, One Fiction

Construct four sentences that should start with "I am. Three of the four sentences should be true about yourself. You
can talk about your characteristics, strengths, weaknesses, accomplishments, personalities, and behavior. One
statement should be a lie—something that you just made up about yourself. Make the activity more fun by making
your classmates believe that the statement is true.

1. I am ________________________________________________________________________.

2. I am ________________________________________________________________________.

3. I am ________________________________________________________________________.

4. I am ________________________________________________________________________.

ANALYSIS: (20 possible points)

What have you learned from the activity? Why?

Applying the same activity in the virtual world or cyberworld, how do people portray themselves online? What are
the things that you would want to post/share online? What are the things you want others to share online?

ABSTRACTION:

Material Self

The number of people who are becoming more active online continues to increase worldwide. More than half of the
population worldwide now uses the Internet. It has only been 25 years since Tim Berners-Lee made the World Wide
Web available to the public, but in that time, the Internet has already become an integral part of everyday life for most
of the world's population. The Philippines is among one of the countries with the most active Internet users (We are
Social and Hootsuite n.d.).
 Almost two-thirds of the world's population now has a mobile phone.
 More than half of the world's web traffic now comes from mobile phones.
 More than half of all mobile connections around the world are now "broadband."
 More than one in five of the world's population shopped online in the past 30 days.

Media users in the Philippines grew by 12 million or 25% while the number of mobile social users increased by 13
million or 32%. Those growth figures are still higher compared to the previous year. More than half the world now
uses a smartphone.

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 GLOBAL SNAPSHOT
KEY STATISTICAL INDICATORS FOR THE WORLD’S INTERNET, MOBILE, AND SOCIAL MEDIA USERS

Figure 1. Growth of world digital users in 2016 compared to 2015.

Based on Figure 1, the number of digital users worldwide increases. More people are becoming interested and
devoted in using the Internet for various activities. In the Philippines, adolescents are among the most avid users of the
Internet.

Figure 2. Percentage of mobile internet users from different age groups in the Philippines.

Online identity is actually the sum of all our characteristics and our interactions while partial identity is a subset of
characteristics that make up our identity. Meanwhile, persona is the Partial identity we create that represents ourselves
in a specific situation.

Selective Self-Presentation and Impression Management

According to Goffman (1959) and Leary (1995), self-presentation is the

"process of controlling how one is perceived by other people" and is the key to relationship inception and
development. To construct positive images, individuals selectively provide information about them and carefully cater
this information in response to other's feedback.

Anything posted online should be considered "public" no matter what our "privacy" settings are. Let us say, a

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 student wrote online about how much he hated another student in school, and started bullying him online. Does it
matter if the student said, "Well, this is my personal account"? Even if the student wrote it in a "private" account, it can
become public with a quick screen capture and shared with the world. Personal identity is the interpersonal level of self
which differentiates the individual as unique from others, while social identity is the level of self whereby the
individual is identified by his or her group memberships.

Belk (2013) explained that sharing ourselves is no longer new and has been practiced as soon as human beings were
formed. Digital devices help us share information broadly, more than ever before. For those who are avid users of
Facebook, it is possible that their social media friends are more updated about their daily activities, connections, and
thoughts than their immediate families. Diaries that were once private or shared only with close friends are now posted
as blogs which can be viewed by anyone. In websites like Flickr or Photobucket, the use of arm's-length self-
photography indicates a major change. In older family albums, the photographer was not often represented in the
album (Mendelson and Papacharissi 2011), whereas with arm's-length photos, they are necessarily included (e.g.,
selfies and groupies). In addition, the family album of an earlier era has become more of an individual photo gallery in
the digital age. As Schwarz (2010) mentioned, we have entered an extraordinary era of self-portraiture. Blogs and web
pages have been continuously used for greater self-reflection and self-presentation. Facebook and other social media
applications are now a key part of self-presentation for one sixth of humanity. As a result, researchers and Participants
become concerned with actively managing identity and reputation and to warn against the phenomenon of
"oversharing" (Labrecque, Markos, and Milne 201 1; Shepherd 2005; Suler 2002; Zimmer and Hoffman 2011
Sometimes people become unaware of the extent of information they share online. They forget to delineate what can
be shared online and what should not. Furthermore, it provides a more complete narration of self and gives people an
idealized view of how they -would like to be remembered by others (van Dijck 2008). Many teenagers, as well as some
adults, share even more intimate details with their partners like their passwords (Gershon 2010). This could be an
ultimate act of intimacy and trust or the ultimate expression of paranoia and distrust with the partner.

Because of the conversion of private diaries into public revelations of inner secrets, the lack of privacy in many
aspects of social media make the users more vulnerable, leading to compulsively checking newsfeeds and continually
adding tweets and postings in order to appear active and interesting. This condition has been called "fear of missing
out." People would like to remain updated and they keep on sharing themselves online because it adds a sense of
confidence at their end especially if others like and share their posts. One of the reasons for so much sharing and self-
disclosure online is the so-called "disinhibition effect" (Ridley 2012; Suler 2004). The lack of face-to-face gaze-
meeting, together with feelings of anonymity and invisibility, gives people the freedom for self-disclosure but can also
"flame" others and may cause conflict sometimes. The resulting disinhibition causes people to believe that they are
able to express their "true self' better online than they ever could in face-to-face contexts (Taylor 2002). However, it
does not mean that there is a fixed "true self." The self is still a work in progress and we keep on improving and
developing ourselves every single day. Seemingly self-revelation can be therapeutic to others especially if it goes
together with self-reflection (Morris et al. 2010). But it does appear that we now do a large amount of our identity
work online. When the Internet constantly asks us: "Who are you?" and "What do you have to share?”, it is up to us if
we are going to provide answers to such queries every time, we use the Internet and to what extent are going to share
details of ourselves to others.

In addition to sharing the good things we experience, many of us also share the bad, embarrassing, and "sinful"
things we experience. We also react and comment on negative experiences of others. Sometimes, we empathize with
people. We also argue with others online. Relationships may be made stronger or broken through posts online. Blogs
and social media are the primary digital fora on which such confessions occur, but they can also be found in photo- and
video sharing sites where blunders and bad moments are also preserved and shared (Strangelove 2011). Why confess
to unseen and anonymous others online? In Foucault's (1978, 1998) view, confessing our secret truths feels freeing,
even as it binds us in a guilt-motivated self-governance born of a long history of Christian and pre-Christian
philosophies and power structures.

According to Foucault (1998), confession, along with contemplation, self-examination, learning, reading, and
writing self-critical letters to friends, are a part of the "technologies of the self' through which we seek to purge and
cleanse ourselves.

Despite the veil of invisibility, writers on the Internet write for an unseen audience (Serfaty 2004). Both the number
and feedback of readers provide self-validation for the writer and a certain celebrity (O'Regan 2009). Confessional
blogs may also be therapeutic for the audience to read, allowing both sincere empathy and the voyeuristic appeal of
witnessing a public confession (Kitzmann 2003).
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 Consequently, we should have a filtering system to whatever information we share online, as well as to what
information we believe in, which are being shared or posted by others online. We should look at online information
carefully whether they are valid and true before believing and promoting them. In the same way, we should also think
well before we post or share anything online in order to prevent conflict, arguments, and cyberbullying, and to
preserve our relationships with others.

Gender and Sexuality Online

According to Marwick (2013), while the terms "sex," "gender," and “sexuality" are often thought of as synonymous,
they are actually quite distinct. The differences between the common understandings of these terms and how
researchers think about them yield key insights about the social functioning of gender. Sex is the biological state that
corresponds to what we might call a "mane" or a "woman." This might seem to be a simple distinction, but the biology
of sex is actually very complicated. While "sex" is often explained as biological, fixed, and immutable, it is actually
socially constructed (West and Zimmerman 1987). Gender, then, is the social understanding of how sex should be
experienced and how sex manifests in behavior, personality, preferences, capabilities, and so forth. A person with male
sex organs is expected to embody a masculine gender. While sex and gender are presumed to be biologically
connected, we can understand gender as a Sociocultural specific set of norms that are mapped onto a category of "sex"
(Kessler and McKenna 1978; Lorber 1994). Gender is historical. It is produced by media and popular culture
(Gauntlett 2008; van Zoonen 1994). It is taught by families, schools, peer groups, and nation states (Goffman 1977). It
is reinforced through songs, sayings, admonition, slang, language, fashion, and discourse (Cameron 1998; Cameron
and Kulick 2003), and it is deeply ingrained. Gender
is a system of classification that values male-gendered things more than female related things. This system plays out
on the bodies of men and women, and in constructing hierarchies of everything from colors (e.g., pink vs. blue) to
academic departments (e.g., English vs. Math) to electronic gadgets and websites. Given this inequality, the
universalized "male" body and experience is often constructed as average or normal, while female-gendered
experiences are conceptualized as variations from the norm (Goffman 1977).

Sexuality is an individual expression and understanding of desire. While like gender, this is often viewed as binary
(homosexual or heterosexual), in reality, sexuality is often experienced as fluid.

Performing Gender Online

Theorist Judith Butler (1990) conceptualized gender as a performance. She explained that popular understandings
of gender and sexuality came to be through discourse and social processes. She argued that gender was performative,
in that it is produced through millions of individual actions, rather than something that comes naturally to men and
women. Performances that adhere to normative understandings of gender and sexuality are allowed, while those that
do not are admonished (for example, a boy "throwing like a girl") (Lorber 1994). In the 1990s, many Internet scholars
drew from Butler and other queer theorists to understand online identity. According to the disembodiment hypothesis,
Internet users are free to actively choose which gender or sexuality they are going to portray with the possibility of
creating alternate identities (Wynn and Katz 1997). The ability of users to self-consciously adapt and play with
different gender identities would reveal the choices involved in the production of gender, breaking down binaries and
encouraging fluidity in sexuality and gender expression.

Recently, social media has been celebrated for facilitating greater cultural participation and creativity. Social media
sites like Twitter and YouTube have led to the emergence of a "free culture" where individuals are empowered to
engage in cultural production using raw materials, ranging from homemade videos to mainstream television characters
to create new culture, memes, and humor. At its best, this culture of memes, mash-ups, and creative political activism
allows for civic engagement and fun creative acts. While Digg, 4chan, and Reddit are used mostly by men, most social
network site users are women; this is true in Facebook, Flickr, LiveJournal, Tumblr, Twitter, and YouTube (Chappell
2011; Lenhart 2009; Lenhart et al. 2010), But mere equality of use does not indicate equality of participation. While
both men and women use Wikipedia, 87% Of Wikipedia contributors were identified as male (LaVallee 2009). Male
students are more likely to create, edit, and distribute digital video over YouTube or Facebook than female students.
However, the Pew Internet and American Life Project found no discernible differences in user-generated content by
gender except remixing, which was most likely among teen girls (Lenhart et al. 2010). One explanation for these
differences is that user-generated content is often clustered by gender. Researchers have consistently shown that
similar numbers of men and women maintain a blog—about 14% of Internet users (Lenhart et al. 2010). While the

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 number of male and female bloggers is roughly equivalent, they tend to blog about different things. Overwhelmingly,
certain types of blogs are written and read by women (e.g., food, fashion, parenting), while others (e.g., technology,
politics) are written and run by men (Chittenden 2010; Hindman 2009; Meraz 2008). Although the technologies are the
same, the norms and mores of the people using them differ.

Setting Boundaries To Your Online Self: Smart Sharing

The following guidelines will help you share information online in a smart way that will protect yourself and not
harm others. Before posting or sharing anything online, consider the following.
 Is this post/story necessary?
 Is there a real benefit to this post? Is it funny, warm-hearted, teachable—or am I just making noise
online without purpose?
 Have we (as a family or parent/child) resolved this issue? An issue that is still being worked out at
home, or one that is either vulnerable or highly emotional, should not be made public.
 Is it appropriate? Does it stay within the boundaries of our family values?
 Will this seem as funny in 5, 10, or 15 years? Or is this post better suited for sharing with a small
group of family members? Or maybe not at all?

Rules to Follow

Here are additional guidelines for proper sharing of information and ethical use of the Internet according to New
(2014):
 Stick to safer sites.
 Guard your passwords.
 Limit what you share.
 Remember that anything you put online or post on a site is there forever, even if you try to delete it.
 Do not be mean or embarrass other people online.
 Always tell if you see strange or bad behavior online. Be choosy about your online friends.
 Be patient.

APPLICATION AND ASSESMENT:

1. Creative work. In a small illustration board, make a slogan or a poster about becoming a responsible Internet
user. Use coloring materials to improve your output. Share your output in class and record the comments/reactions of
your classmates.

REFERENCE:

Alata, Eden Joy P., et al. Understanding Self. Rex Bookstore, Manila, Philippines, 2018

- END –

“To God be the glory.”

- Jesuit Motto

Prepared by:

PHILIP E. REDUCTO Approved by:

Full-time Instructor
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 ENGR. EUGENE P. IGLESIAS, MIT
Academic Affairs Head

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