The Construction of Personal Identities Online

Information and communication technologies (ICTs) are building a new habitat (infosphere) in which future generations will spend an increasing amount of time. So, how individuals construct and maintain their personal identities online (PIOs) is a problem of growing and pressing importance. \n\nToday, PIOs can be created and developed, as an ongoing work-in-progress, to provide experiential enrichment, expand, improve or even help to repair relationships with others and with the world, or enable imaginative projections (the 'being in someone else's shoes' experience), thus fostering tolerance. However, PIOs can also be mis-constructed, stolen, 'abused', or lead to psychologically or morally unhealthy lives, causing a loss of engagement with the actual world and real people. The construction of PIOs affects how individuals understand themselves and the groups, societies and cultures to which they belong, both online and offline. PIOs increasingly contribute to individuals' self-esteem, influence their life-styles, and affect their values, moral behaviours and ethical expectations. It is a phenomenon with enormous practical implications, and yet, crucially, individuals as well as groups seem to lack a clear, conceptual understanding of who they are in the infosphere and what it means to be an ethically responsible informational agent online. This is unsatisfactory. Failing to understand what it means to have a PIO causes confusion and impasse. It leads to uncertainty about ethical guidelines and legal requirements. The research seeks to fill this serious gap in our philosophical understanding by addressing the following questions:\nHow does one go about constructing, developing and preserving a PIO? \nWho am I online? How do I, as well as other people, define and re-identify myself online? \nWhat is it like to be that particular me (instead of you, or another me with a different PIO), in a virtual environment? \nShould one care about what happens to one's own PIO and how one (with his/her PIO) is perceived to behave online? \nHow do PIs online and offline feedback on each other? Do customisable, reproducible and disposable PIOs affect our understanding of our PI offline? \nHow are we to interpret cases of multiple PIOs, or cases in which someone's PIO may become more important than, or even incompatible with, his or her PI offline? \nWhat is going to happen to our self-understanding when the online and offline realities become intertwined in an 'onlife' continuum, and online and offline PIs have to be harmonised and negotiated?\n \nThe first stage of the research will compare and evaluate the standard approaches to PI by analysing how far they may be extended to explain PIO. The hypotheses to be tested are that classic approaches to PI can contribute to our philosophical understanding of PIO; that, however, none of them will turn out to be fully satisfactory by itself, when exported from offline to online environments; and that this shortcoming can help us both to refine our understanding of PI and to develop a new approach to PIO. \n\nThe second stage of the research will address the questions raised by PIO, in order to complement the already available approaches to PI. The hypotheses to be tested are that the construction of PIO provides evidence in favour of a dynamic, interactive and distributed (that is, socially- or network-dependent) interpretation of PI, as a relational rather than a substantive property; that this new, interactive approach will be system- rather than single, agent-oriented; and that this approach can successfully compete with the others in explaining PI while overcoming their limitations when it comes to PIO.\n\nThe research will be partly descriptive, in order to analyse what a PIO consists in, and partly prescriptive, in order to establish what a PIO ought to be. It will use a new and unconventional methodology, by replacing thought experiments with experiements in silico (simulations) in Second Life.