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Critical Responses | Informative Summaries | Works Cited

Identities in / with the Web
As Hawisher and Selfe discuss the Web as an interested communication medium, they raise questions about who is reading and writing the Web, about one's identity-cum-Web. Recognizing that the Web is a postmodern medium, it makes sense that its readers / writers exist as postmodern identities:

The concept of blurred identities [. . .] offers a starting point for an alternative perspective to the global-village narrative by observing that identities built on the traditional foundations of nationalism, culture, race, and ethnicity are multiplied and freely transgressed through literacy practices in electronic landscapes. [. . .] The chapters in this collection provide particular examples of how identity formation and online literacy practices are inextricably linked and overlapping on the Web. As the Web establishes itself as a site for this dynamic mix of globally and locally situated identities, its values as a post-modern landscape emerges – it is a space defined, in part, by a tension between contestation and resolution, stasis and change, localness and globalness, single and multiple identities. (286)

In the section on critical responses, I explore their notion of identity. By quoting here some of Hawisher and Selfe's definition of identity on the Web, I hope to give some background for reading the Informative Summaries.