Online Identity and Communication as Narrative Practice

Digital technologies have offered not only new possibilities for
communicating but also new challenges for the way we express
and represent ourselves and our lives through this
communication. This paper explores the forms of communication
and self-expression observable online, and especially studies the
construction of identities through the narratives that emerge from
the mediated communication through examples of user-created
narrative texts on the Internet drawn from a case study on an
online community of World of Warcraft players. Inspired by Paul
Ricoeur’s thoughts on identity as something continually
constructed and reconstructed by narrative configurations, the
paper argues that we can see these user-created narrative texts as
material traces of the continuing work on our narrative identity.
This dynamic, constructivist notion of identity is echoed in much
of the humanist conceptualizing of technologically mediated or
online identity, e.g. Turkle’s observation that because
communication in online settings is always dependent on some
form of symbolic mediation, usually text, it is clear that identity
on the Internet needs to be “composed”. However, while most
studies on online communication tend to draw on sociological
methods, this paper focuses attention on the mediated
interpersonal communication as texts. By introducing a closer
narrative analysis of such texts, the paper thus also aims to
demonstrate that including analytical models and concepts taken
from narrative theory and literary studies in the study of online
identity and communication can lead to new insights into the way
social media influence our ways of representing and
understanding ourselves.