The Virtual World Postcard Project: Social Identity

Still no postcard. Instead, another video, this time of my friend and colleague Alex Haslam. He’s a social psychologist at the University of Exeter, and an expert in the relationship between individual identity and collective identity.

“You Are the Groups You Belong To” – Alex Haslam from CIFAR on Vimeo.

Basically, Alex’s argument is that, even though identity feels like an explicitly individual phenomenon, it is in fact much more determined by the groups we identify with. “We fathers…” “We banjo players…” “We science journalists…” “We crossword solvers…” and so forth. It’s a concept known as “social identity.”

These social identities are fluid and contextual – my identity at work is different from my identity on the subway, at home, or among old friends. I might be a charismatic leader in one context, and a shrinking violet in another.

As Alex puts it in his talk’s title, “You are the groups you belong to.”

This is relevant to the Virtual World Postcard Project because virtual worlds offer bold new ways to think about individual and group identity.

When you first arrive in a virtual world, you have the opportunity to utterly reinvent yourself. It’s hard to imagine a moment when you would be more free to determine your identity. And when you start, you might really thinking about “Who am I” rather than “Who are we?”

But then, if you do things right, you meet people in that world, make friends, and become part of virtual communities, Before you know it, you’re back in the world of social identity. But in a virtual world, both the types of groups, and the freedom to find where you belong are different than in the real world.

Whether it’s a fetish, a hobby, a religion, or a design style, it is easier and faster to find a group of like-minded cohorts. I’ll be writing more soon about the generous guidance I’ve begun receiving from Honour McMillan, a passionate and knowledgeable SLer, but one of the first things she wanted to tell me about were the variety and depth of community in Second Life. Steampunkers. Post-apocalyptic societies. Fashionistas.”Tinys.” (More on this last group soon…)

Basically, if you can imagine a passion, you’ll find someone in Second Life who shares it.

I think identity researchers face some new challenges in virtual worlds, not least because of the much more proactive and controlled way in which people create their community context. (Of course, it’s also possible that the principles of identity in the real world will remanifest in virtual worlds. It’s amazing how much reality is preserved amidst virtuality.)

I’ll return to postcards after this. I just wanted to set the stage first with a bit of where I’m coming from on the question of virtual identity.