Electric Involvement: Identity performance in children's informal digital writing

Abstract

We inhabit a social world in which identity is complex, no longer closely tied to place or territory, delineated by nationhood, nor simply created, as psychology suggests, through acts of identification. Instead, it is argued, identity is produced through action and performance. Popular digital culture provides a rich context for identity play and performance, but the implications of this for education have only recently been identified. This paper is an exploration of children's identity in computer-mediated communication and draws selectively from texts generated through a series of school-based projects to develop tentative principles for the analysis of identity and impression formation in children's digital writing. I show how children co-construct anchored and transient identities in informal peer-to-peer communication, going on to suggest that this is a valid use of new technology in the classroom and one that can be used to counterbalance a preoccupation with the technical and informational content of ICT.