Virtually Live-Blogs and the performance of identity

Abstract

The phenomenal expansion of Web 2.0-based communication platforms in recent years has significantly changed the way in which people present themselves and communicate with others online. No longer restricted to text-based messaging or simple homepages, users can now share their lives with the Internet public through blogs, social networking sites like Facebook, and even mass online games like Second Life. Blogs in particular offer opportunities to construct and maintain a narrative of daily life b a narrative that performs and reinforces a particular identity enacted by a blogger. To further explore the performative nature of blog narratives, I created a performance research project titled weekzero.net, a blog-like website which allowed me to phenomenologically investigate the process of identity performance and the nature of self-representation online. Questions of liveness, presence, identity and the body are reframed on weekzero.netb s virtual stage, and engaging with these questions, vis-C -vis other blog performances, forms the backbone of this thesis.