Learning to be: identity construction in online communities

When an individual enters a new field of practice, an integral part of that process is the development of an identity that situates the individual as a legitimate participant in that practice. This study combines elements of identity theory with theories of distributed cognition to examine the possibility that the identity construction process can be distributed across multiple contexts and platforms. To approach this question, the author interviewed members of two online forums in order to reach an understanding of the extent to which their participation in the online communities impacted their overall identity development. The author argues that individuals use participation in online forum communities to access crucial “identity resources” that help them develop and maintain identities related to their fields of practice. It was also found that online contexts offered certain affordances to the identity development process which were not available in offline contexts, suggesting that some aspects of identity construction could be more profitably pursued in online communities. Furthermore, the transfer of these identities between online and offline contexts was found to be routine and constant, with users often benefitting in offline spaces from identity construction work performed online.