What Is Identity?

Janelle Mallari

Professor Guevara

English 60B

11/12/14

What is Identity?

There is no real definition of what identity is because you will get answers like: sameness of essential or generic character in different instances, the distinguishing character or personality of an individual, the relation established by psychological identification, and many other definitions you may find online or in the dictionary. There are many ways to describe the word identity but, it will not have one true definition. When people grow older, they believe they already know what it is and they believe they already found theirs. Either from online, or from other people they accompany themselves with, or by what they think it is to them.

Some people may ask you, “What is identity?” It is a simple question but with many answers. People may answer with, “Identity is who you are,” but do we really know who we are? If we do not know who we are then how would we know what our identity is? It is confusing but true, does anyone really know the true meaning of identity? Or is it all just opinions of what they think it is? I do not have the answer myself but, I do have an opinion of what it means to me. Identity is known for people online, how people act around certain people, or how people label each other.

Online, it is a completely different place where people can express how they feel and have other people read and reply to them. In the article Ethnographies of Social Networks: How Artists Negotiate Digital Identity, by Stacey Koosel, she stated “An analogy used to describe social media in previous media forms would be considering the impact if everyone was given their own television channel or newspaper—and they were given unlimited opportunity to present whatever ideas they could think of” (Koosel, 2014). Whoever uses the internet and has an account already has an audience that would see what that person likes or what the person says. By showing what kind of music, clothing line,...