The Construction of Personal Identities Online

Information and communication technologies (ICTs) are building a new habitat (infosphere) in which future generations, living in advanced information societies, will spend an increasing amount of time. In the infosphere, it is progressively more difficult to understand what life was like in pre-digital times and, in the near future, the very distinction between online and offline will become blurred and then disappear. The phenomenon is variously known as ‘‘Ubiquitous Computing’’, ‘‘Ambient Intelligence’’, ‘‘The Internet of Things’’ or ‘‘Web-augmented things’’. GPs are a good example of this convergence: asking whether you are online when driving a car while following some GP’s instructions updated in real-time is becoming progressively less meaningful. We already live mostly onlife. Against this background, how individuals construct and maintain their personal identities online (PIO) is a problem of growing and pressing importance, affecting millions of people everywhere. Today, PIO can be created and developed, as an ongoing work-in-progress. They may provide experiential enrichment, expand, improve or even help to repair relations with others and with the world (e.g., in the case of abused children or of people with autism or Asperger’s syndrome), or enable imaginative projections (the ‘‘being in someone else’s shoes’’ experience), thus fostering tolerance in multicultural contexts. However, PIO can also be misconstructed, stolen, ‘‘abused’’, infringed, disrespected, or lead to psychologically or morally unhealthy lives, causing a loss of engagement with the actual world and real people. Depression, addiction, delusion, escapism are all concepts easily associated to disorders that may be magnified by the wrong kind of onlife experience. The construction of PIO affects how individuals understand themselves and the groups, societies and cultures to which they belong and contribute onlife. PIO often contribute to individuals’ self-esteem, influence their life-styles, and affect their