Speakers at SFCC discuss web profiles
Kateryna Poradiuk
Communicator

The internet is becoming an increasingly integrated part of life, and creating profiles is becoming more popular every day.

SFCC guests shared with students about identity creation in online space on May 21, SUB A and B.

Kristin L. Arola, assistant professor of rhetoric, composition, and technology at WSU, and Keith Dorwick, Ph. D. associate professor of English at the University of Louisiana-Lafayette, visited SFCC.

Arola showed her research on the identity of the mixed-blood Native American race, and questioned the auditorium on how people represent themselves racially today on Internet.

She is interested in racial identity because she is a “mixed-blood Indian.”

“My mother is an Indian,” Arola said. “Because, I look [like]a white person, people who found out that I’m a half Native American acted differently and asked weird questions.”

She felt disturbed and wanted to research more about her identity as being mixed-blood.

“Mixed-bloods are consistently excluded from being Indians in our country today by a variety of forces,” Arola said.

Today, more and more people go to online spaces: myspace.com and facebook.com; they post videos on youtube.com, and these people create their profiles by filling out the information needed.

“I am imagining a myspace profile as a school locker,” Arola said. “People decorate their profiles as carefully as I used to decorate my locker at school.”

Keith Dorwick talked about a gay male identity as, “echoes of each other: the appropriation and transformation of queer male materials on youtube,” from his website.

Dorwick shared with his own definition of queer saying, “queer, is anyone who consciously defies gender and sexuality norms, especially if they're doing that in a playful [or] outrageous way, trying to push the envelope of societal expectations. Someone can, therefore, be one hundred per cent straight and absolutely queer.”

Dorwick showed how different teenagers represent themselves online.

“Across the world, queer youth are...[creating] reappropriations of existing digital materials, notably music videos that are deliberate attempts to rethink the iconography of both their sources and of popular musical culture,” Dorwick said.

He shared about one group, Syncsta, who are two boys from UK who created music videos and posted them on youtube. Even though they claim they aren’t homosexual, in their music videos they represent themselves as being gay. They describe themselves as “just two bored teenagers having fun with a video camera on youtube.”

Dorwick let the auditorium listen to few Syncsta’s songs.

Both speakers pointed out on how differently people represent themselves on Internet. The nation can live one real life and another life online.

You can contact the writer at staffwriter@spokanefalls.edu