It has become widely accepted in lay and academic circles that the Internet and associated digital technologies are transforming the manner in which human beings interact with others and understand themselves. In her seminal work Turkle (1996) argues that such technologies are engendering profound cultural changes through the renegotiation of conceptual and experiential boundaries which they facilitate. The experience of identity and community shifts indelibly through an increasingly active process of negotiation between the real and the virtual, truth and fantasy, public and private, local and global. As she puts it, “the Internet has become a significant social laboratory for experimenting with the constructions and reconstructions of self that characterize postmodern life” (Turkle 1996: 180). The online situations which regular Internet users confront through e-mail, chat, social network and online message boards call into question clear distinctions which persist without problem in offline settings.
The anonymity which the Internet affords has a profound effect on the nature of communication which occurs online. As Gauntlett and Horsley observe, “since participants cannot see each other, and are not obliged to reveal their real name or physical location, there is considerable scope for people to reveal secrets, discuss problems, or even enact whole ‘identities’ which they would never do in the real world, not even with their closest friends” (Gauntlett and Horsley 2004: 17). As well as these longstanding tendencies, the proliferation of websites and online services driven by user generated content (blogs, social networking, YouTube, Wikipedia etc) have meant an exponential increase in the quantity of seemingly private material posted to a formally public domain (Beer and Burrows 2007).
Under such conditions the boundary between public and private is rendered problematic in such a way as to demand its active negotiation by each and every user: it is not something which anyone can taken for granted. Likewise the real and the virtual intersect as many individuals either cannot or do not wish to keep their ‘online’ and ‘offline’ lives separate. At a time when fewer people than ever are well acquainted with the neighbours in their geographical community, powerful affective bonds are being formed through online interactions which are frequently more meaningful for the individuals involved than many of the relationships in which they are entwined in their ‘real’ lives.
In this paper I present a case study of the asexual community in an attempt to understand these changes and, through doing so, offer an account of the formation of online identities which is both empirically grounded and theoretically informed. The role the Internet can play in the facilitation of sexual activity and the formation sexual identity has been well documented (Bell 2001, Elliott and Lemert 2009, Herdt and Howe 2007). Against this background, it is my contention that the formation of the asexual community through online media represents an interesting and fruitful case study; defining themselves as not experiencing sexual desire, the online activity of asexuals highlights a range of cultural processes facilitated by the Internet which often have their full dimensions obscured by a narrow focus on sexual activity. While some aspects of my discussion are specific to asexual individuals, I will argue that most are not and that analysis of this community brings into focus some complex dynamics which are too often occluded in theoretical discussions of the changes wrought by the Internet. I shall use the work of the social theorist Margaret Archer (1996, 2007) to offer a framework for understanding how the Internet is reshaping the cultural environment within which all subjects, rather than just asexuals, attempt to make sense of who they are.
Mark Carrigan 