Practicum- Carla Pentimone

With blogging, I have found that people can practice different personalities online by fragmenting parts of themselves through multiple contexts and forms in different online domains. Evidently, this can be a good way to control other’s perceptions of your identity. However, I found myself trying hard to fragment parts of myself on my blog to focus on hockey, even though hockey bleeds over to many other parts of who I am as a person. This fragmenting of self in social networking can be a serious problem when it is pressed on minorities, who are socially expected to leave race issues offline. In regards to Lisa Nakamura’s critique of identity tourism in “Race In/ For cyberspace, I personally did not encounter any blogs who seemingly “passed” as another race, but I did notice that when creating my profile on Blogger, there was not an option to identify your race or ethnicity, which I believe is extremely problematic for those who wish to publicly display what might be a crucial part of their identity to them.