Arts and Letters College Colloquium

Dr. Dylan Wittkower (editor of Facebook and Philosophy, Open Court Press, 2010): "Facebook and Dramauthentic Identity"

Online interactions once provided a place for free play in identity, where MMORPGs and web forums provided spaces where we could explore aspects of ourselves usually hidden from friends, family, and co-workers. With the ascendency and ubiquity of Facebook, our lives online are increasingly conducted using our own names and faces as our avatars, and we have become enmeshed in new dynamics of self-presentation-in some ways participating in the free play of creative performance of untethered selves, but in other ways subject to multiple contextual anchors, creating a practical demand for a unitary self-presentation that can be even stronger on Facebook than offline. This creates what can be called a "dramauthentic identity," wherein we have the capacity to perform various selves, just as in our offline dramaturgic identity, but in which we are required to confront more explicitly the social demand for authenticity.

Ms. Sarah Spangler: "Rhetorics of Women's Visual Self-Presentation on Facebook: Empowerment or Exploitation?"

This talk details on-going research into the relationships between fashion photography and visual self-presentations by women on social networking sites such as Facebook. The study focuses on self-presentation as a rhetorical performance that invites spectatorship, and critically interrogates these rhetorical acts as either reclaiming female sexual agency or perpetuating female imagery to reflect the male gaze.