This week’s NetRhets topic is network literacy, which inevitably leads to some discussion of identity. Miles and Yuille list it as #5 on their Creative Computing Manifesto:

5. inside the network
Network literacy is the ability to engage with and represent yourself within the network.

With my static professional site, I have a fairly good idea of how I’m representing myself to the world. Representation on this blog, however, is far more problematic to me. One of the wonderful and confusing things about blogs is the fact that they’re one of the only documents that permit shifting identities within the document itself. Print is fixed; the author/originator/creator's identity is fixed with it, at least within that volume. An author's identity may shift over the course of their ouvre, but once an individual work is fixed, things don’t change within it. Not so for the blog, which as a dynamic digital document is much more of a living thing. As the blogger changes, the document changes with it. This demonstrated, public change is part of what makes long-term blogging and blog reading so worthwhile - Dorothea, Bobbi, and AKMA have all grown and changed since I began reading them three years ago, and their blogs don’t look or read the same as they did then. The problems have more to do with external researchers than they do with the bloggers themselves (although Bobbi may disagree, given the process she’s gone through lately with hers). How do you categorize something whose identity is constantly in flux? How do you account for the changeable nature of the document? We can work with the larger genre of blog, but what particular identity does it present, and when is it which identity?
I guess I’m writing this in support of my Syracusan colleagues, a good number of whom are new bloggers working on figuring out what their blog is all about. I’m not sure it will help to know this, but I still don’t know what my blog is about, not really. I asked a friend of mine a couple of months ago when I was working on the About page, and she said it was a "classy academic blog." That’s a really nice thing to say, I think, but it totally doesn’t match with that I think is going on here. Not that I have any idea what that would be.
When I first started blogging, it was much more frightening than exciting to contemplate the identity it presented to the world. My very early posts were strictly impersonal, focusing instead on reading response notes. I used a prefab MT template and kept the whole thing anonymous and genderless for the first six months. It probably took a year to become comfortable with the idea of constructing an identity, and then most of another year to actually get around to doing anything about it. (My ambivalence was partly compounded by the problems of dealing with a meatspace stalker. Interesting how life off the network affects life on the network. I’m still not prepared to analyze this part, or to talk much more about it.)
So I began as an academic blog, and supposed that I would blog my thesis when it came time to write it. Instead, I blogged almost none of it except the whining. My archives from that year are almost entirely personal, peppered with links to silly things I found on the Net. Since I’ve moved up here to start Ph.D. work, I’m suddenly more or less an academic blog again, although I can’t quite bring myself to identify as such. Mostly it’s about school because I don’t do anything else. Still, the focus shifts from week to week, and I shudder to think how it would be categorized within previously proposed quantitative blog categories.
What am I doing here now? What sort of identity does this blog reveal? I still don’t know. A mishmash, so far as I can tell. If any of you know what this is, feel free to tell me in the comments.

(Excerpt cross-posted to Networked Rhetorics.)