Today, I received an email on one of the mailing lists I’m subscribed to entitled, “Identity Theft”. What was particularly interesting about the email was that it said it was from me, yet I had not sent it. Another member of the list had spoofed the sender to make it look like it came from me to help illustrate his point.

I’m used to discussions about identity theft on computer security mailing lists. When these folks talk about identity theft, the concern is about stealing banking information. This was the underlying concern of this email as well, yet what is more interesting is that this email was on a list of group psychotherapists. These folks tend to think of our identities as being more than just a credit card number.

Recently, I heard a discussion on NPR with Danah Boyd. On her website, she identifies herself as “a PhD candidate at the School of Information (iSchool) at the University of California - Berkeley and a Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at the Harvard Law School.” I find it interesting that she chooses to identify herself on the website in terms of traditional means of establishing authority. She does have links to Ani DiFranco lyrics at the bottom of the page as an illustration of alternative means of creating identity.

Her “research focuses on how people negotiate a presentation of self to unknown audiences in mediated contexts. In particular, my dissertation is looking at how youth engage with networked publics like MySpace, Facebook, LiveJournal, Xanga and YouTube.”

I’ve often heard her speak and she has made some of the most astute comments I have heard about identity construction online. I’ve often thought about how her work and the work of my friends on the group psychotherapy mailing list intersect, or at least ought to intersect. She notes that teenagers, who are busy constructing their identities online are going through that phase of life where they are just learning about their identities. Whenever I hear her talk about these sort of things, my mind wanders to my friends that are therapists who help people, whether they be teens or other sages, as they struggle to form more constructive identities.

As I read the emails, I scanned various blogs as well. On one blog, the author who referred to herself as a bitchy chick wrote,

I am more than what people portray me to be. I'm more than just purses, shoes and the perfect shade of hair colour. There is a side of me that few will ever know and for now, I intend to keep it that way.

I stumbled across a MySpace page of a 29 year old male who writes, “i always seem to fuck everything up, had so many chances, but never use them. not wallowing in self pity, i must like being unhappy”

Yet these twisted identities aren’t just something we stumble across online. I also listened to an interview with Charlie LeDuff who is out promoting his new book, Us Guys The True and Twisted Mind of the American Man. During the interview, he explored the issues of our economy, our hopes and our dreams and how it affects the identities of ‘Us Guys’.

So, there is a lot tied up in our identities online. Charlie LeDuff gives us some clues. Danah Boyd gives us some clues. We may worry about people stealing the part of our identities that is tied to finances, yet perhaps we should be thinking more about our identities as they affect the way we live our lives and relate to people around us. That is where my friends on the group psychotherapy mailing list come in and I hope many of them spend a little time thinking about the role that the Internet plays in helping people shape their identities these days.