Much of the pioneering computer-mediated-communication (CMC) research focuses on the disembodied potentials of the Internet, where social meaning and interaction have migrated from the physical to the virtual (Christensen, 2003). This perspective views the Internet as a space devoid of physical limitations, where users may fluidly change between multiple identities, while constructing and interacting within virtual, at times grandiosely fantastical, settings. The simultaneous formation and erosion of boundaries as well as the construction and negotiation of identity occur within this abstracted context.

Sherry Turkle’s (1995) Life on the Screen explores CMC’s effect on users’ transition from unitary to fragmented constructions of the self, which have come to “characterize postmodern life” (Turkle, p.180). The majority of Turkle’s research is conducted in “Multi-User-Dungeons,” or MUDs, which are anonymous text-based communicative online environments that allow users to become “authors not only of text but of themselves, constructing new selves through social interaction” (Turkle, p. 12). Turkle argues that the anonymous social platform of MUDs present a context for users to pursue unexplored aspects of the self, straining the limits of a singular identity. In this case the self becomes decentered, existing in multiple worlds, conforming to various roles, and assuming multiple identities at the same time. The users’ choice to create and fluidly transition between multiple identities represent the age of postmodern life and the Internet. Internet groups are viewed as fluid and decentered, contrasting modernist suppositions of reality as being linear and logical. A key conjecture in this theoretical disjuncture is that the Internet allows users to contemplate mental life disengaged from the physical body, constituting the self as multifluous and causing previous social boundaries to be renegotiated. Traditional notions regarding identity are characterized by diacritical authenticity, while in postmodern theory the emergence of the Internet contributes to thinking about identity as multiplicity, where participants are able to construct a self by negotiating through numerous selves.

This research and philosophical discourse represent a Western postmodern view of identity representation and the Internet, focusing on the simultaneous construction and navigation of multiple identities within the parameters of a disconnected virtual environment. The emergence of a multifluous fragmented self denotes a world devoid of social meaning and cultural significance, signifying people’s movement to the Internet as a space to reproduce the social meaning of life (Christensen, 2003). These theoretical concepts delineate a distinction between coherent physical actuality and protean virtual reality, asserting a supreme difference among what goes on when participants are online compared to when offline. In contrast, studies on marginal and non-Western ethnic groups’ use of the Internet stress a resemblance or connection between online and offline space.

As stated by David Hakken, Miller and Slater’s (2000) The Internet: An Ethnographic Approach emphasizes continuity, constituting the Internet as “a new terrain onto which essentially prior identity and other social processes are projected” (Hakken, 2004). Miller and Slater primarily investigate the Internet’s role within the diasporic Trinidadian community, exploring how personal relations are maintained, participants find themselves at home, and community image is molded within a transforming communicative environment. In postmodern cyberspace participants are abstracted from local and social relations, however Miller and Slater discover the opposite: “Trinidadians—particularly those living away—invest much energy in trying to make online life as Trinidadian as they can make it, to see the Internet as a place to perform Trini-ness” (Miller and Slater, p. 7). Trinidadians’ interaction, identification, and community formation online is concretely rooted in their preexisting ascription to offline cultural identity. The Internet harbors the ability to bring distanced entities into direct association, however “there is no reason to suppose that these encounters dis-embed people from their particular place… or construct new identities in relation to ‘cyberspace’ rather than projecting older spatial identities through new media and interaction” (Miller & Slater, p. 85). Essentially, cultural identity remains only as mobile as the minds of participants signifying it. One not can assume ethnic groups use or react to technology in the same way. In this case, however, their interaction within virtual contexts appears to be more about an adjustment to the modern technology, as opposed to a postmodern deconstruction of it.

Many Native American websites are constructed with strong ties to offline sociality, culture, and physicality, signifying key components used to assert group identity on the Internet. Textual information and images reflecting social and physical boundaries, abundant on many of the websites I encountered, are crucial to reproducing Native American identity and culture. These groups appear to be concerned with asserting rather than transforming group and cultural identity. Postmodern cyber theory deeply questions the nature of identity assertion and the emergence of online communities. This study looks closely to determine if the Internet offers a fundamentally new way of forming connections between members, establishing community, and shaping identity or if it remains a continuation or reproduction of previous practices.