Cyber Anthropology and the Construction of Online Identities and Memories: A Theoretical Framework

Mohammed Bennis

Abstract: Social media and social networks have been consistently gaining momentum due to the sweeping velocity of the new technologies. People, groups and individuals communicate, socialize, interact and 'live together' on cyberspace which provides a new realm of communication shaped by digital culture. People are now using social media to build up communities and social groups that transcend the conventional concepts of time, space, body, memory and community, generating a new lexicon that pertains to the digital world, namely, cyberspace, cyber culture, cyber anthropology, virtual communities and online identities. All these digital-based concepts were born on the internet and enhance the culture of the Internet which is to be conceived as a shaping force. People are, indeed, shaped by the digital tools they have themselves invented! Human intelligence, memory and senses have been projected onto our digital devices, embodying, therefore, the human-machine metaphor (Wiener, 1948) which was seminal to the rise of digital technologies. In this paper, I intend to provide a theoretical framework of the concepts of cyber anthropology, cybernetics, cyberspace, online identities on the one hand, and the construction of memory on cyberspace, on the other hand. My hypothesis is that digital identities and memories are shifting, elusive and amorphous which leads us to reflect on the viability of digital cultures and their modes of transmission in the post-organic societies or what Umberto Eco calls "Cyberia", the electronic social groups.

Keywords: Cyber Anthropology, Ethnography, Cyberspace, Virtual Communities, Online Identities, Online Memories

Edition: Volume 12 Issue 3, March 2023,

Pages: 1508 - 1515