Arman Heidari; Hamid Sedaghat; Khiry Hamidpour
Abstract
Along with the expansion of the virtual space and mediaization of the cultural space, people's identification has also changed. From a sociological point of view, the analysis of the expression of women's identity in virtual spaces, which have less freedom in traditional "real" situations to express ...
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Along with the expansion of the virtual space and mediaization of the cultural space, people's identification has also changed. From a sociological point of view, the analysis of the expression of women's identity in virtual spaces, which have less freedom in traditional "real" situations to express their identity, is particularly important. Because virtual space has provided more capacity for them to create and represent their desirable and ideal identity. In such condition, using a qualitative approach to understand the depth and fluidity of their identification process is more reasonable and frutfull. Therefore, the following article has analyzed the identification process of 16 female students of Yasouj University in cyberspace by a qualitative methodology. The data collection technique was an unstructured and semi-structured interview; and non-random, purposeful and maximum diversity sampling method was used for sampling. The generated data analized by the three stages strategy of open, axial and selective coding. Based on the content of the interviews, the causes, contexts and consequences of these girls' use of virtual space were categorized and analyzed under the ten main categories of "the essence of communication, expressing different aspects of oneself, purposeful use to provide various needs and services, satisfying psychological-physiological desires, filling free time, psychological and skilfull personality weakness, family life disorder, different selves presented in cyberspace, capabilities of cyberspace in modern life and scope of cyberspace damages. On a more abstract level, it can be said that the core category of "virtual space as an echo of the real space and a breeding ground of real-pretend selves”, to some extent, reflects the process of identification of the studied girls in the virtual space which is caused by the two-way effect of the psychological-physiological-social characteristics of the girls and their biocultural-social living conditions in the real space of the society.
