brief outline of what my video wants to be when it grows up`

Identity Formation:

-Symbolic Interactionism

• Kenneth Plummer notes: What distinguishes humans is their extensive and creative use of communication through symbols. At one level symbols may seem fixed, but the symbolic interaction perspective emphasizes the shifting, flexible, and creative manner in which humans use symbols.

• Herbert Blumer's (1969) influential summary: People act toward things based on the meaning those things have for them; and these meanings are derived from social interaction and modified through interpretation.
• Thus, human interaction is mediated by the use of symbols, by interpretation, or by ascertaining the meaning of one another's actions, therefore "defining" each other's actions instead of merely reacting to each other's actions

-Charles Horton Cooley's "looking glass self"(1902)

1. We imagine how we must appear to others.
2. We imagine the judgment of that appearance.
3. We develop our self through the judgments of others.

• "...a person's self grows out of society's interpersonal interactions and the perceptions of others...society is an interweaving and interworking of mental selves."
• Gordon Marshall (1998) reiterates Cooley: "Just like the reflections in a mirror, the self depends on the perceived responses of others."
  

-George Herbert Mead's "generalized other" & "I"/"me"

• "The self is something which has a development; it is not initially there, at birth, but arises in the process of social experience and activity, that is, develops in the given individual as a result of his relations to that process as a whole and to other individuals within that process"
• "taking the role of the other": a means of self-actualization and development of empathy for others
• the "generalized other": "an organized and generalized attitude" (Mead 1934) with reference to which the individual defines their own conduct.
• The "me" is the social self, and the "I" is a response to the "me"

Media Ecology:

-Media as environments (Casey M.K. Lum)

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-How media shapes social relationships (Joshua Meyrowitz)

Anonymity as a "cultural motif":

-Affect of the Industrial Revolution
-Idea of forced anonymity