The network has gone digitally mobile. It is with us all the time. Danah Boyd is correct in her assessment of the modern predicament as being “always on.” The kind of connectivity permitted by the Internet is the result of an embedded desire within the culture at large. We have always been a network society. It has only ever been a question of saturation, of how heightened and boundless the net can become. Technology allows the connections to spread with unheard of rapidity. To envision the Internet and try to understand its machinations is to look into a mirror. Is it any surprise that what that mirror reflects is the poetry of destruction mixed with creation? The predicament of Internet identities and spokespeople, whether bloggers, Twitter marketers, or fellow SNS users who talk about and inadvertently sell perspectives and memberships into select groups/clubs/cliques, is how to remain current, hip, and seductive. As creatures of consumption, we cannot ignore these seductions, only accept or reject them.  The real question boils down to what we will purchase next (or buy into), and from whom. Who shall we be tomorrow and from what immaterial means shall the new we be composed?

The professional identities investigated by Dawn R. Gilpin in her chapter, “Working the Twittersphere,” were intriguing as examples of online identity construction, a phenomenon shown to be more a result of peer to peer interactions, or conversations, (at least within the context of Twitter) than solitary constructs. This kind of identity building extends beyond Twitter and into SNS and even the websites we choose to frequent, blogs included. Whether we, as users, comment on blog sites and the like, there is a creation of identity as a singular unit and also as a member of a group of followers or professional compatriots assembled and unified by the websites from which we choose to seek out information. It is a kind of branding as a member of a gang while at the same time striving to exist as a unique individual. No brand is exactly the same, but there is always another brand that is rather similar. Mendelson and Papacharissi’s chapter “Look at Us,” about college Facebook photo galleries, gives the impression of a stream of similarly composed and performed photographs chronicling the newly (semi) independent youths of America. While the study continues the identity construction hit upon in the essay by Gilpin, the investigation of pictorial evidence as visual proof of individual and group identity heightens the impact and co-constructed meanings therein.