Identity Development in Cyberspace

The national average for the first age a child receives a cell phone is approximately 12.2 years of age, as reported by the NIH (Richter et al. 2022). This age is usually situated within the greater discussions of childhood psychology and of childhood development. However, criticism acknowledges that Piaget's theory of cognitive development does not adequately include the sum of influence of both social and cultural factors in his theory of development. Here we see an opening in which Matusov and Hayes (2000) argue that while Piaget does not discount the social aspect altogether, there is still room to understand how sociocultural factors impact development. This encourages us to take a better look at the way cultural movers affect the way children form their ideas of self-development vis-à-vis technology. This paper will identify the ways in which internet platforms position themselves as sites of identity formation and how different attributes are formed via various social media platforms ranging from the early 2010’s to today.

In 2005, YouTube was first marketed as a video broadcast repository (Web Design Museum 2018). Fast forward, social media including YouTube and beyond were the new encyclopedias, used in place of reading cookbooks, watching live news coverage, or even learning a new skill. Children born in the era of the internet overwhelmingly instead turned to the web to search. But, looking away from the algorithmic search trends, channel trajectories, or content engagement, on the internet, we search for friends, for community, and for pieces of ourselves via the internet.

In 2012, at 11 years old, I entered a new school, and with a new social identity at a new (predominantly white) institution, I searched for a new way to present myself to my peers. And as a way of microdosing autonomy as a child, I decided to protest the lye-based chemical relaxers that were plastered onto my head, left to develop, then rinsed and neutralized, to which I was then left with a tender scalp but straightened and relaxed shoulder-length hair. My mom agreed, but only under the stipulation that I was now required to take control of the task of my hair, and the burden that required my mom to turn to a relaxer was now placed on me. So, at age 10, I was now tasked with learning how to manage thick, curly hair on my own. With most people in my community relaxed, I had no physical teacher to learn from, but rather I had to turn to virtual teachers instead. YouTube stars such as Naptural85, Rayven Elyse, and ItsMyRayeRaye were my biggest source of influence of how I chose to see, style, and align myself, since I found community with a group of Black women breaking the status quo and wearing their natural hair, even being able to make their internet activity into a career with sponsorships from hair-care brands, subsidies of large retailers who before this internet movement did not carry natural hair-care products.

Fast forward to 2021, and we see how Pinterest creates the Pinterest Inclusion Fund that, while said to increase user belonging and inclusion and is self-reportedly “one of the many ways [Pinterest is] helping content producers reach new audiences and customers on Pinterest, and helping users discover new, diverse inspirational content,” simultaneously brings in new engagement and more money from marginalized users who are more able to use the company’s platform to better develop their profile (Pinterest, n.d.). Pinterest is regarded as a site of ultimate “moodboarding.” Users are able to organize the way their visuals convey parts of themselves into groups of aesthetics, and now do so at efficient speed through relevant searches. In 2012, to search for the tutorials most suited for me, I had to search “hair styles for Black girls” or “style inspo for Black girls.” Now younger users simply choose between icons of skin-tone swatches to better refine their search (Pinterest, n.d.), eliminating the illusion that White is the default search result. This suggests easier ways for users to find content that mirrors themselves, but uses skin tone, body shape, and hair pattern as an equitable identifier rather than an other to specify. And while I wish these initiatives were around during my formative years to push against the otherness I felt at my PWI, there is greater need to investigate the way these search algorithms affect the youth of the current day. When the time you are meant to be developing in terms of personal identity is now parallel with the ways in which you interact with the personalization of tools online, how do those patterns of identity development both online and offline intersect, and are these identities manifested solely based on visuals or other markers as well?

Moving to another platform of the early 2010s, Tumblr allowed users to curate very specific visuals to add to their account, aka their “blog.” By encouraging and introducing users to basic HTML, users were able to personalize their site by introducing colors, images, type, and other variables that made their blog more personalized and tailored to themselves. As an image-aggregating site, Tumblr had a huge influence on the way internet users used visual images to communicate interests. Subgenres of visual curators such as soft core, pastel goth, or even nymphette, concerningly taking abstracted inspiration from Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, were groups in which users flocked to in order to repost and reshare, creating a sense of community based on visual identities. I remember personally being drawn to what was referred to as the “art hoe” aesthetic, coined by rapper Babeo Baggins and made famous by the likes of other Black stars such as Willow Smith and Amandla Stenberg. The aesthetic was Black creativity-forward, and bold colors, specifically yellow, were praised as being not appreciated enough against brown skin, and users of color were inspired to stray away from prewritten ideas of what Blackness was and what a Creative looked like. And while I would argue that the term “art hoe” is less present in my life today, it clearly took root during my formative years, seeing that I am now enrolled in a masters program at an art school, so the art hoe in me still lives. I say this to reiterate the process in which visual identifiers, such as the self-subscribed groups on an image-aggregating site such as Tumblr, in fact have influence on the lived behavior of users.

While Tumblr has depreciated in value today, highly specific internet subcultures are still visible in the internet space today. A “-core,” referred to the suffix following mundane descriptions, although originating in early internet spaces, is how visual aesthetics are now displayed en masse across the predominantly younger internet generation via platforms such as TikTok and Instagram today. These cores include ballet core, cottagecore, and even bloke core, all meant to send a certain message about who you are and what you stand for, which I argue are relevant identifiers in the time of self-identity development. Take, for example, the way one defines “old money core,” an aesthetic defined by class signals (TikTok 2025). Through the introduction of cashmere sweaters, turtlenecks, tennis wear, pearls, and cufflinks, a user tells a personal story through visual images of a person with generational wealth, often through comparisons to what the aesthetic is not, i.e., depictions of flashy symbols of wealth or things considered “unclassy,” such as newly acquired, non-multigenerational money. For internet users, when they choose to follow or adopt an old money aesthetic, they’re choosing to identify with its values, all that it signifies, and its stances on how it views the world. When an internet user chooses a -core to add to their profile, they’re adopting a visual identity, a political identity, and a position in society. And while identity development, from the conversations of Piaget’s ideas of cognitive development, is situated in the short term, we start to move closer to the arguments of Erikson's stages of psychosocial development (Erikson 1993), which argue that identity development is a process that spans further than childhood. I bring forward the metaphor that when a middle-aged user chooses to engage with tradwife core, a community defined with milkmaid dresses, sourdough, homesteading, and stay-at-home mom life, then uses that influence to shape how she approaches relationships, we see evidence that cyberspace is a site of identity formation, and this identity formation is not only formed in childhood but rather persists through adulthood and informs the life of the user offline.

While I have predominantly shared my experience of the positive ways that the internet has formed my identity, I would be negligent to not acknowledge the way real harm can be done by holding identity in the place of cyberspace. For one, cyberspace is novel in the way that identity is not as easily verified as in the real world, and capitalizing on this fact are those who conceal their identity in order to manipulate others. Catfish, a 2010 film, followed the story of Nev, who found out that a woman he was speaking to via Facebook was not being honest about her identity online (Joost & Schulman 2010). This film coined the term “catfishing” to describe the phenomena of users pretending to be different people online. Here, we see the emergence of online identity bounty hunters who use the internet to track and find traces of real identity left in profiles of those who are “catfishing.” The hosts of this documentary-turned-MTV show now use internet features such as reverse image search, phone-number registration, and public user data to aid their search, which I argue is a clear exhibition of how, along the way of identity development in cyberspace, some users feel the need to conceal their identity to hide and manipulate. And when the hosts interview those doing the catfishing, they often find their motivators to be insecurities of their offline physical identity such as race, body size, or adherence to body standards, complicating what we think of as productive identity development.

Finally, I want to move to a darker and more dystopian take of what it means when identity development is influenced via the internet to form unhealthy patterns of self-image and projected images of women in real life. “Red pill,” stemming from references to the 1999 film The Matrix, can refer to the greater space on the online manosphere, described by Botto and Gotzen as “a loosely connected network comprising social media communities that constitute new forms of men’s rights activism and include groups such as incels (involuntary celibates), Men Going Their Own Way (MGTOW), and Pick-up Artists (PUAs). Despite differences between these groups, they commonly adhere to The Red Pill (TRP) ideology, a collection of antifeminist beliefs supporting male supremacy (Ging, Citation 2019)” (Botto and Gottzén 2024). Shows like Netflix’s Adolescence show how this ideology is formed by interactions with online forums, groups, and comment sections, and is increasingly impacting younger generations of boys today through the investigation of a young boy whose interactions with the manosphere ties him into the murder of a female schoolmate (Barantini 2025) (“Why ‘Manosphere’ Content Is Appealing to Some Young Men | PBS News,” n.d.). I bring these examples to understand that where a user finds themselves in cyberspace alters the way they form their identity, both through alignment with others who share ideas, experiences, and common goals, but also through common hatred and dehumanization of others, in this case of women.

Overall, investigations into internet spaces and platforms give us insight on the lives of users who frequent these sites and, in turn, greater perspectives on the views, attitudes, and attributes of society as a whole. This paper is inspired from having to reconcile that during the time that I was personally using the internet to gain inspiration for the self-determination I needed to navigate the world as a Black woman, there were and still are corners of the same internet where people gather to aggregate their hatred towards people like me. As a designer, I recognize that these interactions are not a result of individuals in a vacuum, but rather framed by the platforms and tools that one uses on social media, thus creating an impetus to understand the role of the designer on these sites and on development as a whole.