Personal identity is a complex and multifaceted concept: our identity is crafted from a number of different factors: our background, ethnic group, interactions with other, beliefs, the decisions we make…

Often we have no control over how others perceive us, or how they might interpret our interactions with them. Our personal identity is something that evolves over time and can change, sometimes drastically, throughout our lifetime as we interact with new people and gain new knowledge and understandings.

We present ourselves in particular ways in different contexts, in what might be described as the performance of identity. How you behave with your parents may be very different to how you behave with your friends, for instance. And this extends to the online world. Indeed, digital technologies give us the opportunity to represent the hand we’ve been dealt in yet more creative ways.