What is Online Identities

Consumer content generation in the Web 2.0 environment from a libertarian perspective is about the democratization of mediated knowledge where it creates the possibilities to produce new knowledge and media economies in a postmodern world. This chapter examines the notions of empowerment afforded by multimedia technologies on the Internet where new forms of knowledge, politics, identity, and community can be fostered through the Web 2.0’s architecture of participation, collaboration, and openness. It also discusses how these unlimited possibilities to produce content present new social and ethical dilemmas. They not only challenge conventional ways in which knowledge and expertise have been constructed in modern and postmodern societies but also require more rigorous methods to identity what can constitute expert knowledge. The production of user-led taxonomies and data repositories has raised the need to re-examine user-generated content and its function and coexistence within the existing systems and archives of knowledge.