Research Ideas

Creating or choosing a topic on my own to write about has always been something I've struggled with. Is this a valid topic? Is there enough material for me to examine? Does the material have enough depth for me to analyze it? Am I intelligent enough to handle the topic properly? Needless to say, I've got a lot of hangups when it comes to writing papers, but I've also got a few ideas this time around:

1) Social Identity

I'll let two ladies more knowledgeable than myself pose the questions and ideas I'd like to address:
— Lene Arentsen: "The question is whether these media create new people or just new ways of expressing identity? Can you talk about online identity exclusively or is your virtual identity walking hand in hand with real-world identity?" http://lenearentsen.wordpress.com/2011/02/14/identity-and-digital-media/

— danah boyd: "I investigated how American teenagers socialize in networked publics . . . in how the architectural differences between unmediated and mediated publics affect sociality, identity and culture."
http://www.danah.org/

How are online identities created? What strategies are used to present an identity online? Does a person create a single identity across all online communities/networks, or does either the medium itself/the people who use it encourage a person to create different identities? Does the medium have an affect on what type of identity is created? Are these questions redundant, or nuanced?

2) Online Education

The effects of the internet on education are more than I could ever hope to sum up. I find it interesting, though, that in an age where institutionalized education has lost a lot of its value (the internet offers many opportunities to become "successful" on its own), we see the beginnings of what is essentially a scam education, aimed at people who can't see that the value of a degree is largely subjective. Do I have any real direction with this? Not yet, but it is a topic I find difficult to ignore.