When we create screen names, personal websites or weblogs, participate in online message boards or virtual communities, much of what we are doing is marketing ourselves, offering ourselves up as a commodity. Multiple online identities are in some ways akin to product lines held by a particular company. Each separate identity one creates may allow him or her to cash in on a different market, even though the medium of exchange may be social rather than monetary.
It seems that we have assimilated the culture of commercialism so completely that we see our own identities as product.
The manner in which we trade in our identities on the Internet has evolved within a
complex set of cultural developments. This paper will consider how the current cultural emphasis on flexibility and access, combined with the position of the Internet within the larger context of capitalistic modes of production, has brought us to a place where we have become increasingly comfortable with the commodification of our own identities.
In The Corrosion of Character, Richard Sennett writes of the cultural dislocation that is a byproduct of a prevailing emphasis on flexibility in the workplace. According to Sennett, our notion of flexibility has changed in recent years, losing its original connotation of stability in the face of external forces of change. Though the word ‘”flexibility” originally described the ability of a tree to withstand wind damage, its yielding to the wind while retaining its fundamental form (Sennett 46), flexibility has come to mean a capacity to adapt to perpetual change in our work and personal lives, one that we are all expected to embrace, or be left by the economic wayside.

For Sennett, a key problem with negotiating one's life under the terms of limitless
flexibility is the challenge it poses to one’s ability to create coherent personal narratives. One is always in the position of recreating oneself, and achievements are no longer "cumulative" (16) in a way that would tend to foster stability, community and personal character. The emphasis now is on constant permutation to meet the changing demands of our environment. Sennett claims that the "most strongly flavored ingredient in this new productive process is the willingness to let the shifting demands of the outside world determine the inside structure of institutions" (52). Though he is speaking here of the business practice wherein external market pressures are allowed to determine internal corporate structures, Sennett's idea also extends to the behavior of individuals.
He sees members of the new economy as being adrift in change, unsure of who we really are or what defines us.

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