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identity is adopted has implications for the very form that social inquiry takes. In
this article, three quite different notions of identity are explored, as substantive
agency, as a matter of discursive attribution, and as an analytic model. The issues
involved in the use of each of these versions of identity in research are explored.
In the second half of the article, in order to examine these problems in more
concrete terms, we look at how they emerge in internet ethnography concerned with
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