Week Three. Topic One.
Assuming on online persona is something I do not know alot about, mainly because I do not have alot of contact with forums and chatrooms and so on. When I was younger, I sometimes used forums and message boards, but I never thought of changing my persona, I think this was possibly to do with my age, and the internet being fairly new. One can change their identity from changing their age, to their job, to even if they are male or female. I think ones dentity being completley hidden could encourage people to change things, one can even be more open about their real selves (I believe usually in the case of sexaulity).
Bolter and Grusin (Lister et al:2007)believe that chatrooms and so on do nothing but serve the "cultural remedation of the self". Turkles (Wired 4:01. Who Am We?1996) agrees with this, writing that computers not only change our real life (ie.helping with school work), but are changing us as people, either by us changing outselves online, or changing our selves by what we experience online.
The choice of a picture (or avator) to represent us online means that we can choose anything from a picture of us to a picture of a cat, we have the choice to hide. Most forums and even social networking sites promote the use of nicknames for screen-names, these can persuade people to change or hide their real life selves. For example, I, Ellie McCullough, can be "washingmachine64" or even "Mike Smith".
Online personas can have some good points though, as one does not judge others on appearance or race or gender if its not disclosed. One is judged on their peronality (assuming thats not made up as well). Stone (Lister et al:2007) sums this topic up well by stating that the "physical facicity of human bodies is changing", we are now becoming anything and anyone we desire online, something that is not yet possible in the real world.
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I think your experience is typical -and not because the internet was 'young' -but in fact because of its opposite. Nowadays most people in the West have an 'online life' the user numbers are in the billions. When theorists such as Turkle did their work, users were in their thousands. As I said in the lecture -'early adopters' aren't the same as the later majority of people who take up an activity or technology.
ReplyDeleteNowadays, most Inet users do not engage in 'identity play' online any more than they do IRL -just as you didn't when you were younger. Beware of confident theorists who are talking about cerain historical/geographic/cultural specifics as if they are generally true for ever.
This is a particular problem with this area -because it changes so rapidly.