Sara Duffney - Blog 3 (Online Identity)

The topic I found most interesting and relatable this time around was that of online identities and experiences. I identified with it so well because my friends and I have grown up on computers: using online identities, playing and coding MUDs and MUSHes, participating in forums and guilds, using IRC (Internet Relay Chat), and also participating in real life Dungeons and Dragons games. It was very interesting to read the detailed MUD experiences of others in the Sherry Turkle chapter (“Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet”), particularly how beneficial it could be for some, but how unhelpful and hindering it was for others. Because my friends and I are such anti-social (IRL) nerds, I can relate to these experiences in several ways. When AOL became very popular, I was around the tender age of nine. I could not help but notice all the easily-accessible chatroom options (as there was not much else to do online in 1997), and I quickly began talking to strangers, experimenting under many different guises. I thought it would be arrogant and foolish to be honest and give away my real a/s/l (I still think so, actually, as I was only a child), so I frequently pretended to be older women to avoid condescension and to have unbiased conversation. I quickly learned that legal-aged women are in high demand, and needless to say, I didn’t get the “birds and the bees” talk from my parents, but rather the internet and my own research to find out what these people were talking about. This turned out to be beneficial for me, because I learned how creepy strangers on the internet can be (after one phone call with a platonic internet “friend,” I was horrified, felt awkward, and never contacted internet friends through different mediums again). I learned the distinct line between beneficial internet activity and relationships, and potentially dangerous ones.

My roommate, however, is another story. He skipped the AOL phase and immediately started playing Tribes and other online games, immersing himself in his online characters, guilds and IRC chat. In the ten years I have known him, I’ve seen him become addicted to at least six MMORPGs. He becomes immersed in the characters he creates, feels pressured by his guildmates and IRC friends, and proceeds to perfect his online characters/identities to the nth degree while sacrificing his real life in the process. Jobless, spending weeks perfecting a character’s gear, his life can be turned upside down from the loss of a single artifact or boss battle (this can create extreme animosity among his guild and close friends). He sometimes quits a game in a rage, feeling as though he’s lost months of work (both on characters and making new friends) because of some minute detail or misunderstanding. He is particularly dependent on his online identity and online friends, spending the majority of his time with them until he rages (ragequits, as we say) and finds a new server or game. However, when he plays Dungeons and Dragons and Shadowrun in real life, he seems fully capable of detaching himself from the game. Maybe this is because we, his real life friends, are the ones playing with him. Or, maybe his expectations for each are different.

I would also like to mention that it was fascinating to read about “personae as expanded self” in the discussion. Most of my classmates seemed to agree that a person is definitely responsible for their actions, even if their online identities are extremely different from them physically and even mentally. This is the valuable lesson I learned from AOL chatrooms. Even as a nine year old, I understood that lying about my age was an alteration of identity, and I quickly realized that others could just as easily lie about anything on the internet, though their motives may not be so pure.