From Sherry Turkle's book Life on the Screen, I was quite surprised by how many people admit that they create multiple characters online that they describe as their true selves. They believe that these characters (personalities) reside within themselves always but are not free to come forth until they are in the online community setting. This really made me start to think about what these multi-user domains are doing to people's social skills. At first I thought that by allowing these people to express who they really are behind the comfort of the computer screen, they would be more able and willing to express these true parts of their personalities in the real world. From the reading though, it seems that the opposite is true. There is all this talk of having many selves within us, but there is absolutely no evidence that this comes forth in the real world.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that there is a large disconnect between how people express themselves online and how they do so in the real world. I would attribute this difference to the inability to feel comfortable with our true selves even though Turkle argues that this MUDs help us to discover our true selves. What good is discovering who we really are when we can only act that way in the online community. Sure more and more of our lives are spent on the computer, but this will never totally replace the need for interpersonal skills and for being able to be true to ourselves when we are around other people. If people need the internet to finally realize their worth and their identity, great. I just think that they need to be able to translate this knowledge to their everyday lives when they're not stuck on the couch for hours on end playing World of Warcraft.
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6 comments:
Not that I totally disagree with you, but I get the feeling from your post that you feel there is a real world personality for each of us. But I think that while we may have a different personality online, don't we have different ones in class and with our parents, and with our friends? Sometimes even different ones with each parent, or each side of a family, or different groups of friends? I don't know that having one online is necessarily worrisome or bad since we really do have different personalities based on situations. I do agree that if someone is spending all their time online, they may lose interpersonal skills that are necessary. But even those may not be useful in time. No one 200 years ago could have expected in their wildest dreams the idea of the internet, so we may not even be able to dream of a world where person-person interaction is secondary to the person-computer contact.
I believe that an Internet personality should be an extension of a "real world" personality, not a replacement. In this way, I agree with John. I think that no amount of Internet communication can replace the importance of face-to-face contact. But, I also agree with Sam in that we have many personalities in real life, so these may be translated into our online personas.
I agree with you that these online persona are not being translated into the real world. I feel like people on these MUDs begin to spend too much time trying to develop their many personalities online rather than develop their personality in real life. If they are creating themselves online and no one in the real world knows who they truly are, what will they have to show at the end of the day.
what if acting like a part of you in online communities helps you to act that way in real life? also, maybe people are just having fun with who they are and how they present themselves on the internet. just a few thoughts.
First, I think that the internet presents a great resource for people with similiar interests to share ideas and communicate. And I think there are instances where an online personality can enhance a part of your real life personality like what Becky was saying. However, I also think those people who get along solely via the internet would have been cut out of the gene pool in past generations because they never would have found another hermit online! (Just a thought!)
I agree with most of what you are saying. I believe that interpersonal relationships are much more valuable than relationships with techonology. I think that a relationship between two humans can never be fully captured by a relationship between a human and a piece of technology, no matter how advanced it is.
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