"Who Am We" by Sherry Turkle and "Identity Warranting" by Walther and Parks

Being asked to look at the profile or homepage of someone I know, and seeing how close or far it was from reality, the first person I thought of was my sister.  First of all, I know her possibly better than I know anyone else, so I can most easily identify the difference between her online persona and how she behaves when she's with me face-to-face.  Second of all, she's a pretty big Facebook user - she's the one who asked me not to delete my Facebook profile when I was considering quitting the site.  When I look online at her profile, (connected to a real-life identity that can be corroborated and 'warranted' by social structures of people we both know in person), the person I see seems 'real' to me just as she does in person.  There's pictures of her smiling, the occasional bit of dry wit and sarcasm, posts from her friends and our mutual friends, and an overall cheerful tone very reminiscent of the public persona that she projects.  Her interests and political values are listed, and only her real family members are listed as family.  What is lacking is what I know she doesn't project publicly - parts of herself, personality characteristics, that only come out when she's talking with just people she's very close to, whom she trusts.  My sister on Facebook is an idealized version of my sister face-to-face, but it's not that far off.  Comparing her profile-'irl' differences to those of someone I know less well, it's hard to see, to some extent, which version is more real, because I don't know the 'real' them.

Identities are complex, offline or online, but online, that complexity becomes much more salient.  Turkle's description of 'windows', where we appear as different people in different mediums, makes sense to me, although I haven't usually presented massively differently across mediums.  The exception to this rule has been my experience in play-by-post roleplaying, which is precisely why her description of MUD players was fascinating to me.  The idea of playing the role of a woman sometimes, a man sometimes, and a magical rabbit at others is nothing new to me - I've done something akin to that myself.  What's completely new to me is the idea that any of these should be connected to each other in any way, or more importantly, to the person who spawned them.  A cursory look at the document on my computer listing the full names, ages, and other descriptive information of my original characters reveals 57 names - many of them inactive (I haven't written or played with them in a while), some of them not.  But this world is radically different from that of MUDs.  The online roleplaying I have done is a game, a story.  The online roleplaying of MUD players was explicitly connected to their lives, no matter how far fetched their personas.  Being someone who just plays for fun, this is what throws me - why make the connection?

As time has passed, it seems, MUDs have lost popularity, and when you play an obviously fantastical role in an obviously fantastical situation online, that role separates itself from yourself 'irl'.  Most people online present as themselves, certainly in the most popular online mediums (twitter, Facebook, tumblr, YouTube, etc.).  Even Joel from 'Alone Together', when he presents as a little pink elephant in Second Life, imbues Rashi with his own personality and makes it clear that he takes his Second Life relationships seriously, allowing him to use this fantastical persona to work through his real conflicts.  In "Who am I," Turkle says that "... some are tempted to think of life in cyberspace as insignificant, as escape or meaningless diversion. It is not. Our experiences there are serious play. We belittle them at our risk."  On this, I agree, and I think this may have been what made MUDs as fragmented and confusing as they seem to have been for many.  Fantasy can be mean of two things: either it's perceived as play, existing just for fun, or as a way to fulfill genuine desires, hopes, and deviances of the player in a safe space.  When many people play together in a fantasy without defining for which purpose they have come, it's harder to form a community, or to use online worlds to work through whatever you are trying to work through, because without knowing how seriously your partners/co-players take the fantasy, it's more difficult to know whether they can be trusted.