Week 7 – Who am we? Fictional selves online.

After doing this week’s reading, one of my many thoughts was that Sigmund Freud would have had a great time studying how human beings operate on the internet if he were alive today.

Anonymity online is one of the biggest elephants in the room of our time and is a massively discussed concept. Now like never before, human beings can interact with countless other human beings whilst being completely anonymous doing so. Well, I say completely anonymous but that may not necessarily be true to a certain extent. However, the vail of anonymity has led to people interacting online in far different ways to which they do so in real life, or ‘offline’. Anonymity is like a shield, a cloak, a disguise, people can be whoever they want to be online, be as harsh or as kind as they like without repercussions. It can be described as different aspects of peoples true personalities coming out in a ‘safe’ place for them to do so rather than in the real world.

This idea which I wish to look into is best explained in Sherry Turkle’s ‘Who am we?’ where she interviews a college junior ‘Doug’ who explains how he has several ‘MUD’ accounts where he takes on different characters/personalities depending on which he’s currently logged in to. Logging in and out of an account, he says, is like “I split my mind…. I can see myself as being two or three or more. And I just turn on one part of my mind and then another when I go from window to window.”

This weeks reading looks at this idea and how it and online anonymity has created the concept of ‘trolling’. However I wish to focus on the fascinating idea of people creating ‘other selves’ online rather than the darker products of online anonymity such as trolling.

I myself am no stranger to people making up entirely fictional personalities on the internet through which they interact with others, this is not to say I have done this myself of course. It can be said that the rise of online games, particularly MMORPG’s such as the one ‘Doug’ plays in Sherry Turkle’s essay, has facilitated and allowed more and more people to go online and live through alternate personalities. However my story was not quite so simple, rather the people involved were brought together through a game but the character was built outside of it.

In the mid-2000s, as many nerdy teenagers do, I played a lot of online games. One of which, as one inevitably does if you play a game for so long, led to me making friends with people who played on the same server as I did. As we grew to know each other we started regularly communicating through a shared skype instant messaging chat room, which to this day still has 15 people in it who continue to communicate even though none of us play the game anymore. We spent around 2 1/2 years interacting, playing games together, talking about what was happening in each others lives, all the while living thousands of miles apart. After 2 of those years however, several members of the group slowly began to become suspicious of one of them. This person had been such a prominent member of our little online community for so long we were careful to doubt them. It soon came to light however, after peices of their life story didn’t add-up, that their entire ‘online self’, everything they had told us about themselves, life events, all we’d discussed and shared, was a lie.

It was an odd feeling, someone you thought you knew, a good friend, was a work of fiction, didn’t exist, never had, and to top it off that person was now replaced by another person, the first persons offline real self, that you now had to get to know all over again.

Was what they did wrong? For ease, lets call this person ‘Tom’.

In his ‘outing’ Tom confessed that he did what he did at first as a prank, but as the community got to know him he didn’t want to leave it and simply stuck with the false persona and it grew from there. He didn’t do it out of malice, he genuinely valued the friendships he’d created, and borrowed ideas from stories he’d read or watched to keep up his illusion.

In the end, everyone forgave him, some found it funny, some felt genuinely betrayed. It raises very interesting questions about the morality of creating a fictional self online. People were hurt, no one likes to be lied to, but it gave ‘Tom’ an escape from his real life, to a life he preferred. Does this justify his actions? Could it be considered a kind of ‘trolling’ of an online community? Perhaps, it is the intentional conceitedness that trolls use to get reactions out of people but minus the malice in the intent. It certainly wasn’t the dark picture of ‘trolling’ that the Radio 4 clip; Digital Human: Transgression paints in it’s investigation of the concept.

What I do know however is that I got a very good lesson in the what online anonymity allows people to do.