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INTERPRETATIONS OF ONLINE IDENTITYANONYMITY…..

1) The idea of being anonymous online, creating an aspiration of who or what you wish you could be. Creating an entire virtual world, of your own design within a platform such as Second Life. A digital life based upon a masquerade or performance of an alternate self.

Lister (2009, 209) New Media, A Critcal Introduction.

SECOND LIFE….

Heralded by some as the emergence and proof of the beginning of the ‘Post Human’

Second Life is an example of an Avatar based platform, that we can choose as we wish too mould and create . We can choose body shape, hair colour, eye colour and even gender.

A blonde haired over-weight man, for example living as a Woman within a digital construct.

Anything is possible in the world of anonymous online identity

OUR INTERPRETATION OF THE SOCIAL IDENTITY2) The idea of joining a Social Network, to

be re-affirmed within your own community. The apparent opposite of anonymity, more regard on self-publication and social stance. Again a type of performance, but one that is attempting to become an image of what you see or wish your life to be like within your own peer and/or family network.

ITS ALWAYS BEEN THIS WAY?

“It is not only that virtual worlds borrow assumptions from real life; virtual worlds show us how, under our very noses, our ‘real’ lives have been virtual all along”

(2006,6) Tom Boellstorff. Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human

The above quotation give the impression that we as a species/race/civilization have always lived in such a way as to project ourselves as an avatar, from the moment we can speak and put forward our own subjective personalities, into the environment to which we were born.

This is talked about in Post Structuralism with regard to asking the question ‘Are we just a construct of the imaginary?’

PRO’S OF ONLINE IDENTITY….

• Creation of a new identity, or an ‘enhanced’ one.

• Sociable, communication within your community network.

• Globalisation creating the ‘Global Village’.

• An escape from the ‘Real’• Free and easy international

communication• Interactivity with different social groups

CONS OF ONLINE SOCIAL IDENTITY

• You are exposed in the public spotlight, giving away information you didn’t realise.

• You are the product being sold• A massive popularity contest, possibility

of online bullying.• Addiction to social media, ending with

loss of grip on reality.• Will it get onto the point of being unable

to communicate fully with each other?

THE FUTURE….

The body must become a cyborg to retain its presence in the world, resituated in technological space and reconfigured in technological terms. Whether this represents a continuation, a sacrifice, a transcendence, or a surrender of "the subject" is not certain.

Scott Bukatman (1993, 247) Terminal Idenitity, The virtual subject in postmodern science fiction

EVOLUTION….

The previous quote suggesting it to be a possibility that to create an ‘Online Identity’ is only progress within a Human Ecology. The idea that creating an online version of ourselves comes naturally to us in terms of our own evolutionary process and progression as a species. A stepping-stone on the long road to becoming a full Cyborg.