Internest and Your Identity

Identity on the Internet

Before the internet, there was only the computer, large ones that take up a whole room.

The computer then was seen only as a tool, and then a few years later there was the personal computer which made it more accessible and more interactive. The PC was a kind of evolutionary step which enabled us to have wider relationships. But these relationships did not appear yet until PCs started to become interconnected. This is where internet comes in. At first it was only a military tool, used by the States to connect their military branches and easily share their data. That was until someone saw the commercial value and the great potential of the net. In the article of Sherry Turkle, she described a new world where we have started to populate over the years with several mirrors of ourselves. The cyberspace is exactly that strange new world people have inhabited with the help of technology like the personal computer. With our lives now inside the screen and our personal selves cannot be determined by the other end then the internet, we gain the ability to recreate ourselves virtually in the new world. We now have the ability to create characters will may or may not reflect our own identity.

With MUD or multi user domains the characters we play can even have emotions that can be conveyed to a large number of other players residing in the cyber world. Through the interactions we have with players around the world, our real life personas, Turkle pointed out, go to “sleep” and our characters materialize inside the virtual domain.

Players often border between real life (RL), a term coined by several MUD enthusiast and their cyber worlds and as a result there are several analogies that will work for this topic. Let’s take Play by Email (PBeM) as an example; this will be discussed further later on. The author is the player in cyber world and the interaction in the game is in the form of writing and the computer is the converter of simple...