have you ever deliberately created several different identities on the same web site?
have you ever had to leave a discussion group or virtual community for some reason, then made a comeback with a new identity?
what was your purpose in doing so?
what were the results?
[hypothetical responses are encouraged!]
have you ever had to leave a discussion group or virtual community for some reason, then made a comeback with a new identity?
what was your purpose in doing so?
what were the results?
[hypothetical responses are encouraged!]
posted by:
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Re: identity multiplicity
Tue, December 21, 2004 - 7:22 PMno to all the questions
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Re: identity multiplicity
Wed, December 22, 2004 - 11:01 AMYes, I have 2 friendster accounts. I have one for me and one for (ahem) my dog. A lot of my friends know my dog, so I thought it would be cute to start a friendster profile for him. Before I knew it, pugs from all over the nation (other owners with dog profiles) were adding him as a friend. I also started a tribe for him called The Official Theo Chang Fan Club, but right now it's called the Theocracy of TheoChang. Okay, too much information.
No to the second question. -
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Re: identity multiplicity
Sat, December 25, 2004 - 11:04 AMhah, I liked the saga of your dog. the closest I have come to such a thing is posting my cat as a co-author of a web page I have been working at, on and off [mostly off at the moment].
in the other thread, you discussed the relationship between real life and virtual life, and the reasons why you feel that it is potentially dangerous to have an online profile that reveals certain things about you/your personality and interests. have you ever though about simply "becoming" another person online, or would that simply undermine whatever reasons you have for using Tribe in the first place?
I have thought about leaving problematic tribes and then returning with a different profile, but figured in the end that it would be too much of a hassle. probably if I had more time on my hands, I would start to play around with that a bit. there is a much-lauded potential for the internet to becaome a "space" where people can explore alternate identities. is this valuable? how can those explorations benefit us in "real life"? just going off on a tangent here, as usual. -
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Re: identity multiplicity
Sat, December 25, 2004 - 11:26 AMhmmm...at first, i didn't like the sound of trying to "become" another person online. i mean, i am myself and i think it would be an illusion to believe that i could just choose to change who i am. but then i started thinking about it more, and i do believe that being on tribe has changed who i am in some ways. i have joined tribes and learned about things and ways of living/thinking that i may not otherwise have been exposed to. so in a way, i shape my online persona while being simultaneously shaped by it. i think this is true for any environment, though-that we affect and are affected by our surroundings. -
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Re: identity multiplicity
Fri, January 7, 2005 - 12:52 PMso, your online persona is reflexive, it sounds like...
I don't think I spend enough time online to have a "persona". however I feel that I have more of an opportunity to come across as articulate online, since I am able to formulate my messages before revealing them to others. of course, even that doesn't always work, but one can try.
I should mention one thing that's come up in my life recently, which is that I hate pretending. I think this probably affects my online presentation: rather than acting as someone other than who I am, or as one facet of who I am, I think I am trying to present myself in a densely packed and thorough kind of way so that others won't have any illusions. I think I would be scared to "try on" another personality.
how do you draw the boundaries around what you reveal online, with "strangers"? I guess I am not even sure if we consider each other to be strangers [there I go, questioning terms again]. there are thigns that I would love to "converse" about, but I know that "if so-and-so ever read that, s/he would know that I was talking about him/her"...where do the restrictions begin, I wonder?
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