Identity

Even though I use skype, facebook, gmail, youtube, etc… I don’t think I have an “online identity” as such. My real life is definitely mapped online, but I don’t have a “virtual life”. People might think I’m missing out as I’ve never made friends online and never played with multiple personae. This brings me to my first question: what is it that FIRST drives people into virtual worlds? Curiosity? A need to escape? A need to join? A need to communicate? A need to create? Or simply, a need for something else? People invade virtual worlds for different reasons and this is probably why the virtual has various effects on the real.

I did renew contact with lost friends through the Web 2.0 and did make friends with people I hardly knew thanks to the Web 2.0, but I always physically met these persons in the first place. I think identity consists of body AND mind constantly interacting, which is why I would tend to disagree with the disembodiment hypothesis which assumes that online, we’re no longer tight to our bodies. I would have a very hard time getting to know a person online as I’m sure my imagination would play an important role in building that relationship. It would link thoughts, interpret emotions and even create a body, probably resulting in a picture far from reality. Furthermore, I think misunderstandings are more prone to happen online as it is impossible to translate things such as tone of voice into words even if emoticons do help. A positive element of virtual worlds is their potential to overcome issues of racism, sexism and other discriminations based on abilities and appearances.

I’m also uncertain what people mean when they refer to the notion of “multiple identity”. I tend to agree that an online persona might be a characteristic of oneself which is being projected and explored online, but a persona is not another identity. I believe that I’m likely to adapt to different people, which reflects multiple aspects of my personality, but this does not mean I have multiple identities. Depending on the context, people might show different characteristics of themselves, and the online world allows seeing people in different contexts, which is why a mother might be shocked to see her daughter’s MySpace profile. This is also why people have multiple accounts, as a stage name might only concern a particular audience.

Finally, I would like to mention OpenID, which is meant to solve identity theft and phishing. OpenID definitely solves the problem of managing and maintaining multiple logins and passwords, but I’m not sure if it is any safer in terms of phishing. Adding a third party to the process usually increases its complexity and increases the number of entry points for eventual phishing. Other interesting questions concern ethical problems about the amount of information being asked from people, sometimes irrelevant information. What about privacy? Is it too late? Is it a price to pay?