Shifting Identities: Which society is more real?

Slide 1

Before taking a closer look at the shifting of identities from virtual to actual reality, first a definition of identity has to be made. According to Howard (2000), identity can be described as a collection of characteristics, preferences, goals or behaviour patterns associated with an individual or a group. Every person has his or her own identity. Some are more aware and sure of it than others. Some people feel that life as we all know it, is not enough or not satisfying enough. For those people, the internet provides plenty of suitable solutions.

Slide 2

The internet is a growing tool. It is offering people a chance to be someone else. Someone they would like to have been or want to become. It gives people the chance to escape reality, to escape the person they are in their business or social lives. As the cartoonist Peter Steiner stated: “On the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.” In real life, a person can be an unhappy, fat gamer who does not have a lot of friends. On the internet, this person can pretend to be a good looking girl who is able to date whoever she wants, or a muscled pro-athlete with whom all the girls want to be.

Slide 3

The movie Gamer [2009] is the perfect example for such different cyber identities. In this movie, there are two types of worlds. In Gamer, it mostly revolves around one world, ‘Slayers’ , where players can buy a character and fight with him or her to the death by controlling the characters mind, through a chip implant, as some sort of a puppet. The characters are convicted felons on death row, therefore it is ‘ethically correct’ according to the world’s creator in the movie. The other world is basically the same as SecondLife, a game which is known in our society. People can create characters and socialize with other players. In this clip it can be seen that many people pretend to be someone else in cyber society than that they are in real life.

Slide 4

Now, we can question if this shifting from real life identities to made-up cyber identities should be accepted or that it could be ‘dangerous’ to our contemporary society. For example, what if people spend so much time in cyber society being their cyber-characters and preferring it to the real thing, that they forget about their real life. They could create cyber-fantasies to make up for the mistakes they made or problems they face in real life. When being so caught up with your virtual fantasy it could happen that you spend all your time, effort and even money on this life, while neglecting the real society. This can lead to losing your job, friends and maybe even family.

Slide 5

According to Sherry Turkle, a professor from MIT studying life in cyberspace for many years: “the internet allows people to build a new self or identity, by cycling through many selves.” In cyber space, users can experiment with different identities until they find what they like. Some users even split themselves into multiple identities, to portray several ideal-self images. Turkle also discusses the phenomenon of ‘gender swapping’, where men pretend to be women and also the other way around. This can be a consequence of users being curious of how it would be to be from another gender.

Slide 6

In the end, the question which arises is: “Which society is more real?” The answer to this question is more likely to be subjective. Every person has his or her own answer to this question. For some, the cyber world has taken control over them and they cannot live without it anymore. For others, the cyber world is a world yet to be discovered, or perhaps to be ignored. Of course there is also the majority of which can live in the middle, being active in the cyber world and having more than one identity, but are able to live with it and can still separate virtual from actual.