Identity Crisis: The Management and Responsibility of Online Personas.

This post is a response to the article "A Rape in Cyberspace" linked: http://www.juliandibbell.com/articles/a-rape-in-cyberspace/ and the article "The Sock Puppet Who Loved Me" linked: http://www.slate.com/id/2178820/

Adopting new personas is nothing new in our world. Older writers would adopt pen names for a number of reasons. People throughout history have claimed double lives. The fantasy of new personas is expressed widely in the stories of super-heroes in comic books. The internet as a new creative medium is simply another form of expression that can allow people to take on new personas. But in this case, there's another element.

That element to me is hard to explain, but in essence it expresses a much deeper level of truth and emotional attachment than any other medium where new personas exist. This becomes very apparent in Julian's article, describing the emotional response from the victims of the "cyber-rape" as being very similar and yet very different from victims of actual rape. I do not mean to imply that the feeling is the same, as in actuality I believe they are completely different, but nevertheless those people at LambdaMOO felt violated and attacked. As I read the article I was confused and a bit astounded by how invested the people of that group were in their characters, in their personas. This investment came to the point that, to paraphrase the article, the drama and issues of the online world became just as real to them as the drama and issues of their lives off the internet. I don't know what the lives of these people were like, or how the internet became a part of it, but based on my experiences I could barely relate to them. To be honest I'm having trouble explaining what my point is, so I'll try to show it with an example.

Let's take the event that occurred and put it into a different perspective. I associate with a lot of people who actively play role-playing games, similar instances where the players (or in the case of the MOO, users) create new personas and act out the character's life based on established rules. To me the LambdaMOO seemed very much like an online Role-Play. In most Role-Playing communities I had participated in, the kinds of actions perpetrated by Mr. Bungle would have at best been ignored (with the perpetrator ultimately being ignored by the entire community at large) and at worst would have lead to the "toading" that had occurred, but with much less debate involved (where instead of debating the idea of some form of self governing MOO, the users would simply request that Bungle be banished). Perhaps it is because I speak from the mind of a different generation but in scenarios like that the emotional attachment still exists. For instance I genuinely care about the characters I create but it tends to come with a detachment that they are just fictional ideas, and I guess I couldn't really relate to the emotional pain that the "victims" seemed to be going through.

But I guess that's the point of it all. It's a matter of perspective, just as if I was participating in the MOO during that time I probably wouldn't have had that much of an interest (at least not one to compare with the people who treat it as a second life) in what was happening. Would have I been offended by the Bungle incident? Absolutely. But the detachment I tend to carry with any online persona I make would have probably had me shrug it off after a day or two and just move on, or if the rules of the MOO forbid people from just ignoring what happens continue to participate with the same detachment I always carry. While I can understand the emotional investment that can come with fictional situations (I've had my share of characters in books and movies I really wanted to succeed) I suppose I don't share the same type of investment with online persona-users.

Moving on to the other article, to be honest I've heard stories like this before. Not just in news articles but even from rumors circulating around my high school. The creation of fictitious people has changed with the advent of the internet as much as creating any work. The main difference with using social networks as the tool is that for all intents and purposes the person, unless identified as otherwise, will appear real in every sense of the word. In standard fiction a character is made "real" by their actions and believability. This doesn't mean the reader of the character necessarily believes the character to be a real person who they could walk up to on the street and talk to, but it means that the reader will acknowledge the legitimacy of the character and will believe that the character's actions are plausible in either the real world or the world that the character resides in. The difference there is that usually the creator of the character does not do anything to make the character seem real in the sense that they exist in a material tangible way. The end result of a character who by its nature seems to be a real person is that "readers" will not have the immediate detachment that normally accompanies the reception of a fictitious character. This can be used for good or bad purposes (in the case of the article I'm referring to, very bad) but either way a hefty responsibility comes with that sort of ambiguity.

I've always been an advocate of individual responsibility, and in this case I don't feel very different. When Lori Drew created the Josh Evans persona, she probably didn't realize the weight that a perceived real person could have on Megan. Let's say that instead of the myspace prank, Drew was in fact an author and she wrote a short story about Josh Evans and Megan. If Megan read it, and it was written to hurt her emotionally, it would have most likely succeeded, but in my opinion, it wouldn't have had nearly the devastating effect that the "real" person Josh Evans had on the girl. By understanding from the beginning that Josh was a fictional character, Megan would have become at least a bit detached from the story. The biting words in it would have still stung, but they wouldn't have had as much of an impact. What happened was this: By creating a fake persona in the immediate guise of a real person, Drew opened a window to Megan's heart that most if not all standard characters of fiction usually close simply by being fictitious. That window caused Megan to become much more emotionally attached to the character and when the character turned on her it broke her heart.

Responsibility must be taken into account when making a character, regardless of the reasoning behind it. Especially now with the internet blurring the lines of emotional detachment, it falls on both the speaker and the reader to understand the nature of creating online personas. If you let yourself become too attached to your persona, you can fall victim to someone who abuses that emotional connection. And if you don't understand the impact that a "real" person can have on another you can cause serious harm without intending to. The online identity crisis is a problem that will most likely not be solved for some time due to its fairly young age, and because of that we need to tread cautiously in the world of online personas, so as to not forget who we really are.