This past week we read an excerpt from Sherry Turkle’s book “Life on the Screen”. The chapter we read was titled identity crisis. It talks about how life in virtual communities can help introduce people to the many different lives within themselves. She explains that there is no longer individual notions of self and that we are actually multiple personalities. I personally disagree with pretty much everything that this article argues.
I can sort of see her point that, as she states, “you can have a sense of self without being one self.” I understand that people have different personalities when they are around different people and placed in various situations. However, I feel that if you get involved in some online community and make up five different personalities for yourself, no one you meet online will really know your true personality. I just don't see how creating random characters can help you figure out who you really are. Also, I think that people often get much too involved in the online personae because they view it as an escape from the real world where maybe they don’t have many good relationships. Rather than working on improving their REAL life, they are spending time in a made up life so they can ignore their real problems. I think many people involved in MUDS and WELLS are insecure and have trouble with social interactions so they make new personae whom they like and where they don’t have to physically interact with people.
Later in the chapter Shelly describes a young woman named Ava who lost her leg in a car accident. She made a character on a MUD who, like her, had one leg. It then goes on to tell how Ava had sexual relations online with her virtual lover. This, in turn, helped her to accept her own body. I think that if Ava had just found a real person who accepted her just like her virtual lover had, then she would have found that having sexual relations with that real person would have led her to self acceptance in the same way. I really don’t think that the fact that it was in a MUD had anything to do with her self-acceptance. I think that people need to just spend more time working on real-life relationships and their personal development in the real world rather than using the internet as a safety net.
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3 comments:
I see what you're saying, but I think that some problems are very difficult to deal with in real life. Not everyone has the opportunity to confront their problems head on. The web can be a safe place to deal with it.
I agree with you in most of the aspects of your argument, especially that people should not replace the real world with a virtual world. However, I think that as long as one does not become obsessed with being online, and if they really enjoy it, why not?
I definietly agree with your take on this. The web (contrary to what people were saying in class) is not the "real world." When you wrap yourself in this type of virtual reality, you lose a big part of what distinguishes us between being human and being a machine. In this virtual reality, you might see the person, but you cannot touch them or hold their hand, you cannot listen to their voice and hear the emphasis they place on certain words and notice their quirks. It is an un-reality and if anything, I think that it makes an individual anti-social. That's why we see internet-addiction as something just as damaging to a family as alcoholism. A lot of people are more accepting than we give them credit for and diving into the internet to get help for such a problem isn't truly solving it, but rather still hiding from it...there's a big difference.
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