2.7.2. Total Freedom: the Concept of Virtual Identity

Technology is beginning to mediate our social relationships, our self identities and our wider sense of social life to an extent we are only just beginning to grasp.- Mike Featherstone

In the internet nobody knows that you are a hobbit. - The Cyberhobbit

We come to see ourselves differently as we catch sight of our images in the mirror of the machine. - Sherry Turkle

To view the world as hyperreality, a world of simulation, a virtual reality to which one stands in a relationship similar to a drug user-relationship has massive impact on postmodern identity constructions.

Most of the research conducted about virtual/electronic identities is available about internet-technology from the 80s. Especially applications like the online-conference-system IRC (Internet Relay Chat) and online roleplaying games MUDs (Multi User Dimension or Dungeon) become analysed.

In these virtual spaces of communication, which are still very popular today, it is possible and very popular to fake identities. You can pretend to be somebody else with another name, another age, another race and another gender. You can find under IRC-users very bizarre identity-constructions. Very popular is cross-dressing or even being a double-agent, men who play women pretending to be men and vice versa. This all is possible because the identity construction happens on a level of simulation. You construct your identity through creating your own digital narrative.

This is still a very simple form of creating an electronic identity but it shows already one of its main-possibilities, the possibility of creating whoever you want to be in simulating an identity. There are people in the IRC who develop the same character which is very different from their own identity for months and so start more and more to think and behave like their alter egos. There are psychological risks in doing this, for example loosing the contact to your own body by gender-swapping but there are also the possibilities of learning to understand a different position.

More radical becomes the construction of identities in the virtual playground of MUDs. "MUDs are dramatic examples of how computer mediated communication can serve as a place for the construction and reconstruction of identity." (Turkle 1997: 14)

MUDs and all their similar counterparts like MOO, MUSE or MUSH are text-based role-playing games inspired by the face-to-face role playing games Dungeons and Dragons, which swept the game culture in the 1970s. MUDs are like an interactive novel with sometimes a quite difficult plot. The aim is normally to solve some secrets or fight some dragons.

They are a 'new kind of social virtual reality', where you act by typing commands on the keyboard. Every user has to create a character in the beginning, which becomes referred to as one's persona. Everything for this character is possible. It does not have to be human or one of the known genders. You can be a superhuman or a rabbit. "MUDs provide worlds for anonymous social interaction in which you can play a role as close to or as far away from your real self as you choose."(ibid: 183) As these personae are just digital narratives, there even has to be no carbonbased being on a keyboard behind them. "Some leave behind small artificial intelligence programs called bots (derived from the word 'robot') running in the MUD that may serve as their alter egos, able to make small talk or answer simple questions." (Turkle 1997: 12) Electronic identities offer the possibility to replace parts of your identity through artificial intelligence. When you are in a MUD, often enough you are not even sure whether you talk to somebody real over the keyboard or whether it is just an artificial intelligence answering you. This has also the effect that parts of one's identity only exist in these MUDs, only exist in cyberspace and this part is growing and maybe can even replace the real part to a great degree.

Electronic identity constructions challenge the traditional concept of an authentic, stable, to-be-the-same-with-the-self identity in a radical way. "MUDs, like other experiences in cyberspace, blur the boundaries between self and game, self and role, self and simulation. One player says, 'You are the character and you are not the character, both at the same time.' and 'You are who you pretend to be ... You are who you play.'" (quoted by Turkle 1996: 157) With this roleplaying game it is possible to be different identities and personalities at the same time. In Turkle's research these roleplaying games act as an example for the rise of new identity-constructions which she refers to as distributed identities. Each of the identities lives in a separate window on the computerscreen.

"As a user, you are attentive to only one of the windows on your screen at any given moment, but in a certain sense, you are a presence in all of them at all times." (ibid.: 159) Real Life (RL) is just one more window and so this way of thinking about identity has also influenced the way RL-identity is thought. "Windows have become a potent metaphor for thinking about the self as a multiple, distributed 'time-sharing' system. The self is no longer simply playing different roles in different settings, something that people experience when, for example, one wakes up as a lover, makes breakfast as a mother, and drives to work as a lawyer. The life practice of windows is of a distributed self that exists in many worlds and plays many roles at the same time." (ibid.: 160) MUDs act in this sense as a virtual playground for RL.

As Sherry Turkle concludes, the ability of 'being digital', that we can live through virtual personae, means "two fundamental changes have occurred in our situation. We can easily move through multiple identities, and we can embrace -or be trapped by- cyberspace as a way of life." (Turkle 1997: 231)

IRC and MUDs is pioneering technology in the internet, but as the technology advances also the aims advance. MUDs as social virtual realities offer possibilities to create virtual identities and you can act through them by communicating. MUDs are only textbased, but their graphical counterparts (MOO, MUSH or MUSE etc.) become better and better. In some of them you can create your own 'avatar' (virtual body) and walk through three-dimensional environments e.g. WorldsAway at http://www.worldsaway.com or The Palace at http://www.thepalace.com). The creation of even more realistic environments like the Metaverse described in Neal Stephenson's science-fiction-novel Snow Crash, where you can use specially designed helmets, goggles, data-gloves and data-suits to intensify your sensations is only a matter of time.