I hadn’t ever seen it connected to that term before, but the idea that people tend to create alternate, less inhibited personalities online is something I’ve just generally taken to be true, honestly. I mean–just look the fuck around us on tumblr–it’s everywhere.
Do I have any opinions on it? I mean…I don’t really think its something you can have an opinion on–it just exists. It’s a feature of anonymous spaces really–it’s just that the internet is a really big anonymous space. People create different persona all the time–I’m not the same person at home that I am at work, or with straight friends at a sports bar, or with gay friends at a gay bar, or online as a kinky sex-freak writer. But just because I can inhabit different masks doesn’t make any one of them more real than the others–they’re all real, and they’re all me.
I think it’s something that a lot of people are going to struggle with, as the barrier between online personas and real life personas begin to break down faster and faster, as the anonymous internet disappears (because lets all be honest–it is disappearing, and faster than any of us are really comfortable dealing with). I mean, this gets at the real issue, in my opinion, which is that technology at the moment is developing at an absurdly rapid pace, faster than any of us can really deal with on a psychological level, and very little thought is being put into the psychological effects of any of this. We’re all babies with hand grenades, basically, and there’s no adult in the room to stop the carnage we’re bringing on ourselves, on each other, and on our identities. It’s only going to get worse, and when it does, it will get very…disturbing.
Bracken's Corner 