During last weeks Intro to Digital Cultures class, our class was assigned a reading from Sherry Turkle’s book Life on the Screen. The specific reading that I will be referring to is from chapter seven, titled Aspects of the Self. Turkle starts out the reading by saying that “When we step through the screen into virtual communities, we reconstruct our identities on the other side of the looking glass”. Turkle tells us about MUDs (Multi User Dungeons) and how they started text based chats like AIM or chat rooms (which eventually lead to social networking like Myspace or Facebook). She goes on to tell us that MUDs gives people “an opportunity for self-expression, leading to her feeling more like her true self when decked out in an array of virtual masks” (Turkle). This is where the problem lies. When you are behind a chat log, it is easier to trust the words that pop up onto your screen. That is why relationships online move so much faster than IRL relationships. Because of this it is also a lot easier to deceive those who you interact with on the web. You can be a totally different person and leave all the cares of the real world behind “He could always begin with a clean slate. When he changed his character he felt born again” (Turkle). Like I said before, this can be a good or a bad thing. The thing that people do not realize is that your life on screen can affect your everyday life. In the Turkle reading, a boy named Stewart said that playing on MUDs had help him talk through emotional problems but it also caused a drop in his self-esteem. Many other people have negative consequences due to their online personas. The two main examples I shall use are relevant in today’s culture (since MUDs no longer exist).
The first being the story that we read in class called “An IM Infatuation Turned to Romance. Then the Truth Came Out” (http://www.wired.com/politics/law/magazine/15-09/ff_internetlies ). This article was from Wired Magazine and told the story of an Internet love triangle turned sour. The story tells of Thomas Montgomery (who was a 45-year-old ex marine) who pretended to be an 18 year old in order to communicate with 17 year old “Jessica”. Later on, one of Thomas’s coworkers, Brian Barrett, got involved in the affair. Heated emotions flew, and Thomas killed Barrett over jealousy. In the end, even Jessica was a fabrication of the real Jessica’s 45-year-old mother. The second story comes from a news story I came across a few years ago (which can be found here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HFsfDLCkfQU ). This is the story of a girl named Megan Meier. She was 13 years old when she took her own life because of an online relationship. The relationship was with a 16-year-old boy named “Josh” who met her through Myspace and constantly complimented Megan. But after “Josh” gained Megan’s trust he suddenly had an abrupt change of heart. He cursed Megan and told her “the world would be a better place without you”. This was the comment that eventually led Megan to kill herself. As it turns out, “Josh” was a fabricated character created by the mother of a girl that Megan had been having issues with at school.
While creating new personas or realities for that matter can be harmless or even helpful (like with the boy Stewart from the Turkle reading), the fact still remains that many people can use these fabrications to cause harm to others. Both stories stated above started with “good intentions” and fake personas but unfortunately both ended in tragedy. Because the Internet makes it hard to tell who is real and who is not, many are sucked into the virtual world, leaving their real lives behind. Both the murder of Barrett over jealousy and Megan’s suicide over her heart break greatly support Turkle when she says “how complex the psychological effects of life on the screen can be”. Don’t get me wrong, I love the Internet. I spend a lot of time on it. Yet I think that caution should be used because you can get sucked into a false reality, which can end in tragedy.
