Gap between Muds and Real Life (Session 5)

1)The idea intrigued me most in this weeks' reading was about facebook. Expecially, the research that how people show their identity in off-line anchored environment was interesting.

According to this article, people show them differently whether the environment is anonymous or nonymous. For example, MUD is anonymous environmnet, people establish "suppressed or hidden true self" or "unrealistic ideal self" whereas they establish "real self"in real face to face environment. Facebook is online environment, but it's not anonymous nor nonymous because its off-line anchored relationship.

As a result, in Facebook, people present them in nonymous settings, because most of their relaionship is based on the real life. However, they try to construct group-oriented identity, show their popularity (wall posts from friends), well-roundedness (descriptions of one's interest or hobbies), and thoughtfulness. So it's called "hoped-for possible identities" which is people would like to be, but have not yet been able to be.

After I read this article, I compared it with my facebook self, and I found out that this makes sense. For me, it's been about two months since I started using Facebook, but I usually try to present myself in a positive way. I think that's hoped-for possible identity. For instance, I try to make more friends, and show my interests and hobbies through wall, but, actually almost all of my relationship is anchored in off-line environment, I think I usually show "real self" on Facebook, and that's also "true self" of me. I think that I establish quite similar selves, when I'm in real life or anonymous life.



2)The article "Aspects of the self" is talked about MUD(Multi-User Domains/Dungeons). I never heard about MUD before, but it is really appealing that it can be used as psychotherapy. In this article, there are many cases of solving problem in real life using MUD, and some of the people overcame their problems through participate in MUD, but some of them couldn't.

But I don't think that it's a good idea to use MUD for psychotherapy, because it can't be a fundamental solution. The author pointed out that "MUDs offer parallel lives" which means real life is one of the many windows, so MUDs players easily go into one life and then others. But is this good? I think people, who spend 8~10 hours a day in MUDs, might confuse real life with simulation life, and one can think RL is just one window, so they don't take it seriously. If they don't like RL, they can just shut down RL window. Also,it is almost impossible to connect MUDs life and real life. Even though one can communicate with people in MUDs life, Real life is totally different. In MUDs the only thing people have to care about is text. However, in real life, there are many varables such as apearance, body language, and other situations surrounding people. I don't think they can easily adapt themselves to real life, as we can find from the Robert's case. When he decided to visit Kasha-his virtual girlfriend, he said that "She had a great personality over the computer. We get along pretty well. BUT I just didn't want someone coming to live with me"