As ist seems, this journal entry is about second life, although it doesn't say this explictly. Obviously Turkle states that people seek to create different personalities online which they cannot become in real life.
I'm surprised how happily she accepts the fact that people do this. To me this says that there is something wrong with society. I don't simply see it as an escape, I see it as compensation for something that these people cannot achieve in real life.
Why would I want to use different languages in online communities? Manipulate people? What about friends that share connections in these different communities? Trying to explore the self I would expect these shared connections to join in exploring each others different facettes of the self in the different communities we share. It sounds to me like virtual shizophrenia.
(page 647 column 1, 1st paragraph)
I am saying that the many manifestations of multiplicity in our culture, including the adoption of online personae are contributing to a general reconsideration of traditional, unitary notions of identity. Online experiences with "parallel lives" are part of the significant cultural context that supports new theorizing about nonpathological, indeed healthy, multiple selves.
How is this healthy? A symptom for unhealthy identity is the effect of war games on computer gamers. Obviously this other identity gamers adopt for the game session can take over on real life. When this is possible with gamers, why is it not possible with other personalities users of parallel virtual worlds experience online?
The way I understand this report, Turkle does not see computer users in front of a computer anymore - they are in the computer. Holding psychoanalytic and computer culture as a joint venture would mean to accept the artificial world of the computer as a given reality.
I am thinking of people exchanging comments on Youtube. Controversal videos spark verbal fights pretty quickly, while others don't make viewers comment at all. Is this another reality? Or is the web a playground? Can we really take written emotions, or decisions to make a software react in our favour, as worthy to be psychoanalysed?
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