Blog 5 Reflection on Identity in Cyberspace

CMC has created more than just an easy way to communicate from anywhere in the world. CMC has created a virtual space in which people leave there physical bodies and identities to enter a new world in which they are free to create a new self image.


Identity and deception in the virtual community, a research conducted by Judith S Donath, analyzes the issues linked to identity on SNS. It is true that once we are communicating through CMC we do not obey to the same cues that in the real world. We are disembodied and we are free to create a new identity, our web identity. SNS make it easy for us to create accounts in which we can choose our name, choose the picture we want to display and the information on ourself we desire to expose. Thus SNS's and other internet Forums give the users the choice to stay anonymous, of course from one site to an other anonymity is more or less provided. In educational or business mail accounts we often have to use a login providing our name and last name, like with colleges' e mail account, in which we most of the time use the first letter of our first name followed by our family name @school.edu. The whole issue that is caused by the freedom of anonymity is that it often leads to deception, people use fake accounts to deceive people without being recognized. Thus a man could be using the identity of a woman! It is not hard to understand how this could quickly escalade to very big issues like pedophilia, rape etc... Current events occuring through Social Networking site. The web is a new world in which people obey to new rules very different from the one we know in the real world.
It is thus important to try understanding how human communication and psychology is involved in CMC. In the second research paper written by Azy Barack and John Suler, Reflection on the psychology and Social Science of Cyberspace, we are introduced to a new field called cyberpsychology, this field isn't anything else than the psychological approach of human behavior when involved in CMC. Cyberpsychology explain that even though we talk about cyberspace, the space we are talking about is real, it is a place in which we go that is nothing like the real world but nevertheless is still a place. That is maybe why we use terms like world wide web, domains,windows, forums etc to call thoses places. In this place we communicate differently, we may eventually communicate with more disclosure and less inhibition, we behave in a very different way that we would have in a face to face meeting. This change in behavior is very important because it affects our real world identity, if you disclose your feelings on facebook, you still disclose your feelings to the world, and people you know will know things you would have never told them in the real world. I think facebook should be, if its not already, a field for a new research based on Cyberpsychology. This field of psychology is today evolving a lot, since humans communicate, or could I say "live" more and more in this cyberspace. Perhaps we can ask ourselves where is this new trend of communication and behavior going to lead us, could we reach a point to which someone basically creates himself split personalities and identities. The question "who are we"? was already mindblowing, hard to concieve and grasp today it is becoming even more complex.