Race in cyberspace plays a major role. Just as the other articles state, anyone can be on the Internet. When someone is on the Internet you are just a mind. To others online when they read information they do not think of a physical being. With this in mind, there are ways to show identity. Race and identity causes a person to think differently, I think.
As Nakamura writes in Race in for Cyberspace, different sites and chat rooms use things to create identity. For example, in the LambdaMOO site there are characters that can be created with gender. It has four different genders that can be picked from. They also have different images you can pick from to describe physical features or ethnicity.
I have seen this myself. I have been in a chat room once and you really don't know who these people are. You can think you are talking to a 25 year old girl going to college, but in reality its a 57 year old woman trying to relive your youth on the Internet. Why would someone do this? They do it because they can. They do it because online no one know who you are, what you look like, or how old you are. People only know as much as you tell them. So someone online can really be no one online.
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4 comments:
Wait you mean that 25 year-old college girl I was chatting with last night may have been 57! OMG!
It is funny to consider how easy it is for someone to conceal their true identity on the net. The first thing that comes to mind is how rampant myspace was with fake profiles trying to direct you to elicit and/or phishing sites. They seem to have improved this though with captcha technology and spam reporting. Thank god! LOL.
Haha. I'm extremely amused because I was that girl when I was twelve. I would get into those chat rooms and pretend I was sixteen (the "cool" age). I would find pictures of pretty girls on the internet and play them off as myself. It's sad to admit, but still funny to think how I, a 6th grader, could pull off being a sophomore in high school. It makes you wonder what the guys on other end, talking to this "sixteen year old", really cared about most to not even realize I was twelve. Maybe they were lying too...
I kind of just assume most people on the internet are liars. :)
It can definitely be empowering to get connected in a way that doesn't have to involve any physical characteristics that represent you. To be able to be completely anonymous or to be somebody different all together and form relationships like that is really amazing. It is also kind of scary. you know? I've watched a show on dateline a few times called "to catch a predator" where these sexual preditors seek out supposedly young kids to have sex with. It just seems so crazy to me that when they meet in person, neither the preditor or the victim are even close to the representation they had of themselves on-line. Anyways, that just crossed my mind when I read your post.
Yes the race will cause you to act differently, but also cause other to act different. The net will always be one area that we are able to create and be another person...this idea of living another world in another persona. This is a virtual way to live our fantasy we can’t act out in reality.
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