Online Identity and Role-Playing

In the readings this week, I was most intrigued by the discussion of identity as a consciously shifted state in IM communication. In particular, the concept of windowing—as Stern summarizes it, the communicative practice employed by “a person who ‘distributes’ himself or herself into multiple online conversations and acts differently among the conversations, taking on different roles all at the same time” (Stern 8)—stuck with me, as it was a behavior I could recognize in myself and my own habits. Before reading Instant Identity, though, I had never really thought of it as a behavior, or at least not one to note; it was simply how you IM. But now that the point has been raised, I find that I can’t stop finding instances of it in my own online habits (I have a window for talking to my dad, which is different in tone from the window for talking to my study partner for class, which is different in tone from the window for talking to a friend about poetry recommendations, which is different from talking to another friend about Batman, and so on), or then questioning what this says about me. Do I so clearly compartmentalize all of these relationships in the offline world? Probably not, as doing so would be considered rude. And what does the fact that this behavior of multi-tasking friendships is not considered rude online say about the dynamics of the internet as a social sphere? At this point, I’m not entirely sure, but it’s definitely a subject I will be further researching, and yet another reason why applying theory to my real-life experience is one of my favorite things to do.

Also, one point that I kept coming back to in reading this section was how this analysis would apply to the settings of online role-playing games, or RPGs¹. I don’t have a lot of experience with RPGs, but Stern’s proposal that windowing allows us to shift which aspects of our identities we are channeling at any given time in the context of IM instantly made me think of them. While I don’t think Stern was suggesting that we literally adopt different identities for different online interactions to the extent that is the aim in RPGs, there are still, I feel, connections to be made here. Obviously, RPGs are a conscious play on the issue of the fluidity of online identity. In such extreme play, we can see, similar to the girls and their hompis in the “Go Cyworld!” article, how we create alternative identities in other online interactions, and which aspects of cultural constructions we may adopt and/or challenge, knowingly or not, in the ways we tailor these identities to their specific situations. In a way, then, all online interaction arguably becomes a role-play setting—it’s just a question of whether we acknowledge it as such, and what information about ourselves and how we conceptualize online social space we can then gain from this (lack of, as this also tells us something) acknowledgement.

¹I am more familiar with the text-based community games that require players to interact with each other through the personalities of the characters they have chosen to play (as opposed to, say, team-play games like World of Warcraft, where players create characters to carry them into the interactive sphere but still play their own personalities, and not necessarily that of a mage or elf, once they are in that sphere), so that’s what I’m referring to here.



Works Cited

Stern, Shayla T. Instant Identity. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., 2007. Print.