As soon as you enter the online world, you are no longer yourself. Your identity as a human being is stripped from you and reformed through your interactions with everyone else online. So who do you become? Are you the same person that you are in real life? Or do you change, do you become someone new?
The question of identity online is a fascinating one. If I want to, I can be a thirteen-year-old boy in Nebraska, or a sixty-year-old woman in Tokyo, or a blind girl in Australia. It doesn't matter who I actually am, what matters is who I want to be.
So how much of our identity is constructed by the way we look and the way we speak and what we do, and how much of it is an unchangeable part of our personalities? How much stays with us even when we exist only in ones and zeros and pixels?
I'm asking a lot of questions and giving very few answers.
Here's a few:
Answer: For a long time, I thought one of my favorite fanfiction writers was a girl, only to find out much later that he wasn't. I just assumed, because I didn't know anything about the person and most of my other fanfic-writing friends were girls.
Answer: I can know the intimate details of a person's life and know nothing about them at the same time. Through reading someone's blog, I can learn where they live, what they do, what their favorite color is or how many kids they have or when their birthday is. And at the same time, I really do not know that person. And they may not know me.
Answer: 42.
Answer: A lot of people online thought I was a guy, simply because of a username that I was using. After all, you have no idea what I look like. It's up to you to figure out who I am.
In this world, gender and age and ability and appearance disappear. Fantastic, innit?
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