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Joining Your Online and Offline Lives
The Escapist this week is running an article entitled Anonymity is not Enough. The article explores the increasing overlap between online and offline lives. From the article: "Freed from accountability for their actions, some players seek to experiment with the more annoying sides of their online identities, becoming in-game griefers or forum trolls. On a more serious level, some use the protection of the screen to pull off scams that can cost unsuspecting players real money, or to stalk other players online (and sometimes offline as well). And for those honest virtual businessmen out there, anonymity can sometimes make it difficult to build the kind of solid reputation of trust that any smart customer looks for."
What the fuck are those and why does linux suck so much anyway you fags.
For most of /., it's hard to overlap into something that doesn't exist.
Obligatory PA: http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19 Fortnuately, real life is missing that anonymity, and has real consequences to real bullshit.
Fnord.
Really, what more is there to say on this entire subject?
+5 Sublime.
I'll have you know, I'm out at a bar on Mardi Gras RIGHT NOW. ...god, the shame, it's actually true. Damn, WiFi, damn it to hell.
Freed from accountability for their actions, some players seek to experiment with the more annoying sides of their online identities, becoming in-game griefers or forum trolls.
Sometimes habits picked up online leak out into offline life. This can include troll-like behavior, but is certainly not limited to trolling.
A case in point: in many online forums, people express themselves in ways much more vulgar than they ever would in real life. People gradually adopt expressions like "bitch", "cunt", (and so on) which they would never say out loud.
Or, at least, these people think they would never say these phrases out loud. But quite a lot of the process of word choice is performed at an unconscious mind, so before you know it, you can end up with Senior White House Correspondents accidentally using expressions like sloppy seconds.
The problem I see the most of is that many people have litereally no lives offline - their entire social world is in some Internet forum or chat room or such. A good number of these people have very limited social skills, and are very difficult to deal with.
It would be interesting to see some research done with regards to various forms of sociopathy and other psychological disorders that are expressed and / or magnified through "living online" (and this isn't being all holier-than-thou - there aren't a whole lot of people that are 100% psychologicially "well", whatever that is - I certainly won't claim to be).
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Printing out your pr0n!!??
truth!
What scares me is not people's anonymity, but usually two other things associated with it. The first is lack of anonymity, which can ruin a perfectly good game or discussion or quite a few other things. If people want to be assholes in a game or such, and they're sometimes allowed within the game's structure, then they can use in game mechanics to get back at them. But as soon as someone personalizes an experience, and takes it out on the person's real life, then it's not quite so much fun anymore. The PA comic below is a great example of that, tracking down the person's work and telling them that the person traffics in child pornography... not so fun. Or when a company uses it to track your online usage habits, tracking it back to you, and then direct marketing to you. Good times. heh
The other is the astroturfing. The assuming of multiple identities within a community for the expressed purpose of saying how great something is. Once this becomes common, it will become harder to decide what's getting good word of mouth and what someone is just spending money to make it seem like word of mouth. After all, with software, as soon as you bought it, you have very little recourse if it turns out to be the next Diakatana.
Gonzo Granzeau
"Nothing the god of biomechanics wouldn't let you into heaven for.." -Roy Batty
The anonymity between your online and offline life can be important. If i'm a gay-leather-fetishist or a homophobic-neo-nazi i may want to be able to express myself online without having to deal with the negative social repercusions in my real life, and i think that's an important aspect of the net that we shouldn't get rid of. However the members of those two online communities want to be sure that someone who shows up in a new forum (in the figuartive sense) is actually a member of their community and not a troll from the other one. Therefore what's needed is a way to build up a social context to "prove" your online identity is real. People who were concerned about who they admited to certain forums online could restrict them to people who had such cohesive identies and had shown themselves to be trustworthy. And of course if you're using such an idenitiy you can't spout the first thing that comes to mind without worrying about the social consequences.
Of course there would still be nothing stopping someone from taking the time to build up a false online idenitiy, or maintain two or more different online identities, but there's really not much stopping people from doing that in real life either. Nothing is perfect afterall.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
If you have 20 minutes to waste, this is a fun read that takes you through the author's experience with the game Eve Online. The author is a jackass for trying to pull off the scam, but the story is very engaging. I liked it, and I've never played Eve Online, let alone any othe MMORPG.
Religion for nerds. Stuff that really matters
Try explaining to your wife that "YES... I KNOW I told you we both could go out for dinner this evening. But that was before I found out the healer (or DD, or puller, or Tank, or whatever) had a flat tire and couldn't make it home in time to level last night, remember? So we postponed it to TONIGHT. Sorry, Honey! Didn't you get the link to the guild calendar I emailed to you?"
I loved the people I played with; such good times. But it created a real juggling act with real-life events. As fun as the game was, it wasn't worth the effort in the long run. I got tired of the overlap, and gave the MMOG world up, last fall. Never looked back. Life is great.
Your experience may vary.
VOTE!
My friend and I created a website Leetster to create precisely that bridge. Users create profiles in a manner similar to myspace, but providing real life information is highly optional. The site is focused on WoW players, and we have a broad spectrum of profiles from those that go all out with real life info, to those with all WoW-related content, to fake profiles and funnies.
Philosophistry
if any message deserves it, this one does.
Actually, that would be a fun idea for a tech business where people know the slashot-eque moderation system. Have a shirt with various moderations where people can "mod" the things you do or say over the day. In the end, see if you have 5 checkmarks for -1 troll, and 10 for +1 Insightful :-)
"Sometimes habits picked up online leak out into offline life. This can include troll-like behavior, but is certainly not limited to trolling."
I dare say that if someone's line of thinking is "muahahaha, I'm anonymous and have an audience, now I can act like a total fuckwad" (like in the PA comic), then that's their _real_ personality: a total fuckwad. It's not as much something they've picked online, it's something that they really were all along.
Maybe fear of repercursions kept them from doing that offline before, and forced them to act as if they're someone else. But in the end, it's not that going online made them develop a second personality. It just allowed them to drop the mask and act their real personality.
"A case in point: in many online forums, people express themselves in ways much more vulgar than they ever would in real life. People gradually adopt expressions like "bitch", "cunt", (and so on) which they would never say out loud.
Or, at least, these people think they would never say these phrases out loud. But quite a lot of the process of word choice is performed at an unconscious mind, so before you know it, you can end up with Senior White House Correspondents accidentally using expressions like sloppy seconds."
I'm not entirely sure what the point is there. They definitely didn't learn those words on the forums, unless they've lived under a rock since birth and never, for example, saw a Hollywood movie, heard a joke, went to high school, or generally interacted with humans. That correspondent probably heard that expression before IRL a thousand times.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I must now do this.
"Personally, I've always thought the same about alcohol."
Basically, yes, that's the idea. If alcohol "made" someone go punch the neighbour in the face or tell the boss a heartfelt "fuck you", chances are that's what they wanted to do when they were sober too.
And more importantly: they would have done it without alcohol or the internet too, if a time came when they thought they can get away with it. The history is full, for example, of times of anarchy when a whole bunch of people decided to go take vengeance on their neighbour because it looked like they can get away with it or find an excuse for it.
That's what I should have probably made clearer in the previous message: when someone starts being an asshole IRL too (or when sober too), chances are it didn't "seep" from their Internet behaviour into RL. Chances are they just don't care about the RL consequences either, or decided that those consequences are small enough to live with.
I've seen people go through such changes with no alcohol or Internet forums being involved. E.g., a timid "Nice Guy" (TM) geek gets promoted to management and starts acting like a flaming asshole. E.g., a nice manager during the dot-com bubble turns into a flaming asshole once he gets the idea "muahahaha, the bubble is over, I can finally wipe the floor with these guys and they won't quit during _this_ crappy period on the job market." Etc.
And my take is that they didn't just pick a bad influence on the Internet or at the pub or whatever. That's who they really were deep down inside all along. And what brought it to surface wasn't momentarily confusing RL with an online forum, but just deciding that the pretense isn't really needed any more IRL. They would have done it without the Internet just the same.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
It's better if you can see it... but I suppose having the computer hooked to a projected scoreboard or something like that would be equally amusing.