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."

Comments

Re:Forum trolls?

[SoCalDissident]

If only we could make people wear (Score:-1, Troll) T-shirts, it would save us a ton of time, especially at work. Better yet, a tattoo... -1, redudant T-shirt for twins...? or, a (Score:-1, OffTopic) bumper sticker for distracted cell phone talking SUV drivers... I would RTFA, but it's blocked by my work filter. So, not only does my job interfere with my offline life, but also with my online one...

I don't think so, really

[Moraelin]

"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.