I have often pondered: Do we stray from our real identities when online? Do we become different due to the extended amount of freedom or anonymity we are given on the web? I suppose it depends on the person. However, in my experience I have found that my personality is exactly the same online as it is offline.

In today’s online social world, we become members of different communities. We make names for ourselves in these communities and contribute to them. We meet many friends around the world, share videos, stories, and pics from our lives. We invite these friends into our worlds because as humans we still share a need to bond with others even if it is only a virtual bond. People today lead lives dedicated more to their StumbleUpon networks or Warcraft guilds rather than to their real life families. Therefore what good would we be doing by deceiving our community? We are leading virtual lives today. Many of us spend more hours online each day than offline (I know I do), therefore we should cherish these new bonds we created. Perhaps the real question we should be asking ourselves is: “Do we stray from our real selves when we’re offline?”

Thanks to Yaniv Golan for the amazing pic.

Technorati tags: identity, net identity, flickr, web, freedom, anonymity, community, online community, social networks, stumbleupon, warcraft

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 29th, 2007 at 3:28 pm and is filed under Community, Online Identities, Web 2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.