Online Identities

Identities and our sense of self emerge from our earliest experiences and are based internally on what others think about us. Some of our identities are formed at birth such as your sex, and others such as your faith, can be inherited or adopted from your family and culture. We also have a choice in shaping our identities and in the online world it makes it very easy to change your identity to be seen differently. This can be both good and bad in my opinion. The ability of being capable of changing your identity gives a person a chance to be seen differently or heard differently, then they probably actually are in person. I believe that online when it is not necessary to state what your gender or ethnicity is, most of us would assume that the other person talking is a white male, when actually the person could be part of a minority group. I believe that I also possess this same prospective because it is a part of my heritage, and it impacts the way I shape others identities that are otherwise unknown online.

In other Internet interactions where having the ability of changing your identity can be seen in a negative way would be for example in some online chat rooms, social networks and dating sites. Here, being able to change someone's identity is dangerous because people sometimes choose to use the ability to change their identity in a negative way, unlike changing it in order to be heard. Some examples of this are when teens are talking to strangers online and then begin to create a more emotional relationship with the person on the other side of the screen. When they decide to finally meet up with that person who they thought they were talking to online, that person usually ends up turning out to be someone completely different, and in most serious cases, someone who is very harmful.

From my own personal experience on social network site such as Facebook or Twitter, I will only interact with the people I believe to be legit. If a person chooses not to have a profile picture or a little blurb about himself/herself, I am more hesitant to interact with them because they are limiting the amount of information they share with you and they are then perceived even more as a stranger. The information that we choose to share on the web on sites such as Facebook, have a major role in developing our identity. The way you talk online and the things you choose to post or talk about all have an impact on the image you are leaving for yourself. Recently, I have heard of companies usingFacebook as a place to gather free data about certain market groups, and they do this by collecting data on what sorts of things people choose to "like" on Facebook to help them get a better understanding of their market.

Having the internet as a place to converse with strangers can be done in a safely manner, as long as you always take precautions, because even though if what they say and tell you about themselves sounds to be real, it just may not actually be the truth. The Internet gives us the freedom and even the confidence that we may not have if we were to have the same interactions in person. Being able to create your own identity empowers you to be heard in ways that might not be possible in real life interactions. This all just goes to show that even though we believe we now live in a country where everyone is seen equally, we actually still have a long ways to go.