In the interests of reintroducing myself to this blog (which no one reads unless I am teaching IMS 201), I would like to present an idea that I have been kicking around for a while. In my office I have a copy of then Penny Arcade comic “Unreal Tournament 2004 Lends Incontrovertable Proof to John Gabriel’s Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory,” which posits that “normal person + anonymity + audience = total fuckwad.” The “total fuckwad” portion of this equation is very true in the world of online gaming, especially as experienced on Xbox Live. In fact, the level of racism and homophobia that occurs in Halo matches at any given time would seem to refute any notion that significant social progress has occured in this country in the past 40 years. However, the portion of that well-know equation that I take issue with is the notion that online identities represent anonymity.
I would argue that online communities have their own version of social capital that encourages members to create and maintain an identity. What this means is that, although community members may not know the “real” identity of the people with whom they communicate with online, the online identities are every bit as real. One would not want to delete their account on a message board, for example, and have to start from zero posts again after building up a reputation that allows their opinions to be taken seriously.
Post count acts as a type of social capital in many online communities. How many times have you read something along the lines of “why should I listen to you with your 20 posts?” So violating rules of forum decency and deleting an account with 3000 posts and replacing it with another one, although possible, means not having your opinion taken seriously anymore. Also, users tend to take on an identity in these online communities. They may have a single strong opinion (GM cars are the best, defense is more important than offense in winning basketball games, JRPGs are the only type of video game worth playing, etc…) or a specific role to play (bad puns or jokes in every thread, breaking trade news, complicated analysis of defensive systems, etc…). These online identities tend to be more narrow than “real life” identities and opinions are harder to change in online communities, but this makes them no less real. And to many active members of online communities, these identities may be as important as their offline identity, so losing this social capital does not seem like any more of an option than moving to another city after committing a social transgression. So, an avatar, userID or gamertag does in my opinion not represent anonymity, but rather a separate, more focused, identity that runs parallel to other identities that one may have.
Sorry about the half-baked post, but these are ideas that have been kicking around in my head for a while that I fully intend to explore in a more systematic way in the near future.
