Our real selves?

In a recent article on PitchforkMedia, Chris Dahlen talks about our imaginary friends online and how we ourselves create imaginary personas of ourselves online.

Dahlen talks about how jazz musician Eric Dolphy has a myspace and has over 3,200 friends. The catch — he’s been dead for forty years.

He goes on to talk about how even imaginary book characters have myspaces.

He comments on this phenomenon by saying:

“And real or not, those characters are walking around on the internet talking to all of us– like a Donald Duck at Disneyworld who can’t take off his suit because he isn’t wearing one. Having chugged some aspirin and gotten past the whole “they’re not real, but they act real, so let’s treat them as real” thing, we sit back and enjoy the time we spend with them. They’re our imaginary friends.”

He gets to the point when he says that we don’t play our true selves on the internet either:

“But here’s the best part: We don’t play ourselves on the internet either. If you take an alias in AIM or tell a white lie about yourself on your blog, you become a character. Like a lot of you out there, I keep a dozen fictional identities around the net, and it’s just no big deal. For example, in World of Warcraft, I’m a long-haired brunette who looks like Han Solo with breasts and likes to knit on the battlefield. Hey– that’s just what I see in the mirror. But you don’t have to be a gamer or a freak: As we slip deeper into virtual social experiences, online games, or just lying about sex on MySpace, we all gradually split from our real selves into our imaginary selves. Anyone with a desk job who spends all day online– talking to clients on the telephone, IM’ing friends out of town, or trolling message boards– has made the same dip into the shallow end of the virtual pool.”

I can only agree with what he is saying here. This is why I think social networking and virtual worlds can become an almost dangerous thing. Where is the line where we crossover from who we really are and who we “play” on the internet?

This is why I think virtual worlds like Second Life are, well, rather troubling. Have we really become so obsessed with this online persona we have created that we had to create a whole virtual world for them? Have we really become so bored with our own lives that we have to create new ones online?

What happened to the real world? Yeah, the one that’s actually outside all of our houses. The one where you can do pretty much everything you can do in Second Life (minus flying, of course).

I think we as people are slowly losing what we depend on: face-to-face interaction. The more we slip into these online worlds, the more we isolate ourselves from and lose sight of the real world.

I’m not saying all of these online networks and communities are bad, I just think we need to be careful.

Go outside, it’s good for you. (I really have had to tell myself that before).