Internet Identitiy

The concept of “field site” receives a lot of attention in Tom Boellstorff and Christine Hines accounts of how to do ethnographies either on the Internet or with an Internet component. Boellstorff seems to feel strongly that an online community can be a contained field site, without taking into account the “actual” world at all. Hines, on the other hand, frames online communities as “actor networks”, which mediate interactions with the outside world. Both approaches have merit in my opinion. The interesting part about the Internet is that we can live in it, as many people involved in Second Life seem to do, or we can live with it. In either case, the presence of an online element in our daily lives is significant to our culture. The Internet has changed how we actualize ourselves, by providing us options outside of the constraints of the physical body.

In Boellstorff’s Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human, he makes it very explicit that his research did not concern itself with the “resident’s” offline lives. As a result of this lack of inquiry into the person sitting at the monitor, all his anecdotes are touched with the awareness that the avatar may in no way represent the person or persons talking through it. I found this to be very intriguing, particularly as an explanation for why a person might want to immerse themselves into a virtual world at all. Though Boellstorff describes a few special features which demarcate the SL world from our physical reality, such as flight and teleportation, the most significant enhancement it provided seemed to be a completely mutable identity.

In Kenji Yoshino’s book Covering: The Hidden Assault on our Civil Rights, Yoshino describes the difference between a mutable and immutable identity. Immutable identities, like race, can be the most challenging to live with precisely because they are so permanent. Identities like gender, which we know to be mutable, can also feel similarly burdensome because of their perceived immutability. A virtual world provides a space where none of that holds true. Though the options are of course limited by the scope of the virtual world, a person can chose aspects of their avatar regardless of their actual identity. Furthermore, these traits can be altered. This experience seems remarkably freeing in a world where society places so much value on the aspects of ourselves we cannot change. With their avatar, a person may chose to engage in discussions about politics, sex, or any topic in the world, but in a way they never have before. I would be interested in the anthropological and psychological potential of this aspect of virtual worlds. The fact that it isn’t addressed in Boelstorff’s particular book just shows how much more room there is to explore in the anthropology of the virtual.