A response to Anna's Blog

I had a look at Anna’s blog post in which she spoke about Denise Carters Living in Virtual Communities: An Ethnography of human relationships in cyberspace. Anna’s main focus was that as the internet becomes more accepted and used as a commonplace part of society, online identities and interactions and those in the real‑world will be viewed as equally valid.

Anna asks: “Don’t we behave similarly online to the way we behave offline?” and really, in short the answer is no. We act differently in part due to the sense of anonymity or separation we feel online, which Amila blogged about[1]. As Anna points out herself, social codes constrict the way we behave and interact in the real world. Similar codes do exist on-line but the separation that we feel from our online identities means that these are never normalised to the same extent. In this sense on-line life seems to be more free.
I don’t mean to be totally negative in my response, overall there is a strengthening of ties between online and what I’ve been calling ‘real-world’ life, after all the internet is no less real than anything else. But I can’t agree with Anna saying that “the traditional view - that what’s real and tangible is more valuable than what is virtual and intangible - can’t be applied to online ‘living’ in any kind of meaningful way.” There are admittedly more and more purely online identities, people only or primarily known through their online interactions, but the basis of credibility for an online identity still lies in the real world, maybe in university diplomas, geographic location or even celebrity. Take as an example Salam Pax, The Baghdad Blogger, a good writer in his own right but the reason he became as well known and respected as he did was that he lived in Iraq.[2] Even on Wikipedia people with some claim to ‘real-world’ knowledge, such as university diplomas, are valued more highly than others in the discussion forums. Its rare that the same credibility in the real-world can be earned through online interaction.
I’m not sure about the assertion that, as the internet gets more widely accepted, what’s ‘virtual and intangible’ (online interaction) will be given more value. It seems to imply that it will still be viewed as a distinct entity from the ‘real-world’. Rather it appears to me that the two will become less distinct from each other and that the sense of separation that we feel when online will begin to fade, meaning that our online and real-world identities will become more congruent.
[1] Amila’s Shroom 4000 blog http://shroom4000.blogspot.com/2007_05_01_archive.html
[2] http://www.abc.net.au/foreign/content/2006/s1697895.htm