As I read Sherry Turkle’s article “Who Am We?” I was really surprised. I have always been aware of the different social networks, like MySpace and Facebook, that were available on the internet, but I was unaware of the popularity of MUDs, also known as multi-user dungeons. MUDs are “social virtual reality” rooms where people can meet online (Turkle). In MUDs people are able to create new identities for themselves. People can even create multiple identities for themselves. What was really sort of creepy for me was the fact that so many people create opposite sex characters for themselves in the MUDs. This goes to show that not everyone is telling the truth about themselves online.
Turkle interviewed many MUD users and received some different feedback. One user created his character to be the better part of himself. He formed a relationship with another user and even asked for her hand in marriage, though they had never met in real life. It seems as if Stewart, the man interviewed, had created his character to help him cope with and resolve his real life issues. Unfortunately, as told to Turkle, instead of the MUDs helping him with his real life issues, the MUDs just make Stewart feel worse. “He feels addicted to MUDs: ‘When you feel you’re stagnating and you feel there’s nothing going on in your life and you’re stuck in a rut, it’s very easy to be on there for a very large amount of time’” (Turkle). Stewart, like many other MUD users, has a hard time connecting his MUD character(s) to his real life.
As I said in the beginning, this is all very strange to me. I know that many people put false images of themselves on the internet, but it never dawned on me how many people actually do it. This article made me realize that I really cannot trust much of what I see on the internet, in the case of the different interaction sites. This article also made me even more uninterested in the MUDs than I have ever been before. I have enough to do in my real life that I cannot use MUDs or social networking sites as an escape. If I had to choose between one or the other, unlike people like Stewart, I would definitely have to stick to my real life.
If you would like to read the article “Who Am We?” by Sherry Turkle, please click here.
