Friday, 6 February 2009
selves and others online
The internet certainly offers the chance for people to express themselves in ways they wouldnt otherwise. There has been much coverage in recent years about people who become someone else when they are online. On Channel 4 recently there was a documentary following people who spent their entire days logged into cyber sites, and virtual world websites. These include sites like papermint.com, which encourage people to create themselves in computer form and communicate with other users online. This is seen as unusual, and the more contemporary and popular forms of social interaction are sites like Facebook and Myspace. These allow people to share thoughts, feelings and photos etc. It allows people to show their character, show others photos and videos of events they have been at, and write about common interests and show personal relationships and chat to friends. The obvious ciriticism with this is that people can tamper with their identity, change characterisitics, and manipulate others into thinking they are someone else. People can hide behind a virtual character, which presents a problem to others. For me, the game The Sims is what has provoked this trend in virtual games and sites. Does anyone agree or disagree?
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I definately agree. I used to spent hours a day on 'The Sims' and to be honest the main reason for this wasn't because of the entertainment that it gave me but to escape my own life. So yeah its fair to say that i was hiding behind a virtual character.
ReplyDeleteSometimes these games can lead to extreme cases where people cant distinguish these virtual environments from reality. This can be related back to games such as 'Grand Theft Auto' or 'Manhunt', whereby people started to reenact what they saw in the game into society. Tobe honest though i think that if you do things like that, you have to have something wrong with you. Thats my opinion anyways.