Visual & Spatial: "The Online Me" The Internet and creating online Identities

It is said that the general public don’t have a voice, don’t have a say in what affects them as individuals. They are all the same and simply follow like sheep the main trend of the time not asking questions, not opposing what is told to them by distanced fat cats and aristocrats. Now, fifteen years ago I would have agreed with that, very rarely did the common individual get to talk to the nation and stick up for the regular “Joe” working the regular nine to five shift. But now everything has changed, the whole world has shrunk and allowed common individuals to become very powerful and manipulating, and you ask what has allowed this, the plane, the boat, the shuttle… The answer is the Internet, never in world history have so many different cultures, communities, and individuals talked to one another, spreading ideas and building friendships all over the globe. This has been done by various ways, but all are based on the notion of one computer being joined to another via the net, the Internet super highway.

One of the most popular ways of explaining yourself on the net is to create a personal homepage about yourself, your hobbies, your ideas, your ambitions, your problems, anything that your can dream of and want to share with the world. Many individuals do this, cancer patients, retired scientists, football fans, movie fans, etc. There are two types of personal homepages; the first is that of the author who wants to be “cool,” they often use stylish designed pages and comment on items and ideas that are in fashion at the current time. The other and more common is that where the author simply uses the homepage as a diary, gallery or journal of there life, including family and friends. The later is more common as the author doesn’t need any computing coding education to produce it; templates are available from providers such as Yahoo! Geocities and AOL. These then make the medium available to a much wider majority of the public and allow many people to express there ideas. The only problem though is that more often than not the personal homepage is simply an extension of the family album and ideas or problems with or for society are not discussed and brought to public attention. Blogs from such providers as Blogger also allow users to publish their ideas and reports on subjects, and even get comments from the readers on what they have just read. The only problem though with blogs is that they are usually too opinion driven and very rarely does one create a good, solid identity of the author.

Another and ever popular way of creating an online identity is that of the chat room. Chat rooms from such providers asMicrosoft and Talk City, allow any group of people to talk to each other anywhere in the world, with great ease and speed. For example some chat rooms that were present when researching this subject were “14-19teen,” “MarriedNLonely” and “Adult_Sexy_Flirts” to name a few. As you can see the chat rooms allow many people to discuss problems and ideas with other individuals who in turn can give support. One good adaptation of chat rooms is MSN Messenger, which I use on a daily basis. It’s a cross between chat rooms and email, and extremely useful when wanting to get in touch with friends. It’s basically just like texting service but doesn’t cost you money and allows you to send images, movies, sounds and most importantly allows you to create an online passport. You create a name, address, nickname, etc. and then talk to others over the internet. You can decide to be yourself or someone else, the choice is really yours and sometimes it is great fun to pretend to be somebody your not. For example many of times me and my friends have wound up others by pretending to be someone else, its cruel but really funny. Obviously though in serious situations this can be very dangerous and their have been many cases when individuals have come to harm when trying to physically meet fake online contacts. One amazing attribute though of chat rooms is the similarity between the text typed in by users and mobile phone text. For example “love” becomes “luv” and lots of laughs becomes “lol.” This nod back to mobile phone text style language is very apparent and at first on a large computer screen doesn’t look right. The reason for all this text style language I believe is down to the old notion of “coolness,” you see as mobile phone text language is seen as a young, modern phenomenon, older individuals adopt this kind of language in chat rooms to portray a “hip,” “cool” image of them self’s to others. As well as being places for the young and wanting to be young individuals to get together, chat rooms have a better purpose. They allow professionals such as scientists, from all over the world to talk to each other and discuss ideas and results. Allowing instant recognition and theories on important experiments and technological developments. Also fans of different genres can interact with each other often to their relief to actually find someone with same amount of interest in something as them. This doesn’t produce anything useful but allows individuals to talk comfortable between each other without having the feeling that someone will laugh at the views.