After finishing the readings, the thing that stood out to me was how dated some of the jargon used was. "Snerts, MUD's, and a couple other things are terms I'd not heard in my decade or so of internet usage. It's because the internet has changed quite a bit from the days when the article was written. The advents of social networking, IM, youtube, and other such things have made the internet much different than it was in '96. now we have more advanced acronyms like MMORPG.
(My internet experiences back then pretty much were me logging on to AOL, and then signing off when I realized that all the content at nickelodeon.com would take around 15 minutes to load. )
Back in the day, when most people still used AOL, and IM wasn't a widespread means of communication, chat rooms were like a huge novelty, and one of the key features that the internet had. Chat rooms are where the stories of people talking to other people, pretending to be other genders come from. Chat rooms were a more mainstream thing, before they got the stigma of places that only scary perverts hang out. Now because of internet predators, and the general weirdness of other people, most people stay away from chat rooms and use more private lines of communication. So to come in contact with those who would switch genders in their online personas, one would probably end up on sites of ill repute.
In it's infancy IM was more of a way to hold conversations with random people one met over the internet, than it was just a way to converse with friends. There weren't all the security measures, like spam filters, and IM blockers. it was more anonymous, and impersonal. You could just go through the AOL database and IM another user with similar interests, so you never really knew who you were talking too. Now the focus has switched from doing that, to only talking with people you know, with there being waring messages against talking to strangers when you install the program.
The reason that people act the way they do online, has to do with the complete anonymity of the web. You can be a jerk, and it doesn't matter, cause you'll most likely never meet the people you bother online. I really don't see it as there being much more than that; one can act upon their impulses with little or no repercussions.
I have already said that in the years since the articles creation the face of the internet has changed. I think it has gone from, as the article shows a separation of online and offline selves, to a great integration of both. You just have to take a look at facebook.com to see that.
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I remember being on IRC (Internet Relay Chat) for a long time before AOL came out. I could be a jerk, chick, wizard, wind surfer, whatever. Then AOL came out, and that was cool, but I think I got booted off that pretty quick. For swearing, not for being a perv. But you're right, it was the anonymity of it all. I went through the brief phase (which some people never get out of) of picking fights and saying "I'm gonna hit you in the mouth with my boot" to someone who was 3400 miles away, because, Hell, what were they gonna do? Come kick my weak ass? No way. But that lost it's entertainment value after awhile.
I think you have a really good point. Most reputable internet sites do not even have chat rooms anymore. I think the articles are a little out-dated. Most people are beginning to use the internet for more worthwhile reasons. For example we have instant messengers that allow us to only communicate with people that we know. The internet has also grow so that we have greater protection against people who would pray on others. Education pertaining to the internets use has also been widely broadcast so that most people use it more carefully. I think we have come along way, and we are learning from past mistakes.
It's definitely true that online and offline lives are quickly becoming difficult to separate—Myspace and Facebook are perfect examples of that. But it's also important to note that there are still many people on those sites who experiment with their identities, changing minor aspects of their personalities or even creating multiple profiles that they use in different ways or at different times. As Suler points out in his article, "People vary greatly in the degree to which they are consciously aware of and control their identity in cyberspace," and I think this is crucial in fully understanding him. Although it may seem that people's online and offline identities are the same, we often make imperceptible changes to our self-presentation. Just as we act differently depending on whether we're with friends or family, in a book store or a night club, we also alter the way we act (or present ourselves) between the real and online worlds.
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