Turkle Article

After our discussion in class last week about the Sherry Turkle piece "Identity Crisis" I was intrigued by reading some of the other blog posts about it so I figured I would do one too. Turkle focuses on the use of MUDs or multi-user domains. This includes games like World of Warcraft. I had a couple of friends in high school that played that game and I remember my other friends and I making fun of them endlessly. I personally have never taken part in any MUDs, unless you count playing on yahoo games. In the reading I was really surprised to hear that people created characters out of multiple aspects of their personalities and would have multiple characters. I guess it’s just a whole other world that I had never heard of or thought about.

I was very interested in the story about the girl that had lost her leg and used a character with only one leg to help her cope with her own loss. Through meeting other people who accepted her character with one leg online, she grew more comfortable with herself and it helped her gain confidence out in the world of real people. To me it’s really a good story and I’m happy that she found a way to deal with her loss and get comfortable in her own skin once again. I’m sure there are tons of stories like hers. It seemed to be fairly split among the class on the question of these MUDs having a positive or negative affect on society. I think my opinion lies somewhere in the middle.

I certainly think that people need to be able to get out and communicate with other human beings on a face to face basis and being online all the time with your 15 different characters can definitely be a hazard. But I also believe that every person should be able to do what makes them happy and makes them feel comfortable. If a person chooses to spend their free time online, and as long as it is hurting no one (other than, potentially, themselves), I have absolutely no problem with it. I believe what is most important is to find a balance between the two worlds. A person needs to be able to be themselves everywhere they go, whether it is online or at the grocery store and hopefully they feel comfortable doing that. I think the perfect example of that is the story of the girl that lost her leg. Through spending probably way too much time online by most of our standards, she was able to feel like herself again and able to appreciate herself enough to know other people could do the same outside of the internet. There were probably other ways she could have arrived at the same point, but using an online character was what she felt most comfortable with at the time and it obviously worked. It doesn’t really matter how you get there as long as you get there. Though she may still spend a ton of time online, she can also go out and be a happy member of society, and that is the most important thing.