Your Virtual Self, and its Battle with You.

     The virtual world is very attractive. Its ability to lure in so many from the real world is due to a major factor: you being behind the screen. This simple fact grants endless possibilities, advantages and loopholes when it comes to interacting and connecting with others over the web. The main idea to communication is presenting yourself in a particular manner to deliver and receive news, information or thoughts. What the web provides is this ability to present yourself in a manner you can control and edit, should the desire come up, without the excess baggage of live, interpersonal drama and feelings. It grants this overwhelming sense of invincibility, where you may proceed at a pace that satisfies you completely and with a persona that doesn’t necessarily define your entire being. The screen placed between you and the virtual world is provides the chance, the opportunity, the power, to control what you say and how you interact at a distance you deem safe enough. It truly is something so enticing that people can’t help but to get hooked onto the internet.

     Sherry Turkle, social and personality psychologist, gave a TED Talk in 2012, “Connected, But Alone?”, to relate the extensive usage and reliance on technology and the impact on people’s live, personal relationships. She laments on the lack of intimate, real connections people make with themselves and others due to the great appeal of the virtual world, where people can “customize their lives”, as Turkle puts it. The idea that “the thing that matters most to [people] is control over where they put their attentions” is easily solved by the Internet. On the web, you can manage information uptake, friend circles, familial connections, hobbies, different lifestyles, and most importantly, output. As you gain more and more control over your activities, without having to keep in mind appropriate word choice for particular occasions, how the person across from you perceives you and whether or not you have something stuck between your teeth or slapped across your face, you start to become more confident in this online self. With greater confidence, there is less worry on how you have to present yourself to the world, less concern over others’ judgemental looks or comments and less need to consider other people.

     With the development of a virtual persona, a person’s sense of humility, and sometimes, respect, declines. The ability to retouch on your faults, insecurities or differences in “the face, the voice, the flesh, the body”, as Turkle lists, is so rewarding, to portray yourself in the light you want to be seen in, that the need to hold back no longer exists. Why be modest now when not only has the window of opportunity opened, but you are being pushed through it? And that is exactly how Wilde Cunningham are living their lives out on the web, or Second Life that is. Second life is an online virtual world, where people may create avatars as they desire and interact with others. The online environment is constructed to how the person sees fit, extending the possibilities of carrying out life to whole new levels. Wilde Cunningham is the avatar constructed and shared by nine “special needs” residents from the Evergreen Center, in Massachusetts. These people are all physically disabled, some affected by cerebral palsy: John G., John S., Mary, Scott, Micah, Nicole, Charlene, Danny and Johanna. To use Second Life, they are assisted by a care worker, Lilone Sandgrain, who is able to interpret and transpose their utterances or gestures, communicating with them, and delivering their words and feelings to the virtual world. Something that was physically impossible for these nine residents, walking, was made possible by Second Life through their avatar.

     James Wagner Au, blogger, talks about his connections made with Wilde Cunningham on his blog, New World Notes, in the post “The Nine Souls of Wilde Cunningham”. He explores the take Wild Cunningham have on Second Life and its impact on them. For them, “‘in Second Life they are on a equal setting and [others] don’t see the handicaps’” commented an online friend of Wilde. The handicap is both physically and figuratively overlooked in this case. Friends of Wilde, who know about their nine contributing members, once having gotten to engage in typical conversation with them, find themselves not even thinking twice about the physical differences. Not only is it because on the web, there is a loss of the actual person, where the persona becomes visible, but also because the nine can perform the same activities as any other person online. Everyone gains an equal footing online, to start afresh and however he or she wishes. This lets people go all out, to showcase the best parts that they want, without having to worry about real life consequences, because like how Sandgrain said, “Second Life frees [people]. [People get to] miss a lot of the bad things real life has”.

     Modesty is something definitely not conserved in the virtual world, but sometimes respect can’t be either. Respect for others declines as the mindset that everyone is doing what they want online, without a care for the next person behind the screen, who more often than not, is a complete stranger, dominates. There are no feelings of sympathy for other users of the web; no one feels the need to provide sincere emotions because feelings on the web are just words, images or videos from a persona. It’s a harsh way to look at things, but in the general sense, that is how the virtual world runs. It delivers the power to transform into whoever or whatever you wish for without having to consider the feelings of another person, because that person is just another stranger weirdo like you behind his or her screen who’s just trying to do his or her own thing too.