Not the Great Pretender

     During my brief experience in second life, I tried to operate much as I would in my real life. I chose a realistic avatar, or at least as realistic as I could get it to be
in the time I had and with all the problems I encountered in using the program. In continuity with my real life, I entered the virtual environment of Second Life with a pretty open mind, and tried to behave as normally as possible. I approached "people" honestly, and with my usual default setting of giving people the benefit of the doubt in tact. I found out the truth of people's intentions much more quickly in Second Life. This was probably due to the fact that, in discontinuity with my typical real-life behavior, I freely followed people places, or accepted invitations to visit their homes. Since these people posed no physical danger to me in my real life, sitting in my chair at the computer, I felt that I needn't fear them. Interestingly, it played out much as I thought it would, and the virtual slime-balls behaved much as their real-life counterparts would behave, I assume, if I were as foolish in real life as I was free to be in Second Life.
     Once it became clear as to the type of "person" I was dealing with in this virtual environment, I felt much more free to dispense with all social niceties that I would undoubtedly "keep-up" for a bit in real life, despite the fact that the "person" had offended me. In SL I would just pop-away, or immediately de-friend them, not caring one bit what they would think of me. So, I was tougher, more brash, and I was more free to do exactly what I wanted. I didn't care so much about being polite. I was less mindful of others in general, because I didn't regard them as real "others." To me, they were all just little bits of animation. I was not scared, I did not worry, and I felt no need to be self-aware.
     The concept and reality of the avatar itself did not affect how I felt about myself online. It truly meant nothing to me. It seemed like a silly and indulgent toy. However, the avatars did seem to affect how people interact socially when they are online. The avatar masks one's identity, or perhaps for some, it amplifies it; but either way it provides a measure of anonymity that affords a great deal of freedom - especially to those who otherwise are repressed in any way. It seems that people are more forward and somewhat shameless. They are more assertive and expressive in terms of their appearance. They indulge inclinations that they may otherwise have hidden or suppressed. They wear what they wouldn't dare in public. They become uninhibited. Therefore, perhaps they interact more freely.  It is apparent that most people do have a desire to connect with others, which is a good thing, but the problem is that the quality of that connection suffers in this environment which precludes true emotional intimacy and almost encourages a sense of dishonesty.
     Identity in this SL online environment seems to be less about "who I am," and more about, "what I want you to see." Because of this, identity becomes much more about presentation and performance, and much less about experience, existence, and feeling.  Lost is the individual made up of one's particular historic and enduring dynamic location along the spectrum of human emotion.
     Perhaps it is because of personal experience that I have no need for make-believe. Perhaps because of my not quite concurrent, but certainly overlapping, decades of psychotherapy, spiritual growth, and expert psychopharmacological treatment, I have perfected the art of self-expression to the point of having nothing that is left unexpressed. Or, maybe I just don't like to play pretend, but I still distinguish between virtual social interactions between avatars and physical social interactions between people by virtue of the fact that the former is fake and the latter is real. I think that this is as it should be. Unfortunately, I suspect that many people don't. They may confuse their interactive role-playing online with real and meaningful social action. This, I believe, is very dangerous. The last thing we need in our virtue-starved society is to further blur the already amorphous and decidedly permeable membrane of a line, that we barely have drawn, between the notion of right and wrong.