CREATING IDENTITES ONLINE
on Facebook, we have the opportunity of being somewhat more “our selves”. “Being ourselves” is of course an incredibly vague term, but in comparison with MySpace you find that members on Facebook choose a more “tidy approach”. MySpace has become a venue for several alternative personalities with fictitious alter egos and forms to present where you stand in relation to your surroundings. Here, avatars and nick-names are also more commonly used. The difference between those who, for example, use MySpace and those who use Facebook will probably become more and more obvious as time passes by, depending on the demands on content that we as individuals have to be able to call upon a
more and more precise image of ourselves. You can read more about the difference between Facebook- vs. Myspace-users in this article written by Danah Boyd last year. It shows (not surprisingly) that Facebookusers tend to be more “academic” than MySpace-users.
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It is probably in this respect that communities and the Internet in greater means will create more and more advanced and creative tools to help us users call upon our plural “unique selves”. So, the Internet doesn’t only give us the opportunity of presenting ourselves, but helps us create new identities. Identities that probably in some means also will affect us as individuals when logged off the computer’s social platforms and logged in to reality.