By Karissa Kilgore,
Staff Writer

Imagine you have a friend named Bob. You know him pretty well: he�s a docile, laid-back guy, who is friendly and well mannered. Bob tries to maintain a B average, is active in a couple groups on campus, plays on a sports team, and calls his mom three times each week. Imagine finding Bob�s Facebook profile that claims he�s a �drunk on campus,� goes to your school just because he plays a sport and gets financial aid, cheats and doesn�t care, swears like a sailor, posts pictures of himself drunk with his roommates, and could be considered racist and sexist by his list of personal quotes. Wouldn�t that be surprising? You don�t know Bob at all, now, do you?

There�s a perpetual question when it comes to the idea of an online identity, as opposed to what others see everyday: why is an online identity usually so different?

The Internet is not a private place to have a separate, �freer� identity. Posting on a blog, a LiveJournal, a message board, or even Facebook leaves an open door to one�s real life. Evidently it�s taking a lot of real life experience and trouble to get this through to some people.

Students at Syracuse University created a group to discuss their dislike of a teacher. The teacher is a graduate student at the university. Who has rights? Whose rights are violated? Are rights violated in allowing this activity or by disciplining the guilty parties? These questions are common concerning any incident that parallels this. However, I think the question that needs asked is, �who are these people, really?�

Maybe it�s a na�ve question, but with the growth of technology and its expanding usage in life I don�t think that people represent themselves very well in their online identities.

My assumption in all this ranting is that people (mostly students) typically do themselves a disservice by creating ulterior identities that do not parallel with how they behave outside of their Internet communities.

I would venture to guess that the women at Syracuse who created this group �bashing� their teacher are not terrible people (I could be very wrong, though). More than likely, I think they were frustrated with their teacher and wanted to do something to express how they felt about her and her class, which led to the creation of the Facebook group.

Why create a Facebook group about such a thing? Listing the groups you belong to in Facebook is an identity sketch. Who you are, what you like, who you associate with... it sums up a person before you know that person. And if you don�t know that person, you might decide, based on that manufactured personality, whether or not to associate with that person.

It�s all the same, too. Facebook and many other online communities allow people to develop and define a �self� through these means of listing groups, activities, preferences, and more. Of course a list of things is not enough to define a real person, but what if it contradicts who that person is in real life? How is this different from listing activities and personal qualities on a job r�sum�? What can be believed?

It�s the same idea with what happened at Syracuse: students sometimes use the Internet�s services for purely social reasons�building profiles and group memberships to establish themselves according to a social trend�and forget that nothing on the World Wide Web is private. Anyone can see how you act online, and anyone that knows you well enough can see if it�s different from how you behave in real life.

Why does the Internet spawn so much dualism in people? I am not a psychologist and I won�t try to be one, but this is a concern of mine. Trying to represent yourself online as you are in daily life might be difficult. What frightens me is the thought of a negative list of Internet identity traits aligned with a person who identifies with those honestly and truly.

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Categories: Columns | KKilgore | Opinion