It's Time Now

As my essays are far from finished (to be honest, some of them I haven't even started on yet) it's about time to get in the swing of it. These last days my thinking has at least been quite cooperative, and I have now almost too many topics to choose from. One of the assignments is about virtual communities, and I find that to be a very interesting phenomenon. Angela Thomas has written a very good text on that subject, and reading it made me think of the mechanisms that come in to function when you're exposing yourself on the net. I think it has a lot to do with identity, and how we want to present ourselves. And also (obviously, since I'm reading Freud this semester) the net is the perfect place to explore and express your hidden desires. Let's say you're a fairly stable person with not that extreme need nor ability for fantasies and imagination, what you leave behind on the internet will most likely be fairly recognizible as yours, but out there in cyberspace there are a lot of, and I mean innumerable, examples of people who uses various approaches in disguising themselves. For very different reasons I must add. Many, and possibly me in the scrutiny of self analyze, just takes the opportunity to adjust the reality a little simply by holding back the more undesirable traits, in an attempt to look, well, good. And others have far more sinister agendas. In pretending to be something else you can just as easily as in real life gain someones trust and then betray them in one way or the other - or even worse! Recommended reading: Rape In Cyberspace by Julian Dibbell