Turkle's Identity Crisis

• Page 256 is where she talks about MUD's and how they are used to create online personae
• Turkle brings up Gergen's idea of a "saturated self" and how communication technologies create linkages between people's minds on page 257
• Turkle uses the metaphor for the self of a home page acting like real estate, and connecting to each other by linking many pages all across the world on page 259
• Page 260 talks about crossing a boundary online when adopting a persona, with people feeling a wide range of emotions, and how these online personae are able to ultimately create different notions of identity
• On page 261 Turkle brings in Dennett and his idea that having multiple personalities is similar to having multiple pages open at the same time on a computer, where the user has the liberty to move between pages at will
• Turkle talks about virtual spaces and how they might provide safe spaces for people to expose parts about themselves they previously hadn't felt comfortable with, which in turn will make them more comfortable in reality, on page 263
• Page 265 talks about cyborgs, how basically people are made up of body and mind
• Pages 267 to 268 talk about how virtual spaces offer a new way to think about human identity in the age of the internet
• On page 269 Turkle comes to the understanding that if we don't have a full awareness of what is going on with created personae on the internet, they won't be able to be used to enrich real life experiences

I felt that the discussion helped alot with understanding this reading better, mostly because I couldn't figure out in my head what a MUD was, and Brittany did a very good job of explaining the format and what it was used for. That was very helpful since the first several pages of the article talked about MUD's and identities created in those spaces.

We talked about how MUD's allow people to play around with many different masks, and it gives people the opportunity to have multiple personalities but remain coherent at the same time. This is similar to how people will usually act different in front of different groups of people, perhaps because of an impression they wish to make or a level of comfortability they are not at within that group. And it is important realize that people are always playing multiple roles through those interactions. We also talked about virtual reality as a transitional space, which tied in nicely to the reading. This was helpful in understanding the part of the article that talked about the woman with the lost leg, and how she really was able to come to terms with the loss of a limb by becoming comfortable with that part of herself in a virtual space first. This is also an important idea brought out in the reading that we talked about, where people are able to take experiences from the virtual world into the real world.