Coming of Age in Second Life by Tom Boellstorff

In a chapter of Tom Boellstorff's Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human, Boellstorff explains how many residents behave in the virtual world of Second Life.  "Against views of online technology as inevitably alienating, virtual worlds can provide contexts for self-fashioning--techne in its most basic sense."  He explains that these sort of multi-user dimensional (MUDs) online games were capable of being more than "inevitably alienating" online games.  He goes on to explain how residents use Second Life as a way to be their true selves and not pretend.  Some residents explained how they felt they did more "role playing", and acting in the real world, than they did online.  They were able to use their avatars, or a screen name, and could be who ever they wanted, but Boellstorff argued that many chose to be their raw selves and self-fashion their identities.  Virtual worlds like Second Life were around to allow residents to experiment with themselves in a real life platform.  Some may view computer gaming as a way to separate from the real world, but actually its a way to build upon one's self.

When I was younger, I used a chat room much like this one.

When I was around 13 or 14 I stumbled across this chatting website,  The website was meant for chat boxes, but there were hundreds of different chat boxes and at that time, many of the visitors did role play.  I learned my way around this text-based virtual world and role played with people.  While I was online, I used a screen name and tried to be the best me I could be.  We would play out different scenarios, and reanimate television shows.  It was geeky beyond embarrassment.  However, I never realized until now, that I was self-fashioning my own identity.  When I hopped online, I tried being only myself, but there were certain times when I wanted to help people more than usual, or be extra silly, or lovey-dovey.   I trying out different aspects of myself to see how the other users would react to me.  At that age, I began being a little more adventurous in real life like I was in the chat rooms.  It was weird, but it worked.

Boellstorff makes a great point when he says that there is a permeable wall between real life and virtual life, since residents portray their raw selves in the virtual world.  In my experience, I was able to fashion my own personality in the chat rooms and groom them until I used them in real life.  Only now, do I realize that I was using the chat rooms as a place to socialize and a place to practice real life socialization.  Much like Boellstorff says,  I used the virtual world as a mechanism to experiment with other aspects of my personality and I could "see" how others reacted to it.  In my case, I did not experience alienation from the real world, if anything I encouraged myself to go through the real world.