Researchers interested in on-line identity have often turned to MUDs, for their role-playing culture provides a novel environment for exploring gender and other identity issues ( Curtis 1992; Dibbell 1993; Turkle 1995; O'Brien n.d.; Reid 1994). Many MUDs are primarily fantasy playgrounds for identity experimentations where players take on an imaginary persona and interact with each other in the virtual world's equivalent of the masked ball. Conversations here are live (synchronous) and ephemeral, their function primarily social. Thought identity is a major focus of MUD culture, it is identity as theatrical role, both highly mannered and expendable.
Unlike the fantasy world of MUDs, most of Usenet is meant to be non-fiction; the basic premise is that the users are who they claim to be. There is, however, a significant variance between newsgroups as to what constitutes a real or legitimate identity. And there are numerous cases of identity deception. Compared with MUDs, relatively little has been written about identity in Usenet newsgroups. Sproull and Faraj (Sproull and Faraj 1993) wrote about group affiliation and the establishment of trust in their discussion of newsgroups as affiliative, social environments; identity is also discussed in Kollock & Smiths' analysis of social control in Usenet (Kollock and Smith 1995). Much of the following discussion is drawn from my study of identity deception in Usenet (Donath n.d.); this work used anthropological methods and game-theoretical analysis to look at identity and identity deception.
Home pages on the Web are somewhat different. MUDs and Usenet are communicative environments in which identity is established within the context of a social interaction. Home pages are more like self-portraits; they are declarations of identity. Home pages are a recent phenomenon (the Web itself is only a few years old) and both the technology of the Web and the social structure of home page self-presentations are evolving rapidly. The following analysis is therefore a snapshot, based on the state of the world in the late summer of 1996; it is likely that the near future will see a very different Web environment. Relatively little has been written about home pages as a social phenomenon (at least within the academic community) and I will thus go into somewhat greater depth here.
3.2.1 MUDs
The opportunity to explore novel self-presentations is, for many participants, one of the main features of MUDs and other real-time conversation systems such as chat rooms. The appeal is both that alternative roles can be explored (gender swapping is a very common activity on almost all MUDs and chat environments) and that the identities can be abandoned at will.
Other researchers, pointing to the ease with which these transformations and experimentations are effected on-line, are more skeptical about how enlightening these behaviors are. O'Brien argues that the roles played out on MUDs are projections of the player's existing fantasies, that a man playing a woman on-line is not learning about what it is like to be female, but reaffirming his existing ``categorical assumptions'' (O'Brien n.d.). ``Disembodiment, far from being an occasion for stretching these gendered forms, may in fact result in more stringent attempts to (re)mark that which we have come to rely on as a primary basis for structuring interaction.'' In this interpretation, the sparseness of cues in a the on-line world leads to a highly stylized and stereotypical self-representation.
Both may be right. The role-player may be making a highly stylized mask out of the stereotypes of the real world, but over time this mask may develop into a complex alter-ego. The characteristics and reputation of this alter-ego are drawn not only from the real-world characteristics it references, but from its history within the virtual community. The player may learn quite a bit from the experience of constructing an alternate, bodiless, textual persona, but that knowledge may be about social roles and institution, rather than specific insights about the psychology of others.
In the virtual world, with no body to detain, no tangible being to hold responsible, reputation becomes the primary source of social control. Goffman ( Goffman 1955) said concern for reputation (or `face' in his terminology) ``make[s] of every man his own jailer''; it is the maintenance and enhancement of reputation that induces people to uphold the social order. He pointed out that in encounters with people with whom one will not see again, these constraints are loosened, and one is ``free to take a high line that the future will discredit, or free to suffer humiliations that would make future dealings with them an embarrassing thing to have to face''. In the MUD world, such constraint-free encounters are common. The player who is ejected for breaking the rules can jettison the offending character and return as a new one (Dibbell 1993); if the cast-off character had no real value to the player this forfeiture has little cost and is thus no deterrent. Cherny corroborates this analysis (Cherny 1995). ``Guests'', she says ``are a troublesome category''. Guests are visitors who enter with no character of their own. Sometimes they are simply new players, or they may be established players seeking to do something destructive while in a disposable guise. Having no long term commitment to the guest character, their actions are unconstrained by any concern for its reputation.
3.2.2 Usenet news
Identity is not the ostensible topic of most Usenet discussion, though it is often the subtext. People participate in Usenet newsgroups for a variety of reasons. They may be seeking information or companionship, advocating an operating system or a religion. As in the real world, their motivations may be complex: both the desire to be helpful and the desire to be noticed may prompt the writing of a lengthy exposition. With any of these goals identity - both the establishment of one's own reputation and the recognition of others - plays a vital role.
Participants also make an effort to establish their identity. Here, as in MUDs, reputation building is the motivation behind much of the effort put in by contributors. Signatures, which can be extensive, are useful both for immediate recognition (they provide a common visual pattern to all of one's postings) and for connecting one to an outside institute or to a net subculture. Signature styles vary significantly from newsgroup to newsgroup, reflecting the aspects of identity that are salient to the group. In many of the comp groups, which are technical discussions about computers, networks, etc., writers include detailed information about where they work, how to reach them, their title, etc. This is both a claim of expertise (I know this material because it is my profession) and an authentication of identity (if you don't believe my claims, you have the means to check up on me). Signatures are also used to establish one's ties to on-line groups, often using inside jokes and puns to make references that are comprehensible only by insiders.
The Usenet reader's picture of the other participants is also being filled in by the Web. Postings are now often signed with a pointer to the writer's home page. Whereas the archives present a documentary recording, the Web-based home page presents a crafted self-presentation, showing how one wishes to appear. The home page may reveal the writer's age, profession, race, hobbies, family life, religious affiliation, etc. - a great deal of social information that was, for the most part, previously unknown in the Usenet community.
This ``comic theater'' - the result of mistakes in identity cues - happens easily on-line. For example, it is very common for people to assume that anyone, unless they have evidence to the contrary, is a man. Assuming a woman to be a man, they are likely to misinterpret the tone and sense of her remarks, for they will be interpreted as if ``performed'' by a man. As the Web and Usenet become integrated, social framing information such as gender will be easily available to the participants in a conversation.
3.2.3 Home pages
The Web did not start out as a social technology: it started as a way to distribute physics papers. It has swiftly evolved far beyond its original academic domain: today, there are pages that represent giant corporations and pages that represent grade-school children. The Web contains short stories, reference manuals, price lists, pornographic pictures, classroom assignments - the list is growing to encompass every aspect of human endeavor. Its emergence as a social technology is marked by two phenomena: the rise of the personal home page as a necessary part of on-line presence and the ongoing attempts to introduce interpersonal communication to the Web's publication-only model. The latter is the focus of Chapter 4; here, I will look at the home page as a sociological phenomenon.
Home pages are deliberate self-presentations, places where people
present their credentials, whether as established research scientists
with impressive vitae and selected bibliographies, or as electronic
trend-setters with eclectic web links and obscure lists of outrageous
bands. Pages, like individuals, vary greatly. Some are elaborate
creations, others simply a few links and an apology for the meager
offerings. Some are stiffly formal, reading like the cover letter to a
resume. Others are almost embarrassingly personal, detailing the
owner's emotional states and family psychodramas. A common home page
format contains a bit of personal information about the subject, a bit
about work, and then a list of favorite links. The choice of personal
information is often shaped by what one can say with links: ``I like
coffee''
with a link to an on-line coffeepot or ``I was born in Wisconsin'' with a link to
the state's page. Still, even the blandest self-description can be
revealing. 
From graduation dates the reader can infer age, tone of
voice can be heard through even the briefest sentence, and photographs
show gender, race, hairstyle, facial expression - the basic clues of
first impressions. The list of links is particularly revealing. Good
Web citizens provide links to the Perl info page, the beginner's
guide to HTML and a search engine or two: they want to
help and encourage their fellow page builders. The distinctive Blue Ribbon Campaign for
Free Speech graphical link - one of the 10 most common links
on the Web - shows a political stand. Teenagers on the Web have the
electronic equivalent of the black concert T-shirt: links to Wired, to
Anime galleries and to their favorite chat sites. For the home-page
builder seeking to create a self-portrait in hypertext links, the Web
provides a vast and varied selection.
Goffman, in his classic work The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, distinguished between the ``expressions given'' and the ``expressions given off'' (Goffman 1959). The former are the deliberately stated messages indicating how the one wishes to be perceived; the latter are the much more subtle, and sometimes unintentional, messages communicated via action and nuance. His use of a theater metaphor - interactions as performances - to describe daily life is very useful here because it emphasizes that people are always playing some sort of deliberate role. Our impression of others, whether face to face or on the Web, is an interpretation of the face they have chosen to present. Certainly, in a setting such as the Web, in which the presentation is carefully and self-consciously manufactured, control over one's self-presentation is greater; still, there is often enough material so that the viewers may read into it more than the writer intended - the ``expression given off''. The choice of links, the tone of the text, the contents of photographs, etc. provide cues that resonate with our real-world knowledge.
Self-presentation in the physical world is not limited to one's immediate personal appearance. The home, for instance, is another arena in which cultural categories are expressed and status claims made (McCracken 1988). Indeed, the metaphor of ``home'' in ``home page'' is a useful one. Though a home page provides little in the way of shelter, it is, like the home, a site for constructing an expression of identity through an array of objects, both self-made and acquired, decorative and functional.
Csikszentmihaly studied which objects in their homes people cared most about.
[W]e found that each home contained a symbolic ecology, a network of objects that referred to meaning that gave sense to the lives of those who dwelt there... to be effective in conveying meanings, the owner had to be personally involved with the artifact... the owner had to enter into an active symbolic relationship with it. (
Csikszentmihalyi 1991)
Some objects, he found, have value for their subject matter, such as photos and home made items; others, for the personal events they represent., such as souvenirs. Some consumer goods such chairs, tables, posters may become meaningful to their owners through long use; others are valued because they represent a goal or ideal - they express who the owner would like to be [9](
McCracken 1988;
Leiss et al. 1990).
The objects on a home page represent a similar span of meaning. There are personal objects, such as photos and text written by (and about) the author. Links to external sites are very often presented in the context of their personal meaning: the author's university or favorite TV show or hobby. And, like the home, some items are there for the owner's use: 8 out of the top 25 most linked to sites on the Web are to search engines (GNN 1996). (An interesting note is that while some pages present these as links the author uses often and keeps there for references, others politely present these utilities on the home page as being for the convenience of the visitor, much as a host offers his own chair to a guest.)
Today, there are an increasing number of ``consumer goods'' on home pages: pictures and applications that were not created by the author, but acquired from an outside source. These range from clip art divider lines to applications such as search functions and guest books. One result is that the pages are much more `visual'. Though the result is often a cacophony of graphic links and backgrounds and doodads, the pages are becoming more distinctive, compared to the sedate, unending landscape of grey-backgrounded text of a year or two ago [10]. The growing complexity permits emergence of certain types, such as the ``guy who has to have the latest of everything'' - frames, tables, java applets - the virtual equivalent to the audiophile. As there are more choices, the pages can be more evocative - there is more opportunity to gather an ``expression given off''.
One problem that faces many home page creators - and that highlights one of the big differences between this self-presentation and a real world identity (or even a MUD or newsgroup persona) - is that the home page is static and, initially, disconnected. There is no ``situation'' in which it acts. What will get people to see it - how does it become part of the interlinked network of the Web? The following advice is from a home page in Singapore:
How to make your homepage known:
1.telephone as many people as you can and tell them your homepage's address.
They are two ways to make your homepage known. They are,