Nakamura and Turkle Responses

"Race In/For Cyberspace: Identity tourism and Racial Passing on the Internet" by Lisa Nakamura

The internet offers people endless possibilities for communicating with each other. It enables us to control how we are portrayed and represented. Our "self" online may be completely from our true self. We feel we are given more power with creating our own identities online. I don't think places like LambdaMOO are very healthy atmospheres after reading this article. These places let users create characters for themselves. It seems that people just make up someone else. Is their personal identity so bad that they have to create some false person and sit online in a cyberworld being someone else? It's almost scary that people dedicate so much time to these fake worlds instead of just living in the real world. People create their own description; therfore, no one knows the true you. The idea of not mentioning race at all was interesting to me because they want to cross over racial boundaries temporarily and recreationally. It seems like a good idea, though if you can make everything else up, why not just add in race and make that up too. They spoke of the idea of tourism and surfing the web, and how it allows people to travel from their computer screens. It links people to each other in new, different, exciting ways. I found the idea of the incorporation of computers into the white collar workplace diving the line of work and play to be interesting and hilarious because all day my sisters and dad send me forwarded emails from work. They send those forwarded "celebs in wisconsin" and ones that are scary and trick you. I always question them, shouldn't you guys be working? So that was really funny to see mentioned in the article because it hit close to home for me. I don't think the cyberspace communities will ever really take over because they are so far from reality. Sure they are fun for people to spend time doing, but in the back of their minds people must know that they need to get back to the "real world" at some point.



"Who Am We?" by Sherry Turkle

I found it very interesting that she pointed out how the computer has changed so much even in 15 years. 15 years ago it was only used for typing, nowadays it does anything and everything. I'm sure no matter what you were trying to do, somehow it could be done on a computer. I think that programs like Sims and MUD allow people to belive in non-life. It's almost as if technology has taken over and made us all robots or something. We all rely so much on our computers. If the internet is ever down I'm the first one to freak out about not being able to check my emails. I feel like the internet and these types of programs make us unattached from life. We don't know what's real and what is fake anymore. Our "self" is taken over by these "characters" we create. We begin to want these characters to become real, we want to be like them. We idolize these characters, feeling that they are better than ourselves. I just feel that virtual reality has gone too far and some people blur the line between real life and cyberlife.