"Every Home Is Wired":
3 -- The Progressive Rock Community on the Net
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Presentation and Perception of Online Identities
All this inevitably leads to the question of identity on a text-based network, then. As Marc Smith notes, "in a virtual world participants are washed clean of the stigmata of their real 'selves' and are free to invent new ones ... . Escape is not total, however, participants are revealed in virtual communities, they ... give signals as ... in face-to-face interaction, but with a far more reliable mask" (n. pag.). We have already seen how individual users attempt to overcome initial feelings of anonymity (feelings which echo the findings of early CMC research) in excessive as well as reasonable ways; generally, as they become familiar with the newsgroups, it is likely that their online identities will gradually emerge to other members. Bit 63
In the meantime, however, "in the absence of FtF cues and prior personal knowledge about one's partners, whatever subtle social context cues or personality cues do appear in CMC take on particularly great value. CMC partners engage in an 'overattribution' process; they build stereotypical impressions of their partners without qualifying the strength of such impressions in light of the meager information ... on which they are built", as Walther points out (24). This can lead to misunderstandings and conflicts which are largely unnecessary. CMC participants must therefore be able to keep their perceptions of other users flexible and to accommodate new information, or communication will be negatively affected.27 Bit 64

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© 1998 Axel Bruns