"Identity Playground"

The internet provides a sort of playground for identity exploration. Its grounds for “identity play” include online dating sites, online gaming and online social networks all of which allow their users one particular benefit…anonymity.

The nature of the internet allows anonymity to all users by placing a barrier between them and the person/group they are communicating with. Internet is effectively the middle-man.
Because of this barrier people feel the freedom of not being judged for their appearance, gender, sexuality, ethnicity etc.

The anonymity gifted to online dating users and online gamers however is somewhat different to the anonymity had by social networkers.
This is because with online dating and gaming the people you are communicating with are complete strangers who would have no idea if you were to outright lie about aspects of your identity, for example, your age, job, income, height.
In a review of the online dating site OKCupid, it was revealed that both men and women tend to exaggerate their income levels by around 20 percent, that in real life men tend to be two inches shorter than they claim to be in their profile and finally that people over the age of thirty tend to display a picture of themselves that is over a year old.

One question to be raised is exactly how much “identity play” is possible through online social networks such as Facebook.
The people we communicate with on Facebook are largely friends and family who would know if we were to lie about ourselves, this visibility serves as deterrent to the extreme cases of false identities happening in other forms of new media.

As a result of this, other forms of “identity play” have become prevalent on online social networks.
One example is the creation of differentiation as talked about by Hugo Liu in Social Network Profiles as Taste Performance.
Differentiation is when someone deliberately makes themselves appear different to others, in other words, to stand out from the crowd. This is done by listing their particular ‘likes and interests’ with the knowledge that other friends and connections will not list the same things or let alone know the bands, films etc that they are listing.

Is this strictly “identity play”? I believe it is because people are still knowingly shaping others’ perception of them and their identity.