Happy Brithday!, 3/03

Today in class I really enjoyed learning more about Poster's writing. One quote that really stood out to me was the one about virtual identities and communities.

Poster states, "What is at stake in these technical innovations...is not simply an increased efficiency of interchange... but a broad and extensive change in the culture, in the way identities are structured". (531) This is important because this is our life now...I hadn't ever really focused on how my generation is much more different than my parents but times definitely have changed. I think it's incredible, yet a little scary at the same time, that someone can completely make up an identity over match.com and fool everyone into thinking they are someone whom they actually aren’t. In my Gender Adaptations class today, we discussed virtual identities seen in Japanese dating-sim video games, and the fantasy of acting out these characters. I’m not a big “gamer” but I have played some videogames in my time and it’s astonishing how far they have come. Last year in CMC 200 I watched a final project movie on Grand Theft Auto and it’s effect on people. It’s scary real! I couldn’t believe they have hookers, drug deals, guns, car crashes, gangsters, and all this stuff that we can personally act our for an hour—or for however long and often we want to play. I can see why many parents do not approve of their child partaking in these activities. Especially in Grand Theft Auto…it teaches them violence and let’s them engage in behaviors and actions that there parents would most likely not let them behave in.

I think our obsession with texting, IMing, facebook/myspace, online dating, skype/email, and all the other new cultural phenomenon’s are so popular because we have evolved into a culture that loves to be “hyper –stimulated” as Habermas would say. These are new developments…and it keeps getting newer… faster. We are a society that wants the newest thing and the fastest device. I think having a “virtual identity” gives us this kind of “escapeism” from our everyday world (reality) and into a more fictional world where everything can be questioned, and no one says anything.