When people adopt an online persona they cross a boundary into highly-charged territory. Some feel an uncomfortable sense of fragmentation, others a sense of relief. Some detect the possibilities for self-discovery, even self-transformation.
A 26-year-old graduate student in history says: ‘When I join a new virtual community and I create a character and know I have to start typing my description, I always feel a sense of panic. Like I could find out something I don’t want to know.’
A woman in her late thirties who just got an account with America Online used the fact that she could create five account ‘names’ as a chance to ‘lay out all the moods I’m in – all the ways I want to be in different places on the system.’ Another named one of the accounts after her yet-to-be-born child. ‘I got the account right after the amnio, right after I knew it would be a girl. And all of a sudden, I wanted that little girl to have a presence on the Net, I wrote her a letter and I realised I was writing a letter to a part of me.’
A 20-year-old undergraduate says: ‘I am always very self-conscious when I create a new character. Usually, I end up creating someone I wouldn’t want my parents to know about. It takes me, like, three hours.’
In these ways and others, many more of us are experimenting with multiplicity than ever before. Hacking talks about male alter personality as a way for oppressed women to become powerful. Online cross-gender play can have much the same effect. MPD exists in a cultural force field which is increasingly open to considerations of multiplicity.
Source review by Sherry Tutkle of:
Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory by Ian Hacking
Princeton, 346 pp, £12.95, May 1998, ISBN 0 06 910590 1
A 26-year-old graduate student in history says: ‘When I join a new virtual community and I create a character and know I have to start typing my description, I always feel a sense of panic. Like I could find out something I don’t want to know.’
A woman in her late thirties who just got an account with America Online used the fact that she could create five account ‘names’ as a chance to ‘lay out all the moods I’m in – all the ways I want to be in different places on the system.’ Another named one of the accounts after her yet-to-be-born child. ‘I got the account right after the amnio, right after I knew it would be a girl. And all of a sudden, I wanted that little girl to have a presence on the Net, I wrote her a letter and I realised I was writing a letter to a part of me.’
A 20-year-old undergraduate says: ‘I am always very self-conscious when I create a new character. Usually, I end up creating someone I wouldn’t want my parents to know about. It takes me, like, three hours.’
In these ways and others, many more of us are experimenting with multiplicity than ever before. Hacking talks about male alter personality as a way for oppressed women to become powerful. Online cross-gender play can have much the same effect. MPD exists in a cultural force field which is increasingly open to considerations of multiplicity.
Source review by Sherry Tutkle of:
Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory by Ian Hacking
Princeton, 346 pp, £12.95, May 1998, ISBN 0 06 910590 1
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