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by Derek Anderson on July 1st, 2006

Derek Anderson

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Why do people like to fake who they are online for no apparent reason? I have come to see that several people are lying to me about their own gender!

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  • by Karl Plesz on July 2nd, 2006

    Karl Plesz

    I love it when people place labels on things they don't understand. Pretending to be someone other than what you are online has nothing to do with honesty or psychological tendencies. I bet if you did a study on people who pretended to be someone else online you would garner the same numbers of psychopaths as you would polling the general population. Now let's get to what I believe to be the real reason.

    Power and protection. People pretned they're somone else for a variety of reasons including, but not limited to:
    - they want to role play (such as the gender switch)
    - they want to protect their identity until they know the other person(s)
    - they want to express feelings or ideas that wouldn't be acceptable in public

    The internet makes it possible to act in a way that reality (or their ego / conscience) just wouldn't allow. I know people who swear like a sailor online that wouldn't be caught dead acting like that in real life.

    Now, I'll admit that 'some' people hide their identity in an effort to control or mislead others online - for malicious purposes. But the majority have no ill will.

    The bottom line is that as long as you are confining the game to the online experience, there is no harm done. You have the power to disengage and never continue the interaction. It's when we let these experiences spill over into the real world that we are often jaded. But this happens even when we are not 'pretending'. There have been many times people have met online and fallen in love the the persona they met, only to find that the physical being sheds a whole new perspective on that persona, suddenly making it less attractive........

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