“The Internet is another element of the computer culture that has contributed to thinking about identity as multiplicity. On it, people are able to build a self by cycling through many selves. AN interior designer nervously admits in my interview with her that she is not at her best because she is about to have a face to face meeting with a man with whom she has shared months of virtual intimacy in chat sessions on America Online. She says she is ‘pretty sure’ that her electronic lover is actually a man (rather than a woman pretending to be a man) because she does not think that “he” would have suggested meeting if it were otherwise, but she worries that neither of them will turn out to be close enough to their very desirable cyberselves: ‘I didn’t exactly lie to him about anything specific, but I feel very different online. I am a lot more outgoing, less inhibited. I would say I feel more like myself. But that’s a contradiction. I feel more like how I wish I was. I’m just hoping that face to face I can find a way to spend some time being the online me.’” (Sherry Turkle 179)
The concept of Instant Messaging and chatrooms enable us to think about the self in a completely new way. The fact that people are not seen when they are typing grants a freedom that regular socializing does not allow. People are no longer bound by what is actually true—be it their appearance, occupation or even personality. As Turkle stated, we can think about “identity as multiplicity.” People are able to have their ‘real life’ self and their online self or selves. People have the capability to be in one chat room as a 5’10” blonde female flirting and in another as an intellectual discussing T.S. Eliot’s poetry, while sitting in front of the screen as a 5’7” professional male. As the woman suggested to Turkle, people have the ability to be different online, and to explore parts of their personality that they do not show in their real lives, or aspirations of who they want to be in real life. This is the concept of ‘building a self.’ The freedom of creation lies within Internet chatrooms and other communication programs. People can essentially ‘cut and paste’ a personality and create a new cyberself that has the potential to be completely different from their ‘real life’ personality. This does bring up the fact that there is a contradiction. What is the difference between someone’s online personality and a ‘real life’ personality? Where is the line drawn, or are there new lines being created right now?