naisho
Forum Disorders M.D.,Ph.D
- Joined
- Nov 6, 2006
- Messages
- 6,433
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I'm sure everyone thinks they are same online and offline(other than the malicious posters who think they have anonymity). However, all things even, it would take a lot of introspection to answer this one.
All I can say is I give the same answers both online and offline.
No offense or anything, just disagreement in perspectives - I doubt the above in bold.
If I ever went into the psychology or psychiatry field I'd be interested in researching the impact of the internet on certain people who act different online than they are in real life. I think of the internet as a 'escape self' for some folks to act a way they don't do in reality. The internet is their "true self" if they were not held back by social-physical norms (like the gaze of someone's eyes or someone's head shaking in disapproval). In real life, because there are so many expectations/standards, personality types (extroversion vs introversion) people receive and act differently according to verbal, physical, visual, and other clues. On the internet, you're only conversing in the verbal trait, the other traits are eliminated thus a person has more control over "how they want" to reply.
Like you said about anonymity: cyberbullies, you have the ones who are tough online and tough in real life, but for some cyberbullies you have ones who act tough online and in real life they are just a scrawny kid. Their perspective of self is different because there aren't much conditions that hold them back from posting the way they want to (unless if their mom was posting on the same forum or something).
I would make it a dissertation or thesis or something, unfortunately it's not my field.