ABSTRACT
Online identities One showcase for our identity can be found on the social networking sites on the internet such as Facebook. Most people who join Facebook post at least one picture of themselves, and commonly many pictures of themselves and their friends. The choice of image is informative of the person’s sense of social identity and how they want to project it. On Facebook you can be whoever you want and you can control your image much more than you can in everyday life. A novel aspect of Facebook is that is allows anyone to broadcast details of their identity and existence to all of the other 950 million users of Facebook worldwide (measured in June 2012). Interestingly it is also estimated that over 80 million of these accounts are fake (BBC 2012). You can be an international star instantaneously with a campaign on Facebook or a video on YouTube. The differences between your identity in real life and your identity in cyberspace is an interesting question for psychology to consider. One line of research has looked at the identities that people create for themselves in online games. These games, such as World of Warcraft, attract thousands of players worldwide who develop friendships and cooperative groups with other gamers. For some people these friendships are more constant than their relationships in real space. One difference between these cyber identities and ‘real’ life is that the gamer can choose how to present themselves and it is estimated that over half of gamers sometimes use identities with a different gender to their own (Hussain and Griffiths, 2008). Interestingly, it is females who swap gender more than males.
