ABSTRACT
The author wants to take up from a number of different angles key linked issues surrounding efforts to make sense of the relation between real life (RL) and digitized or virtual life (VL). These issues include people disguising their identities online, changing ideas of personal privacy brought about by a surveillance culture and revelatory social media, similarities and differences between virtual communities and traditional offline ones, online anonymity as it shapes how we talk to each other, and questions around whether or not we are becoming more like posthuman cyborgs as people become more deeply entangled with digital devices. They simply don't know yet how deeply identities are being reshaped by online masquerade, digital cross-dressing and other forms of identity gaming. The Web and other dimensions of digital culture have rein-vigorated the cultural hegemony and cultural imperialism debates because they have the potential to break up this pattern.
