Identity: your online presence - projecting your presence through the electronic medium - includes related articles on online feedback and the RumorMonger system

RELease 1.0, July 15, 1993

Online services have ways for saying "I'm here; who else is?" Problem is, even when you find our, you often can't be sure. Subscribers will pay for services that permit and guarantee many different kinds of identity. Coupled with identity is the issue of presence. VCO and the Electronic Care International are two projects that help people project their presence through the electronic medium.

Presence

Many online conferences have hosts who act as greeters, and an "introductions" topic, where new members describe themselves. Simply reading and not contributing is known as lurking, and there's not much you can do in between. You either post something, which can seem risky (especially if you're reading other people's flames), or you stay silent and unknown. "Snapshots" are a nice way to make your presence felt online: Users turn a topic in a conference into a string of short, spontaneous descriptions of where they are, what they are wearing or doing, and anything else they'd like to say. It's sort of a come-as-you-are party without going anyplace.

Most online services have a way of finding out who else is online or in a particular forum at a given moment, but most provide only names. Host services also offer a place to enter a personal profile, but many users don't fill them out, and some fill them out with misleading information.

True names?

There are a few safeguards. On most online services, the name that you choose when you sign up is yours for the duration. You have to cancel your account and re-register to change it. Also, names within a service are guaranteed unique. On America Online and most other services you can't post as someone else, because the system won't let you use his handle.

But it's easy to create pseudonyms; the Sierra Network's interface strongly encourages creating new personae. Nobody can tell that you're not a 65-year-old grandmother or a five-year-old girl whose dad is typing for her 'or anything in between. How are you supposed to know whom you're talking to? Is this a place for real activity, or Just one large masquerade ball?

Anonymity, role-playing and gender bending

Anonymity plays a curious role in fostering or constraining participation in meetings (see Release 1.0, 3-93). On the one hand, some comments might never see light without the shield of anonymity; on the other, anonymity can rapidly lead to irresponsible behavior and a breakdown of trust, since there is no attribution and no way of holding people responsible for what they say. Because they put trust and responsibility at risk, anonymity and roleplaying can get in the way of a feeling of communion.

Yet online personae can be a way to exercise and work out ill-fitting personality traits. As we describe below, some people have already tried-and enjoyed -- online therapy. Anonymity has other virtues. Famous people may want to avoid raising a commotion (hey! that's Penn Jillotto's e-mail address! let's get his autograph!); corporate officers may want to say something without being quoted as spokespeople. (The fact that typed messages are easily copied and pasted makes such quotations simple.)

It's Pat!

Gender issues abound. The first chapter of Deborah Tannen's book on communication between men and women, You Just Don't Understand, comes to life online: Women tend to use more narrative; men offer facts and achieve status through expertise. A person working with a dozen kids in an Internet MUD noted that the boys all created male personae; the girls all chose to be either male or neuter. Women mistaken as men online report being treated very differently from when they are identified as women. They are taken more seriously and don't have to prove themselves.

Again, the masks can be both helpful and frustrating. A few minutes of logging on with a female persona should give a man a new appreciation of what women experience. For a man, receiving inane, unsolicited messages from males every few minutes can be a really eye-opening experience. Flirting online with a woman your age and finding out she's a 14-year-old boy (call it the Crying Game Effect) can be more than disconcerting: The loss of trust in this transaction can color others. To resolve such problems, people get blunt: They type MOP?? (Male OR Female?).

Stacy Horn, who rounded, owns and runs Echo, a bulletin-board system in Manhattan (described last month), says that women find the online medium sexy. They can engage other people intimately through writing first, get to know their thoughts and feelings, then deepen relationships if they want to.

VCO: put on a happy (or sad, or sleepy) face

What if you could be present in an online room without necessarily posting comments? What if you could even register your disappointment, boredom and anger? You can.

In 1985, also inspired by Vernor Vinge's True Names, Harry Chesley, an independent Mac software developer, created the Visual Conferencing system for Mac users of Delphi, an early online conferencing system. VCO features an oval conference table with empty seats all around. As people Join the conference, "faces" they have created offline go into the seats. When someone types something, it scrolls across the conference table; people with MacinTalk (an early Mac text-to-speech module from Apple) can hear the text spoken by the Macs.