technoculture314-09

The subtitle “Identity in the Age of The internet” caught my eyes in this week’s reading. It is quite relevant to the example that Luke said in the lecture that a person who refuses to tell her real age on the dating site. It seems funny and ridiculous in the first time, but it is true in the reality and also reminds me my own little experience.

By the time when the "chatting room" was still very popular, I was so excited and put up almost everything about me online. The common questions that often asked were age, sex, height and so on. I was still new to the “chatting room” and I did not notice that people were actually lied who they really are while I was totally being honest with unknown people. There was this guy who I chatted with for a while and wanted to meet up. I looked back our “conversation” history and found out he is 170cm tall and I agreed to meet him. However, everything was not what I expected, in fact, I did not realise it was him, because he looks so different as he described online (He was about the same height as me when I was 165 around that time.). I realised the internet does not always tell the true, thus since that time, I changed my details in the homepage, thus, my identity online has been changed. 

Identity never can be completed. People keep changing their identities due to the circumstances; a person can be 175cm tall, kilos of weight which is super skinny today, can simply change to 170ccm. 60 kilos tomorrow and be a totally different person. Internet is like a wall between two people. They never know who is on the other side and who they really one. People have to guess the others’ identities based on that they’ve put up their homepages.