Internal Identity
Within a community, we have a face, or perhaps multiple faces, that we show others. This face represents a form of self-definition - our perception of ourselves, our internal identification.
This perception is affected by the medium of our communication with others (Giese, 1998) as well as the virtual reality constructed within that medium (Cleland, 1997). The opportunity exists to create personas or avatars wholly different than the ones created in our real life (RL), just as we may have different personas for work and social situations. Turkle (1997) looks at the multiple definitions developed by people entering online worlds. These multiple personalities allow people to explore new identities in a relatively low-risk manner. By removing the hazards of experimental personalities that exist in a F2F situation, the Virtual Nation promotes the internal identity created through self-definition. An interesting area of study will be to find a correlation between online personalities and RL personalities, within the realm of internal identification.