QotW5: Who Am I ?

- Who am I?
- Well,you are a newbie who joined our Internet Marketing forum on January. You focus on Community site building and viral marketing. Your birthday is 20th May 1985.
- No, he is not. He is an expert on our Hardware zone forum, especially Apple stuffs. He said that he was 30 years old.
- You are all wrong. He told me that he was handsome like Tom Cruise, rich like Bill Gates. He is going to marry me next month on Second Life.
- Okay okay, you all just know a part of his complicated mind. He is virtual. Leave him alone!

http://www.sfondideldesktop.com/Images-Movies/Face-Off/Face-Off.jpg

As Sartre said in Being and Nothingness: "The virtual world is different. It is composed of information rather than matter" (Donath ,1996). A person can have multiple identities AT THE SAME TIME. In our real world, he/she can't be a mad student and a quiet teacher concurrently. He either chooses to be mad at this point of time or smart at another the time. However, I can have multi personas at one point of time on the online world. It is like opening many browser tabs in Firefox or Internet Explorer. Each tab brings me to a totally different world. To name a few: Hardware Zone (IT talk forum), VNCNUS ( Vietnamese Community in National University of Singapore), IMS ( Internet Marketing Singapore), 360themes (as a webmaster) ...

Even though the above forums differer ed from each other in term of content, they required (in my opinion) the similar way to gain reputation: CONTRIBUTION. Online identity is never be trusted. Therefore, in order to gain trust from someone else, we must show how we can benefit them. Another motivation for contribution is common rewards include peer esteem, making social connections, and the natural pleasure of helping others (Masum, 2004). As a member of a forum, besides administrator position, people always want to have at least a moderator position. It's nothing but the power to control a box within the forum as if you are the bishop of a land. I was elected in a real election for the title of Moderator's Sensitive box (Sex Edu discussion) in 2006.There was campaign slogan: " Real Sex Ed builds life", give-away freebies ( clips, documents....) and of course a live Election Night. The more I contributed to the forum, the higher my reputation was. That's was how I won the moderation position in a community of around 10,000 Vietnamese students.

Besides contribution, I think BEING TRANSPARENT is an effective way to gain reputation as well. In the world where we TRUST NO ONE, suddenly when we find a peer who expose their personal life, photos, stories, we start to trust that AVATAR. We know everything can be faked but we still trust him/her much more than other members.

Transparence is like a playing with knife. Over-exposing personal information may lead to identity theft. Identity theft occurs when someone uses personal identifying information to commit fraud or other crimes (Forbes, 2005). Imaging that someone else use my identity to post nudity, political opinions which are not allowed by forum rules and regulations or even national laws. It's horrible to think of the consequences. Other sensitive information like personal email address, hobbies, cellphone number, real name, home address can be easily abused by credit card frauder.

In sum, Online Identity is nothing new or special. It's ourself or part of our inner mind. We should treat like the way we care about our name, fame in real world. We should protect it like the way we run the society.

Reference:
1. Donath. , J, S. (1996). Identity and Deception in the Virtual Community. MIT Media Lab. Retrieved on 20 February 2007, from
http://smg.media.mit.edu/people/Judith/Identity/IdentityDeception.html
2.Masum, H, & Zhang, Y.C. (July 2004). Manifesto for the Reputation
Society. First Monday, 9, (7). Retrieved February
22, 2007, from http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue9_7/masum/index.html
3. Oxford Analytica (2005).Hooked on Phishing. Forbes Online. Retrieved on 20 February 2007, from http://www.forbes.com/business/2005/04/29/cz_0429oxan_identitytheft.html