IDENTITY GAMES IN THE WORLD OF NETWORK COMMUNICATIONS

Abstract

The paper focuses on studying the potential of network communication in order to determine the authenticity of a person through constructing virtual images. It is asserted that virtuality creates a wider field for experimenting with somebody’s own identity than physical reality does; therefore, network communication can have a great potential in revealing new qualities of a person’s self. An individual entering network communication has a high degree of freedom to construct his or her own self-identity, which consists of a variety of virtual images. However, these identity games can cause some problems. The first problem is the difficulty in determining the correspondence of virtual images to the inner content of the personality. The second problem is related to establishing the unity and integrity of the personality, which creates and changes images based on the context and situations. It is concluded that performance of many social roles does not always lead to the loss of authenticity and, on the contrary, can reveal deep sides of self because the virtual images are constructed by rules similar to those existing offline, new created images of the self in the virtual space does not replace the existing ones, they develop on their basis.