Cyberspace
challenges our traditional cultural understandings of notions
as basic as time, space, and-more importantly-identity. With the
advent and growth of electronic communication, it is becoming
increasingly necessary to ask ourselves who we actually are and
who we are interacting with when we are on-line. This article
focuses on a case-study from the IRC chat room #rudos (Undernet),
and poses the question of whether cyberspace is quite simply a
powerful means of reaffirming pre-established Physical-Reality
identities, or, on the contrary, a medium that allows for the
creation of Virtual-Reality personae. Drawing on examples from
casual conversations extracted from our emic ethnographic approach,
the project soon revealed that the traditional dichotomous separation
between reality and virtuality is not quite as clear-cut as many
would have originally assumed.
