Hi, I'm Mat... Laaauraa
Although it seems like it shouldn’t matter on the internet, priority number one was to make an attractive looking character. I tried choosing a stereotype, because that way I was able to guess what people would think when they look at my character, and it won’t be something that reflects my true personality.
“To pass as a woman for any length of time requires understanding how gender inflects speech, manner, the interpretation of experience.” (Turkle, 212).
This quote, in my experience, is very true. The problem is, I’ll never know how true, because I can only spot the people that do make mistakes. I’ll never know how many people there are that are males, yet manage to successfully pull of being a female. I had an experience in a gaming community where a man managed to successfully dupe about thirty of us into thinking that he was a 22 year old woman for six months. Once you find out that you are wrong about a person’s gender, you feel used. Now it is common in gaming communities (elsewhere as well?) for members to be required to spend some time on a Voice over Internet Protocol program such as Ventrilo: http://www.ventrilo.com/ or Teamspeak: http://www.goteamspeak.com/. This makes gender much more difficult to fake, as opposed to photoshopped pictures posted on a forum.
I generally am truthful about myself, and unless someone is telling me an absurd story, I try to believe what I am told. This isn’t to say that I’m likely to be duped into a warehouse with a 45 year old man I thought was a 20 year old woman. I just like to think that people are generally as truthful as I am, and I think that for the most part it is the case. The problem with being able to play with identity so easily, to be whoever you want to be while in the internet, is that it is going to make future generations much better liars.