They also do ‘show us your face’ threads http://www.handbag.com/forums/showthread.php?t=459222&highlight=meet whereby users post pictures of themselves! I think this itself would represent your identity if you did choose to post, and I think that by knowing everyone’s identity you would feel like no-one was not who they said they where and you’d trust them more etc, however the users could be posting pictures of anyone? But on this community people don’t seem to question the pictures – why would you – unless it was an obvious ‘model’ photo or something!
Lister states (p.35) that one meaning of virtual reality/space/community is where the users feel themselves to be. I think if you asked any of the handbag users if they felt comfortable, welcome, and ‘to be’ within the forum community, they would probably say yes!
Handbag goes against Howard Rheingold on his theory of virtual community. “Are relationships and communities as we know them even possible in a place where Identities are fluid? We reduce and encode our identities as words on a screen”. From my experience of this website, the members do ‘meets’ every now and then where some of the members all meet up and spend the day together. This means that their identity is not just words on a screen anymore. Members who have met them can then speak to them on Handbag and know who they are from real life as well as online. These meets are usually arranged by more well known users, as ones who are not very well known are perhaps not trusted yet? This post demonstrates how newer users can’t really arrange these meets, as no-one responds - http://www.handbag.com/forums/showthread.php?t=455517&highlight=meet. Perhaps demonstrates also the whole issue of how you have to be a regular contributor to be apart of the virtual community?
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Yes, does your experience lead you to question the claim that 'nobody knows you're a dog' online -i.e. the oft repeated notion that people go online to masquerade?
From my experience I think that you get the people who do lie, but then you get other people who (well as far as I can tell!) are not lying.
I think it would be impossible to say a statement that people go online to masquerade is either true or not, as no-one can ever know if every single person who uses on the internet goes online and tells the truth.
Some may, in the cases of the 'meets' I have talked about, then I think those involved are not going online to masquerade - so I cant say that all people go online to do so. However, I'd be naive I think to say that no-one masqueraded.
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