Social Networking and Online Identities

Interview classmates:
-How many online identities do you have? What are they like?
 4
-In what ways are they different to your “in person” identities?
No difference.



What are some benefits of expressing one’s identity online?

-It is more free and easier to express our feeling which can't be revealed in the reality.
Because of the new identify,we never worry about the secret disclosed by others especially someone know us in the reality.We can act as what we want and follow our inner mind to play the role that is different to what we showed in the reality before.
-It is the good way to meet some friends who have the related interests with us.
We can have more than 1 identities online at the same time,which means the different groups of friends we can meet with our identities. For example, we create the academic identities for the peers and schoolmates while we possess the entertaining identities for our online friends or any particular enthusiasts.


What are some risks?

-The risk may be losing some personal information. It is inevitable that someone may guess our real identities and find out more information throught the information available online or even sometime what we ever expressed with our online identities. The Internet is so convenient that we only need to type any key words with search engines, a lot of results about the key words will be shown immediately.
-We may be cheated by someone with fake identity online easily. This is because we never know his/her real identity when we make a new friend online. All of the information about him/her,which just be told by himself/herself, can be fake such as the name,age,education,appearance or the marriage status etc.