QotW5

“A single person's identity embodies multiplicity. You possess many sectors within your personality and play numerous roles in your life - such as child, parent, student, employee, neighbor, and friend. Cyberspace offers a niche for each of these specific facets of selfhood. Some people even talk about how we can "deconstruct" ourselves online. We don't have to present ourselves in toto - how we look, talk, move, our history, thoughts, feelings, and personality, all in one big package.”(Suler, J.R, 2002)

If someone were to walk into a room full of strangers in a world which was new to them, the possibilities to what they could say or do are endless. They could make up whatever name they want for themselves, make up a profession and if they were invisible too, they could assume any identity. This is what happens online. Millions of people log on everyday into cyberspace and they are set free of earthly boundaries.

An identity is a constant. It is something that is built up over years of hard work and honesty, given that the person we are talking about is honest and hardworking. In the real world though, there are many ways which people use to recognize people and their identities, visual and audio recognition. In cyberspace people are generally just a name or a picture. This phenomenon has opened up a whole new problem of identity theft and reputation building in a virtual environment.

I play poker online under the name Ozmanz69 and sheikhoo26. I play on a variety of sites and poker rooms. I am also a member of the pocket fives community under ozmanz. In the online poker community it is common for people to steal people’s identities and usernames, but it is mostly people who have established themselves as professionals and thus have a lot of respect.

Reputation and skill level in relation to online poker has now become easy to detect thanks to a variety of sites which help people to see another players stats, tournament rankings and so on. www.sharkscope.com is one such site. People are limited to five names which they can search a day. People enter the names they want to check out, and a complete history of their time on a particular site is made available. This way a person’s reputation or skill level can easily be judged. www.pokertracker.com is a site which offers users a program which tracks every hand you have ever played with anyone on one table. If the program is run every time someone plays, over time millions of hands are recorded and each time a player encounters someone they have played before poker tracker will let you know what their betting tendencies and other stats are. Thanks to these programs, poker players are kept honest online.

In the online poker world, it is difficult to steal someone’s identity because each username is unique and more than one player cannot access it at one time. The only way to get around it is to hack into the persons account. However, when this happens people do not play under their name they redirect the money from the account to another unknown account and draw the cash from an ATM. This is very rare as well because these sites track players who make large withdrawals or play from different terminals.

Identity theft is a big security risk that is affecting people throughout the internet. Online poker has a very stringent system because of the large sums of money that are circulated within their system, but online forums and chat rooms are infested with people trying to be something they’re not. This is a menial thing, but if it were to get out of hand, a lot of problems could be associated with such activities.


References:

Griffin, E. (2006). Social information processing theory of Joseph Walther. A first look at communication theory, 6th edition, pp. 142-155. McGraw-Hill Companies.

Donath, J. (1996). Identity and Deception in the Virtual Community. Retrieved February 20, 2007, from http://smg.media.mit.edu/people/Judith/Identity/IdentityDeception.html

Suler, J. (2002). Identity Management in Cyberspace. Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies, 4, 455-460. Retrieved February 21, 2007, from http://www.rider.edu/~suler/psycyber/identitymanage.html

Qotw4

The internet is a great medium of exchange. There is a constant flow of information from person to person. This makes the internet a great learning tool. Online, people are willing to share valuable information which each other without asking for anything in return. An example of this would be www.pocketfives.com. Pocketfives is an online poker community. It has forums and articles where people who are members are in constant communication with other members, discussing strategy and winning moves. This is very strange considering the fact that in poker, the lesser your opponent knows the better. Most of the members are pocketfives are experienced and very successful players who plat with each other a lot online, but still help each other out in relation to the game of the table.

Thus the word, gift economy. A gift can be defined as an obligatory transfer of inalienable objects or services between related and obligatory transactors. Therefore, once someone is gifted something they cannot demand something back in return, but this would eventually kill the relationship and the medium of exchange. Information sharing online is known as a gift economy because even though nothing is asked for in return, the receiver of this bit of information is now obligated to reciprocate.

These sites which share information with each other are available for members of such sites. This is a very important concept because someone who is actively involved in such online forums makes an effort and this effort is made by a lot of the other members as well. This community shares a common love for the topic be it poker, sports cars or it knowledge. This similarity brings them together and they are motivated to share their views and opinions with each other and in turn get useful information which is beneficial to them as well.

The concept of reciprocity is fundamental in communication. Sharing information online has a number of reasons which would stimulate reciprocity. Firstly, if someone has benefited drastically from the help they got online, they would feel as if they owe that community something for helping them out. This would keep bringing people back. Some people are very good at games likes poker, and so an article or a comment left by them on a forum would receive a huge number of hits. For example, “Green Plastic” , is a prominent online player who over the past five years has made millions playing poker online. He has years of experience and his expertise at online poker has not gone unnoticed. Last month, he posted a comment on pocketfives saying that he was going to choose one person from the pocketfives community and make him his protégé’. His post got seventy five thousand hits. This respect drives people to contribute more because of all the admiration such people get for sharing important pieces of information.

Even though the internet is not governed by one central authority, it has created places where people can go and learn valuable things at no cost to them. In the real world, there are no such breaks. Free schooling is ineffective in relation to the extent that online forums can help people in a particular field. An information channel that can operate like this does not seem to crush the human aspect of things as most people believe that the internet does, instead I feel it drives a certain human instinct of working together in a community for little or no monetary gain.


References:

Gift Economy (2007). In Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Retreived on February 7, 2007 from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Gift_economy&oldid=105681971

Kollock, P. (1999). The Economies of Online Cooperation: Gifts and Public Goods in Cyberspace. Retreived on February 6, 2007 from http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/soc/faculty/kollock/papers/economies.htm

Veale K.J (2003). Internet Gift Economies: Voluntary Payment Schemes as Tangible Reciprocity. Retrived on February 7, 2007 from http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue8_12/veale/index.html