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