The woman who pretended to be who she was (online)

On online social networks like Facebook, it has become commonplace to refer to our online personas as extensions of our offline selves; for instance, in Second Life – a virtual world complete with currency, marriages, land ownership, national embassies and much else – users' personas are called 'avatars'. But what does it mean to extend one's identity into the internet? Does the persona translate with ease across these different extensions and performances of the self? Where and how does one draw a line between the 'virtual' and the 'real' self? What does it mean to 'inhabit' or 'dwell in' an online space?

We increasingly encounter traumatic experiences online: suicide notes on Facebook, the sharing of personal sexual videos, increasing cases of impersonation and character theft. While all of these pose new problems for our thinking on the future of online ethics, there is a slightly more mundane phenomenon that seems to hold the key to unravelling many of these larger questions: the gap that people sometimes experience between meeting someone online and encountering the same person offline. This often takes place in the realm of romantic encounters but is certainly not limited to them, and the idea that people aren't as they appear to be online often provokes deep disappointment, at times even a sense of betrayal or having been cheated. It feels as though, on the internet, the person had been impersonating someone else all along. But if it is impersonation, then the question is who exactly was the person impersonating?