What are the psychological implications for a high-school student who spends his evenings inhabiting the persona of a 28-year-old woman? Though these cases may sound extreme, they’re hardly unthinkable. “By being between reality and unreality,” [Amy] Bruckman says, such contact “helps us reflect the nature of reality.”
Predictor: Bruckman, Amy
Prediction, in context:In a 1993 article for The Wall Street Journal, Laurie Hays writes about social questions raised by the Internet. She interviews Amy Bruckman of MIT’s Media Lab: ”Computer networks allow for a degree of anonymity that few forms of communication can match. Pseudonyms are common, and false identities – some times of a different sex – are far from rare. How do you react when you discover that your best online friend is just a figment of another user’s imagination? And what are the psychological implications for a high-school student who spends his evenings inhabiting the persona of a 28-year-old woman? Though these cases may sound extreme, they’re hardly unthinkable. Amy Bruckman, a doctoral candidate at Massachusetts Institute of Technology who works in the schools’ Media Lab, has spent a good deal of time studying gender swapping and sex roles on the Internet. One fact of life online, she notes, is that women are often treated as being helpless. When Ms. Bruckman, who herself logs on under different guises as part of her experiments, appears on the network as a woman, men tend to offer technical assistance – and then ask for sexual favors in return. Once, after deflecting someone’s flirtations, she was accused of being a male in disguise. ‘By being between reality and unreality,’ Ms. Bruckman says, such contact ‘helps us reflect the nature of reality.'”
Date of prediction: January 1, 1993
Topic of prediction: Controversial Issues
Subtopic: Anonymity/Personal Identity
Name of publication: Wall Street Journal
Title, headline, chapter name: Technology (A Special Report): A New World – Personal Effects: Amid All the Talk About the Wonders of the Networks, Some Nagging Social Questions Arise
Quote Type: Partial quote
Page number or URL of document at time of study:
http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?INT=0&SelLanguage=0&TS=1046812098&Did=000000028091201&Fmt=3&Deli=1&Mtd=1&Idx=42&Sid=1&RQT=309
This data was logged into the Elon/Pew Predictions Database by: Anderson, Janna Quitney