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The Internet has become an important tool for information seeking, education, interaction and communication as well as entertainment. Among adults, some popular interactive digital contexts include social networking sites (e.g., Facebook and MySpace), online games (e.g., World of Warcraft), and virtual worlds (e.g., Second Life, HiPiHi) which are the focus of this paper. Virtual worlds are online computer-based environments or world-like spaces, within which users assume new virtual selves or avatars to interact with others, create objects, and engage in a variety of financial transactions (Messinger, Stroulia, & Lyons, 2008).
In the early days of the Internet, scholars and writers speculated that because online contexts make it possible to leave bodies behind (Kendall, 2003; Stallabrass, 1995; Wakeford, 1999), users could create online selves that were very different from their offline ones (McKenna & Bargh, 2000; Turkle, 1997). Quiet, introverted people could become extroverts, the young could act older, and physically less attractive people could assume a physically attractive online persona. The New Yorker immortalized these possibilities in a 1993 cartoon that depicted two dogs in front of a computer with the caption “On the Internet, nobody knows you are a dog” (Steiner, 1993). In this paper, we explore the issue of alternative selves within the virtual world, Second Life (SL) - specifically, we document users’ activities within SL and then examine the relation between SL residents’ offline and online characteristics, beliefs, and behaviors. The results of the study will enhance our understanding of the relation between SL users’ offline and online personas and will help to understand the role of virtual worlds in identity formulation.