virtual life

I quite appreciated the short talk by Jonathan Cabiria, a psychologist and researcher who claims that real life and virtual life is overlapping by a process of permeability. The idea is not really new and a brief psychological research (in the clinical way of the term) allow us to figure out how the borders between these two worlds become thin in the mind of users that put some of their identity in a virtual world. This notion of identity becomes then the crux aspect of the model. Building upon self-presentation approaches such as Irwing Goffman's theory of social re-presentation, the speaker sustain the idea that we present ourselves in a certain way depending on the context (social and physical I may add). Why that? It's essentially a matter of surviving (not physically but socially and culturally), to find connections, bounds, in other words, we need to feel this sense of belonging. If this fails, we would be marginalized and all the implications it can have. Teenegers are in a really sensitive to this indentification processes and usually the way they construct their own identity passes through an overidentification of themselves (EMO-kids, Piercings, Vampyres) which is a "a way to say: "fuck you: this is what I am".