The story of Stewart

Within Sherry Turkle’s Who am we? She discussed the case study of Stewart, a socially awkward Physics graduate in America who has developed a strong social anxiety. He has had problems with his heart since his childhood and, as a result of living a live “on a small compass” (Who am we? Page 5), he has very few friends, his life revolving around work. However, the identity he created for himself on a MUD was the complete antithesis to this, a confident character named Achelles who had lots of friends and was successful with women.

Whilst this could again be seen as experimenting with different identities, I would argue that in the case of Stewart it was more of an escape. He admits that his online persona was too removed from his offline self for him to be able to apply any of it to his real life, and the improvements were too exaggerated for him to achieve in his awkward, shy offline life. This leads me to the conclusion that whilst experimenting with different selves can has positive effects, as you are able to “test” personalities to see if they work and then apply these to your offline life, this is not the case 100% of the time. In the case of Stewart it is hard to see any benefits that this online MUD had created for him as to me he seems to have spend an awful lot of time creating a rich identity online, which has offered him few benefits when he could’ve spent this time more productively trying to overcome his social anxiety in real life.