A Virtual Death-Jordan

"One of the most touted beliefs about Internet communication is that the medium
strips away users' offline identities and leaves them free to reconstruct a tetherless online persona" (Jordan,2005). I really enjoyed reading this article, and this statement in particular stood out to me because this ties in with what we have been studying all semester. In the article Jordan discusses a particular case of an online hoax involving a woman who was blogging as a 19 year old girl who was dying of leukemia. When the community discovered that Kaycee did not really exist and that the woman who was blogging they were upset and released a lot of statements from all over the world in regard to how they felt. This article brought up some very interesting points about the Internet serving as medium that allows people to deceive others based on the ability to hide certain information as well as portray themselves in a certain light. As we have learned throughout this semester many people are comfortable using the Internet to paint a picture of themselves ( not just literally, but in terms of how they want others to see them based on the pictures, videos, text, etc that they choose to put on their online social networks, blog cites, etc.) The story of Kaycee was not surprising to me because as the article often brings up, people have already been doing this type of deception for as long as we can recall and the Internet is now just another form of media that someone can use in this way. I liked how the article brought up the point that specific images (example "the bodybuilder") cannot conclude what a person is or is not (Jordan, 2005). We see this often with the Internet because there is an uncertainty on what we are looking at and our imagination is left to decide. I have questioned the authenticity of pictures of people before and whether or not they were really the person who was writing something on the Internet, but that is not to say I was right or wrong on whether or not the picture was really the person. The whole point is how would I really know? There is truly no way to know for sure unless I know the person in face-to-face contact. This is why I agree with the article that we should stay skeptical to a certain degree because if not we would likely be suckered in to everything we read online. It is unfortunate that other people who are staying truthful online had to receive backlash from the Debbie Swenson incident, but the truth is we don't know that these people are being authentic either. I think we can only trust and distrust as we have reason to and as we come across each new experience.