In many virtual spaces anonymity is complete. Participants may change
their names at will and no record is kept connecting names with real-world
identities. Such anonymity has been sought out by some participants in
virtual interactions because of its potential to liberate one from existing or
enforced identities. However, many systems, including the WELL, have found
that complete anonymity leads to a lack of accountability. As a result, while
all members of the WELL may alter a pseudonym that accompanies each
contribution they make, their user id remains a constant and unambiguous
link to their identity. However, even this fairly rigorous identification system has
limitations. There is no guarantee that a person acting under a particular
user id is in fact that person or is the kind of person they present them-
selves as. The ambiguity of identity has led some people to gender-switching,
or to giving vent to aspects of their personality they would other wise keep
under wraps. Virtual sociopathy seems to strike a small but stable percent-
age of par ticipants in virtual interaction. Nonetheless, identity does remain
in a virtual space. Since the user id remains a constant in all interactions,
people often come to invest certain expectations and evaluations in the
user of that id. It is possible to develop status in a virtual community that
works to prevent the participant from acting in disruptive ways lest their
status be revoked. (www.netscan.sscuet.ucla.edu/csoc/)This particular kind of anonymity which Smith describes as operat-
ing in CMC Jordan sees as a result of the fluidity of identity which oper-
ates in cyberspace. This fluidity, which is much more open than is possible
in institutional, embodied life, necessitates individuals’ creation of a stable
self-identity. For this reason, CMC interlocutors tend to spend much more
time than in other forms of communication revealing information about
themselves, their status, place, and other contexts for why they are com-
municating. Jordan (1999) refers to such an identity as an ‘avatar’.An avatar is a stable identity that someone using Barlovian cyberspace has
created. The existence of an avatar means someone has used some of
cyberspace’s resources in ways that result in other avatars recognising a
stable online personality. Someone’s avatar may be constructed from
the style of their online writing, from the repeated use of a name or self-
description, or from any number of other virtual possibilities. (59)However, no avatar is ever stable for long, and its potential, if not
actual, transiency is always working against its stability. Another feature
of CMC which undermines this stability is the sheer mobility that it offers
communicants. As Steven Jones (1995) has suggested:The importance of CMC and its attendant social structures lies not only in
interpretation and narrative, acts that can fix and structure, but in the
sense of mobility with which one can move (narratively and other wise)
through the social space. Mobility has two meanings in this case. First it is
clearly an ability to ‘move’ from place to place without having physically
travelled. But second, it is also a mobility of status, class, social role and
character. (17)62 COMMUNICATION THEORYHolmes-03.qxd 2/15/2005 10:31 AM Page 62