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".

The speaker reports some of the outcomes of his research where he followed groups of people in virtual worlds. He discovered that they feel more and more stronger, the depression disappears. It could be a longer process for some of them. The main claim is that their is a juxtaposition between the real and the virtual world in their mind. They usually feel more authentic in the virtual world than in the real. I will add that I also noticed these aspects when I was informally studying teenagers using chats to socialise in the end 90ies. What they usually report is that in the real life they are supposed to wear a sort of mask, pressured by the social environment that is stressful. The power of the social-presentation that overtakes on the self. Chats end virtual worlds hence become a way to escape this theatralization of the real world and an opportunity to express their authenticity. I also often observe it in virtual communities such as World of Warcraft where what on a external observers eyes could be interpreted as a sort of phantasmagoric projection, actually in the actors mind is an expression of their authentic-self. This principally stems from the desire of finding a place in the society.