The screenname as face

Increasingly with the Internet, we find power dynamics toppling. In my own life, I find certain social tactics that are not observed online. The reason for this is obvious but must be stated: online, you do not have a face. Or, rather, you have a different face: your screen name.

Online, none of the associations of your 'real' face are found. Online, your screen name carries the different associations of itself and only that. Online, you have a fresh start. Online, we all have a fresh start.

In the 'real' world, changing your face is difficult. Plastic surgery - the good kind of plastic surgery - the Nip/Tuck kind of plastic surgery - costs tens of thousands of dollars. The pain of plastic surgery - the physical pain of the alterations ... the emotional pain of the difference in the mirror [the structural sign of I-ness is dissolved, changed, begun anew] - lingers over many months. The pain of the plastic surgery outweighs any social hindrances - screw changing my face to save my image, the other pains are too great.

But online. Online, online, online. Online, changing your face is easy. There was a time when a friend and I created a fake screen name and entered a sex chat room. We played the part of the submissive woman, we said things, we were different. We were different from ourselves. We played the part of another. And, then, we went back to our lives [we became bored with this otherness]. Thus, we were able to, like Tom Cruise's character in Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut, don a mask and enter a different world. But unlike Cruise's character, we did not have to leave our house - we did not have to go to a specialty shop - we did not have to remember a special password. No one caught us, there was no woman there to save us, we never fled. We created the screen name, the mask - the new face - a surface, and we went into the chat room for fun.

Here, we find an interesting aspect of cyberseduction: the absolute ability to ambivalently change the most personal of signs - the sign of the subject. If one tires of one's screen name, one simply has to return to AOL and create a new screen name. At AOL, faces are free. Thus, the teenagers have their fun in chat rooms, associations are wiped clean, the stalker keeps on stalking.