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In an online community people can be fully themselves, which may not always be totally acceptable in the real world, or they can play around with personas and develop one which is obviously off beam for them. Either way, there’s an opportunity to vent some of the anger caused when people have to behave against type in order to belong to a community such as a workforce.

Whether that theory has any basis in reality or not, there is no denying that online communities are on the rise. Online communities have been around since the very dawn of computing. Ever heard of MUDs or Multi User Dungeons? What about The WELL? No? Read this.

But they’ve come a very, very long way since those early days. I’m not just talking about site like MySpace or YouTube, which are pretty much just enhancements of the old bulletin board concept, but about whole worlds, places where you can immerse a character into a virtual environment and live out a life. Places like Second Life, which on its home page states “When reality gets hard to take, there's an escape to a parallel universe — a virtual world without end where real people create online personas called avatars. Anything is possible”.

Maybe Second Life doesn’t use the phrase ‘Escape your identity stress’, but the inference is certainly there.

Second Life is, I have to admit, both absolutely amazing in concept and design and rather alluring. Join it (there is a free mode but you need to pay to get the greatest benefits) and you can meet other ‘people’ in the form of their ‘avatars’. You can build a home, run a business, make friends, have parties.

There’s a virtual economy, and as well as finding things you can come across in everyday life such as dance clubs and shops you can find vampire castles and other stuff that’s just not around in the physical world (well, not where I live, anyway). Second Life’s most recent claim to fame is to have Suzanne Vega (as an avatar, of course) performing live at the site during August.

There are those who will say that living a virtual life is the tactic of softies - the weak who can’t face the real world and so fashion an escape. There are those who will say it is mind expanding. Men can take on an avatar persona as a woman and vice versa, for example.

Probably there are cases in which both extremes of view apply. Some people will raise the parallel view that joining an online community like Second Life isn’t a lot different than getting immersed in a good book – you lose yourself in a world you didn’t create, and maybe the writer wants you to identify with one of the characters.

But there are big differences. The book will end after a few hours of reading while your Second Life avatar can last for as long as you want it to. The world of a book is constructed for you, while in your online community there are actions, interactions and consequences which can’t be predict beforehand or retracted.

So tell me, can an avatar in an online community have identity stress?

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