A lot of interest is shown in what is known as multiple personality in a person. Many stories have been written on the topic, there have been many movies, and both, of course, quote from real life, the examples of multiple personalities in the past. Having multiple personalities is considered to be unusual. But is it really so much out of the ordinary?

It is my theory that all people do have different facets in their personality, which come to light in different situations. That may sound like another way of saying that people may react in a way which is 'out of character' in certain extreme situations, but that is not what I mean. My point is actually more specific to the 'cyber world' or the 'virtual space'.

I consider myself to be part of a generation (or at least a section of the society) which is 'net-savvy' or maybe even 'nerd'ish to those who do not 'belong' to the same circles. I have a definite presence as a character in the cyber-world. This is marked by my blog, my email account and my yahoo messenger & chatroom aliases. I interact with other people who qualify in the same category. But my interaction with these people are probably very different from the when I interact with friends in the 'real world' to borrow Matrix terminology.

For one, the language I use is different. Even though I use English more often than any other language in my day to day life, it is a different English that I type out. When online, I think before putting something down. I give my opinion on various topics which I probably do not discuss with friends. The anonimity, or at least the fact that the reader is not face-to-face, actually helps me in being more blatant if I may say so. I used to have, for example, a classmate in college, who was of one of the most introvertish natures in person. Online however, he was not only talkative, but had friends from all over the world, girls and guys, and probably having very different nature. The internet does not only shrink the world to our desk, but it brings out another dimension of our personality, or, brings out another personality altogether, from within us.

The subject of online dating has received a lot of interest lately. People have been known to meet, successfully as it is proved later, the love of their lives, in yahoo chatrooms or orkut, or across web-logs. But I think it is on rare occassions that the person whom one knows across the net has stayed the same when present in flesh and blood. To try and develope an online relation into a real world one almost always results in disillusion followed by a lot of dissappointment and pain. Of course it is not wrong to meet a web aquaintance in the real life. But one should expect in such cases to have to develope a relation from scratch, and not try to continue a cyber-relation under totally different conditions.