As Turkle points out, "market incentives are, after all, at work; each story competes with others. Exaggeration might increase readership. And since all confessions are anonymous, who will ever know?" (230). I had always just accepted these stories at face value as truths because logically, they seem like they could have happened. However, many people take a similar stance to the forty-year-old college professor that Turkle interviewed: "he takes on the persona of 'everyman.' For him, anonymity means universality. What he says on the Web does not necessarily follow from his actual experience" (240). So, just because it's not true for him doesn't mean it's not true at all. After all, the people who visit Clients From Hell are mostly designers like myself who can relate to the statements, and they ring true whether or not they are 100% truthful. Like the quote from Alan Moore states, "Artists use lies to tell the truth. Yes, I created a lie. But because you believed it, you found something true about yourself."
Anonymous confession groups like this became a way to deal with the emotional friction that pops up in our lives. No matter how great your boss, eventually you will disagree with her/him about something. So, instead of registering that complaint where it will only do harm, you can go online and move on by sharing your experience. It seems much different than the scenario in the chapter where a woman confessed to using her parents' retirement fund to go on vacation--twice. That is a workaround to get all of the feel-good of confessing without having to own up to your actions. Clients From Hell is a way to get rid of emotional grist that would only harm a working relationship or remain bottled up until all of the little things finally made you explode. Even that use could sour if you used it as an excuse not to confront your boss or client about reoccurring problems, though.
So, like in all things, prudent use is the key...and often the very thing we're missing in the technological onslaught of our new age.
However, many more people resemble the story of Adam who "disappears [into his game worlds] for up to fifteen-hour stretches. Adam gets little sleep, but he does not consider cutting back on his games. They are essential to his self-esteem, for it is inside these worlds that he feels most relaxed and happy" (219). In fact, "to make ends meet, he provides technical support for an insurance company and takes care of an elderly man on the weekends. Neither of these “real jobs” engages him. He is barely holding on to them" (219). Adam moved away from other people by degrees. Having first started gaming as a social event in his work place, he now prefers to play with the in-game intelligences of Civilization. So, instead of gaming being a tool to help him socialize, he's now acting out his problems every day by reinforcing his antisocial tendencies. In other words, he's stuck in a developmental moratorium and is making no progress.A young woman who had lost a leg in a car crash and now wore a prosthetic limb felt ready to resume a sexual life after the accident but was still awkward and anxious. She created an online avatar with a prosthetic leg and had virtual relationships. Online, she practiced talking about her prosthetic limb and taking it off before being intimate with her virtual lovers. She grew more comfortable with her physical body through the experience of her virtual body. (214)
Stories such as this seem to affirm Turkle's fearful question "does loving your Second Life resign you to your disappointments in the real?" (219). Adam is getting just enough reliable and predictable gratification from his game life that he doesn't put the monumental effort in that is needed for more substantial rewards in his real life, such as pursuing the singer/songwriter and screenwriter careers in which he expressed interest. Instead, he's holding down unfulfilling jobs just to keep the electricity on for his games:
Success in simulation tempers Adam’s sense of disappointment with himself . . . it is not creation but the feeling of creation. This is the sweet spot of simulation: the exhilaration of creativity without its pressures, the excitement of exploration without its risks. And so Adam plays on, escaping to a place where he does not have to think beyond the game. (223-4)So, truth online seems to inhabit its own sphere of meaning separate from what we think of as truth in the corporeal world. Confession site entries don't necessarily have to reflect the subjective truth of one's corporeal life so long as it hits upon an objective truth. In fact, this is a healthy way to work through slight problems at work where confrontation is not useful. The trouble online comes from acting out our problems, fooling ourselves into believing we have accomplished something when what we've really done is replace human interactions with computer ones. Instead of the woman confessing to her parents that she had used their retirement money, she anonymously told the internet so that she could continue living her lie with her parents. Adam also used online games to lie to himself. He started gaming as a way to socialize and then abandoned real people for the illusion of friends the game provided. Thus, the most pervasive and harmful form of lying on the internet is our own self-deception.
