[Xantar]

That's all well and good, but here's my point again: you cannot be totally, exactly the same as your real life self on the internet. It's just not possible.

When posting on a message board, you take at least some minimal amount of time to think through what you're saying. The flow of conversation is totally different. If you talked in real life exactly the same way as you do on the internet, there is something seriously wrong with you.

Another example? If someone messages you over the internet while you're doing something, it's pretty easy for you to ignore them or to tell them you're busy and come back later. If they walk through the door of your room in person, it's a much different thing to tell them to leave you alone.

If you had to donate a kidney and you had to choose between two people you like equally well but you've only met one of them in person and the other person you've only ever met online, which one would you give the kidney to? If you choose the person you've known in real life, I would contend that it's because you know that meeting someone on the internet much less important and real and social than meeting them in person. Humans are social animals. We are built that way.

You can say that your online personality matches your real life personality and that it shares many of the same attributes. That's fine. But the question is whether you are exactly the same and all your interactions are exactly the same as if you were meeting face to face. And even though you can try your hardest to be just like you are in real life, you can never totally bridge the gap.

This isn't unique to the internet. Back in the print days, it was common for people to speak of someone having a "writer persona" even if they were opinion columnists for a newspaper theoretically expressing their own personal views in their own voice. Everybody understood even if the words on the page accurately expressed the views and personality of the person writing them, they weren't the same as the actual flesh and blood human being. I don't have a problem if you insist that you're mostly the same as your real life self, but if I ever meet any of you in real life, I'm not going to expect you to behave the same way as you do on the internet. Because you won't.