NETWORK SOCIETY: Sock Puppet contra Faceopera. A phenomenon of alternative accounts in social media.

• Authors: Gajewski, Krzysztof

Abstracts

EN

The topic of the paper is the phenomenon of alternative accounts and the repercussionsin the social and cultural life of the Internet. First of all, the notion of user accounts isexamined. Two main ways of understanding the function of a user account are described.According to the first one, it is the private virtual home of a particular user. The second approachperceives it as nothing more than a way of accessing a service. Next, the notion of a secondary, alternative account is introduced, a sock puppet, offering an alternative identityfor a service user. In the following part the structure and functions of a personal homepage are analysed. Analogically there are two contradictory home page strategies. The firstone interprets them as a pieces of “real life”, whereas the second stresses self-creationaland persuasive strategies applied in them. The transition between personal home pagesto user account profiles is described as a part of the Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 evolution and itsconsequences for the so-called identity tourism.In the subsequent practical part of the paper some cases of usage of alternative accountsare examined. The first concerns Wikipedia, where this phenomenon is indicatedwith the term sock puppet. The second is Faceopera, a play of fictional characters going ona Facebook platform and also engaging real users.

Keywords

EN

new media; Internet; Web 2.0; social network; user account

• Publisher: Uniwersytet Gdański
• Journal: Miscellanea Anthropologica et Sociologica
• Year: 2015
• Volume: 16(2)
• Pages: 65-82

Contributors

author

Gajewski, Krzysztof

Identifiers

DOI

10.5604/20842937.1172752