The Mask and the Face: Imagination and Social Life in Russian Chat Rooms and Beyond

This article explores the dynamics of interaction between ‘masks’, the avatars that people create in chat rooms, and the ‘faces’ that they assume in life off-line. It is argued that the chat room is an Internet technology that gives rise to a particular relational imagination concerning the self and enables the manipulation of individual-social imaginative interactions that are specific to it. These novel forms of sociality are not ‘risk-free’ as some of the literature proposes. Furthermore, they may impinge dramatically on everyday lives off-line. The interesting question is what happens to the imagination when the technology creates relations (conversations) and these are consequential, exposing otherwise hidden aspects of personality.