Britannica Blog

“A while back, I wrote about the affliction of avatar anxiety, in which one’s self-consciousness about one’s online self amplifies one’s self-consciousness about one’s actual self. Here’s the nub:

Your online self … is entirely self-created, and because it determines your identity and social standing in an internet community, each decision you make about how you portray yourself - about which facts (or falsehoods) to reveal, which photos to upload, which people “to friend,” which bands or movies or books to list as favorites, which words to put in a blog - is fraught, subtly or not, with a kind of existential danger. And you are entirely responsible for the consequences as you navigate that danger. You are, after all, your avatar’s parents; there’s no one else to blame. So leaving the real world to participate in an online community - or a virtual world like Second Life - doesn’t relieve the anxiety of self-consciousness; it magnifies it. You become more, not less, exposed.

So far as I know, avatar anxiety has not yet been declared an actual illness by the American Psychiatric Association, but I have no doubt that it will eventually make the grade, particularly after reading a brief article by Steven Levy, called “The Burden of Twitter,” in the new edition of Wired. Levy says that he “adores” social networking but that at the same time he is consumed with guilt and remorse over the activities of his online self. The guilt comes when he fails to participate - when he doesn’t post to his blog or when he lets his tweetstream go dry. “I worry,” he writes, “that I’m snatching morsels from the information food bank without making any donation.” That’s not so surprising. Much more interesting is the remorse, which he says he feels when he does participate:

As my participation increases…”