The Construction and Recreation of Identity in Virtual Life: Digital Identity on Stage in Jennifer Haley’s The Nether

Abstract

With the continuous advances in internet, social media, artificial intelligence, and technology in general, people started to spend more time online than they do in real physical world. Allowing users to have anonymous identity while giving them access to endless sites and sources means that people will create a different identity than they have in the real life, since they will not have to remain obedient to the same social rules of the real world. Digital identity is not always deviant from real one of the user, yet it can be sometimes drastically different due to the anonymity and freedom of the Internet. In The Nether,  Jennifer Haley discusses the possibility of creating a violent and abusive virtual space on the internet. In this space, people use avatars that enact their desires crimes and offences with no moral or legal judgement. This paper attempts to discusses the duality of identities of such users and the shedding of moral rules in digital spaces. The study concludes that the play has successfully shed the light on the necessity of creating and following virtual ethics in digital world instead of giving total liberty to intent users