kidwithknife
Posts: 193
Joined: 9/9/2008
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I must have had at least 30 personas so far, and that's just the ones on the net. Like some other people in this thread, they aren't the whole of me (I'm not sure that's even feasible considering how complex humans are), but they were all different facets of me. Largely, they were created through a mixture of utility and a simple wish to experiment with different aspects. They all have similar traits (as they're obviously all the same person), but with widely varying focuses.
To run through a few no longer in use. Devil's Avocado was my persona for a political forum. An aggressive, but fair debater, with a tendency to use a large number of sources. Duck was very much my indie hipster side. Fun to talk to, but somewhat superficial. Sir Duction of the Innocent is the best known of my online gaming personas. Foppish and flirty, with a tendency to see what I can get away with. The Flying Figroll was my academic/philosophical persona. Willing to shut up and learn when faced with someone more knowledgable about a subject, to admit when I was misinformed and to resist the temptation to make a quick joke instead of engaging properly. (That probably the persona I had the most trouble maintaining, but also one of the most valuable ones I've experimented with). I'm not sure how KidWithKnife is going to turn out yet- it's still early days.
As you can tell, I think about this a fair bit. That's partly because this kind of work is actually pretty important to my spiritual path, which involves a lot of stuff to do with switching belief paradigms. I think there's some interesting parallels between using Internet personas to express aspects of yourself and some of the ways masks have been traditionally used.
A word of caution however. It's my personal experience that this kind of experimentation can get completely out of control. The one persona I've killed off in a very public way was Raffles the Gentleman Thug. (Obviously named after the Viz character of the same name). Actually, very witty, if I do say myself. And very popular on the forums I frequented as him for that reason. Absolutely awesome at smacking down trolls. I actually got one to lose it entirely by making fun of him. However, utterly egotistical and utterly amoral. With a tendency to play to the audience all the times. I never lost an Internet argument as him. But that was partly due to how dirty a fighter Raffles actually was. If an argument was being lost, I'd merely switch from arguing the issues to personal attacks. While constantly trying to work out people's emotional flashpoints so I could make them too angry and upset to argue rationally.
In the context of the (incredibly abrasive and flamey) forum I used him on, that wasn't too bad. But then he started popping up when I didn't mean him to. In particular, I noticed that I was acting like Raffles in private IM conversations, which I'd never had happen to me before. Particuarly with people I didn't know well and/or was trying to impress. Because Raffles was always incredibly charming when necessary- you need to be to keep the kind of public applause needed for that kind of persona to stay unbanned. And that was incredibly enticing if I wanted someone to like me. But he was, in essence, a charming sociopath.
And I'll always be eternally grateful to the friend who noticed what was going on and called me on it. And I went on the forum where he had started (which seemed the right thing to do) and publically announced I was killing him off. Mostly for my own sake. I needed to know I'd gone through with it. Because Raffles was far too dangerous to give myself any way of bringing him back. I needed to remove that temptation.
Don't get me wrong, I don't regret my experience. Honestly, being Raffles was a hell of a lot of fun for a time. More importantly, I've now seen quite how terrifying I'd be without my normal strict code of personal honour. And I think I needed to be aware of that.
And it could have been worse. At least Raffles never took over my normal personality. I'm not sure that James Osterburg could say the same about Iggy Pop.
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RE: Former incarnations - 
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