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

Abstract

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.

Keywords:

• Chatroom
• internet
• imagination
• risk
• subjectivity
• Russia

Acknowledgments

I am very grateful to ‘Poldark’, who took a vivid and amused interest in the writing of this article, though the opinions expressed are my own. I also thank the seminar contributors and especially the editors of this volume for their helpful comments.

Notes

Sayt Buryatskogo Naroda, based in Moscow, was founded around 1999 and has about 2,000 registered and about 1,000 active users (written in 2005).

www.buryatia.ru is based in Ulan-Ude. Founded around 2002, it had about 1,000 registered and 500 active users in 2006.

‘Associations’. zemlyachestvos are based in Russian cities of people coming from one rural provincial area. In Buryatia all of the rural regions of the Buryat Republic are represented by zemlyachestvos in the capital Ulan-Ude. In Moscow, there are such associations, with premises and officers, to promote the interests of Buryats and many other nationalities and regional groups.

Note, however, that chat room talk, and indeed blog, generates its own dialect – often condemned by outsiders as vulgar or impious (c.f. Doostdar 2004:651–62 for the case of blogging in Iran). The easy tri-lingualism of the genre, its wit and irreverence, create a boundary-crossing international space that is also internationalist. In other words, it has an unspoken ideology (see Nair n.d.: 4 for the equivalent in India). Yet, in Russia this is at the same time a limited space ‘vertically’, since it excludes people of older generations who do not know the lingo, and would probably recoil from it anyway. In Russia, as in India, there is a term for this chat room language. It is called speaking ‘in Albanian’ (po-albanskii).

These rules include, for example, that chat rooms cannot be removed or destroyed without the moderator's permission, that guest visitors are not permitted to edit home-pages, that personal correspondence is not transferred into the public domain, etc.

The English word ‘real’ is regularly used on Russian sites to refer to life off-line.

Information, such as the ‘real’ home address, telephone number, and age, is normally not supplied to the site but kept hidden.

The word avatar is used worldwide; it is taken from Hinduism, where it means the descent to earth of a deity in various visible forms.

Sites sometimes provide palettes of the items for building an avatar (e.g. photos, logos and nicknames to choose from), but most people construct their own.

‘Unification’ results mainly from the requirement of mutual comprehension between multiple, variegated and unpractised users, hence the tendency to simplify and Americanise language, the use of standard emoticons, and the censure of irony and sarcasm, all this being managed through the authoritarian practices of moderators. Diversity, on the other hand, is produced by the very advent of all these newcomers, their setting up of endless new forums of their own, and their tendency to use Russian, English and other languages and emoticons in culturally specific ways (Voiskounsky 1996; Schmidt, Teubner & Zurawski 2004).

There is little published work on this topic regarding the Russian regions. Abdulova's examination (2004) of the image of the country of Mongolia on websites in Irkutsk and Ulan-Ude revealed substantive differences. In Irkutsk, essentially a Russian city, Mongolia was seen as a distant and exotic place, of little interest except for holidays. In Ulan-Ude, on the other hand, website discussions portray Mongolia as the homeland of the ancestors of the Buryats and also as a vitally important economic partner of the Buryat Republic.

According to Bargh and McKenna (2004:582–583) sexual minorities and stigmatised groups in Russia do not use the Internet widely to mobilise politically, unlike in many Western countries.

This is different from the Persian case because in Iran the state is concerned with ‘vulgarity’ and sexuality as political-moral issues, and hence does interfere with such sites, whereas this is not the case in Russia (Doostdar 2004). Compare the political character of virtual protest and rave demos in Japan (Hayashi & McKnight 2005) with the absurdist equivalent of flash-mobs in Russia (Gudkova 2004).

Moderators can exclude people for as long as they like, to the degree they want.

It can be seen that the virtual personality is in the end jointly produced. One develops one's avatar only after a period of interaction, and its ‘meaning’ for everyone else is then evinced by means of collective debates, for example those along the lines of ‘whom do we most dislike in the forum?’ It is significant how much energy goes into these public discussions on both sites. And, it is perhaps relevant to this fascination with collective personality construction (and de-construction) that purely individual interactions via chat rooms (i.e. one-to-one messaging through icqs and msns) seem to be much less used by Russians than British or Chinese.