Gender Imposters

The danger in virtual communities is that children and teens are playing around with them and meeting people who are not what they say they are. If teens are constantly interacting with the same person, they get sucked in and lose all sense of reality. Children's minds are impressionable. Sometimes they don't know the difference between what's real and what is not. These other worlds give them a sense of belonging, something a lot of them don't get at home. Technology is great, but sometimes the creators of these games can take it a bit too far. Because the inhabitants of these worlds can be pretty much who they want to be, it's easy for them to pose in a different gender. Sometimes the players take things too far, as in the case of "Joan" in "The Strange Case of the Electronic Lover" by Lindsy Van Gelder and "Sue", who lived in South Wales and was actually a married man that everybody thought was a woman. Don't get me wrong. I love the creative mind. It still amazes me what these people can do with technology.