Newstory Reflection - Anna Ng

Do you want to have a perfect virtual girlfriend? Cloud Girlfriend can help you to do so. By just defining the type of girl that you like, the web will help you bring “her” into existence, which is creating a fake Facebook account with a detailed profile. “She” will keep a public long distance with you by leaving messages on your Facebook, and at the same time, you can reply her messages too. It sounds an interesting idea.

The CEO of this company, David Fuhriman, believed that this new service can act as a platform for people to build up their confidence, especially for those who do not have girlfriend in reality. After they thought that they are able to manage a relationship, they can try matching online and find their ideal partner. The real profile of the user will only be sent unless both sides agreed to be friends.

In my opinion, finding an ideal person to have long-term relationship in reality through online community is an unrestrained and vigorous thought. I think the information provided by others is not trustable. How can we ensure the real profile using by the others are REAL? Due to the rapid development of the internet, people can make use of its characteristics to create new identities for themselves. They may shape an ideal self to fulfill the defects in reality and individual Traits can easily be concealed. There is a significant difference between face-to-face communication and online interaction. Texts are commonly used in online communication; however, throughout this mode of communication, there is lack of non-verbal clues to measure the authenticity of the profiles of that person.

To a certain extent, I agreed these kinds of services may build up self-confidence of some people. We have different social roles in daily life. The things that we do are restricted by norms and standards in the society and family. Sometimes, it may be hard for people to obtain identification towards the identity.
As we are in the post-modern society, more people accepted the idea of multiple identities. It appears that there are no constraints in the internet. This leads the internet network become a place for people explore self-construction.

However, I have a doubt in how the interaction with virtual girlfriend trains up one’s confidence. I cannot think of any reasons to support this since the messages from virtual girlfriend are only sort out by an artificial intelligence system and not required any real people to sitting in front of the computers to talk with.

Finding fantasy dates
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