We start this chapter with the following quotation from a public Internet discussion site describing activities of the members of the board:

Extract 7.1: Internet discussion site

We go on coach trips to Narnia and have Mary Poppins round for tea on a regular basis.

This embodies, in a tongue-in-cheek way, many of the utopian possibilities of virtual identity. In cyberspace, space, time and identity it would seem are no impediment to doing whatever we want to do, or being whomever we wish to be. Identity on the Internet is playful, creative, impressive and limitless, and (so popular discourse would have it) an entirely different proposition from identity in the ‘real world’, In this chapter, we critically explore the concept of ‘virtual identity’ and its relationship to language, and attempt to elucidate its relationship to what is called ‘real life’ (RL) identity.

After exploring ‘virtuality’ as a concept, and summarising work that has explored ‘identity’ and ‘community’ online, we look at the genre-specific realisations of the language of computer-mediated communication (CMC). We argue that it owes much of its distinctiveness to an attempt to compensate for an absence of audio-visual context in the medium (notwithstanding interactions via ‘Webcam’!). This absence has implications for notions of ‘embodiment’ and space introduced in the previous chapter (‘Spatial Identities’) and forms a crucial element of identity work online. We illustrate our discussion with data from two message boards, one a soap opera discussion list and the other a graphic novel message board.