*Even the question of whether Mandel knew what he was doing took on a new shading in light of this unique environment. The Well had long given him the ability to alter and modify his identity, to fragment himself in ways he couldn't have done nearly so easily, if at all, offline. In this way, the system fostered what Sherry Turkle, in Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet, calls the "multiple and fluid" self. According to Turkle's theory, online experiences can "help us to develop models of psychological well being that ... admit multiplicity and flexibility. They acknowledge the constructed nature of reality, self, and other."
Mandel might have been, according to this model, the perfect postmodern human being. Yet something was wrong. He was wreaking havoc and ignoring the impact of his actions online. He was trapped in what Turkle calls "the crucible of contradictory experience," the netherworld of online dwellers, on the boundary between the real and the virtual. "Some are tempted to think of life in cyberspace as insignificant, as escape or meaningless diversion," she writes. "It is not. Our experiences there are serious play. We belittle them at our risk." *