Wojack on Griefing and Separation of online personas

Roland Wojack was much like Jo Ann Oravec in the sense that he is concerned with the physical separation from their virtual personas because it creates changes in a person's psychology to an extent that he would consider it to be detrimental to the online community as a whole. To phrase it, he is considered about two developments; the people who grief, or destroy an online experience and how this physical separation allowed by the internet changes personalities.

Griefing can come in different forms of actions; they can come in discussion forums or they could come in the form of disrupting player experiences in a video game. They are similar to trolls, but they typically are more predisposed to incur negative reactions amongst the communities. Griefing also differs from trolling in the sense that they can come in a variety of scope and size. A person construct a building in the virtual game Minecraft, and a griefer can come in and destroy that person's work. The destruction of that person's work will incite strong actions from the victim and it represents a loss in time and emotional investment. In this case, the scale is pretty massive, especially if it required many hours of work to construct a building in the game. Griefing is best explained by this changing of human brain psychology to offload some of the burdens of the id to the human unto the internet.

The separation of the physical body and mind from the events online creates some of the desire to offload the id unto the internet, where it is possible to develop the id in such a way that it almost becomes another personality; an alter ego. This is I think Wojack's point that people change online because there are no real rules governing their conduct, so they are free to explore things to their pleasure, and by extension, to act the way they desired. This I think formed the backbone for the actions of the griefers, whose immediate goal is to satisfy their desire to wreck catastrophe upon any virtual worlds. Despite this separation, it does not make it justifiable for a person to inflict this kind of damage. The people on the other side of the internet are also people and they have emotions too. If this kind of conduct is allowed, then the reverse psychology might also be true; that when people get away from the internet where they store their alter ego, they might be tempted to bring some of those ego over the real world, creating real world problems. Therefore, griefing cannot be justified by any means.