Pro-ana websites are thought to be concerned with promotion of anorexia. However, it is not always the case. Rather, they provide a save space to talk freely about experiencing anorexia. What is more, some view these sites as therapeutic, helping to work out through this terrible mental disorder.

Thin inspiration sites, there are approx. 400 them, give a fascinating insight to the psyche of Ana girls. The first wave of such websites appeared in 2001 as a means for anorectics so as not to suffer in silence… I’m going to enter this dark underground world to get a better understanding of them.  And that’s what the first chapter of my dissertation will be about: identity in pro-anorexia communities.

A credo of pro-ana world:

I believe in Control, the only force mighty enough to bring order to the chaos that is my world.
I believe that I am the most vile, worthless and useless person ever to have existed on this planet, and that I am totally unworthy of anyone’s time and attention.
I believe that other people who tell me differently must be idiots. If they could see how I really am, then they would hate me almost as much as I do.
I believe in oughts, musts and shoulds as unbreakable laws to determine my daily behavior.
I believe in perfection and strive to attain it.
I believe in salvation through trying just a bit harder than I did yesterday.
I believe in calorie counters as the inspired word of god, and memorize them accordingly.
I believe in bathroom scales as an indicator of my daily successes and failures
I believe in hell, because I sometimes think that I’m living in it.
I believe in a wholly black and white world, the losing of weight, recrimination for sins, the abnegation of the body and a life ever fasting.

source: http://www.fading-obsession.com/religion/ana-creed.php

Some interesting points from this fascinating article:

- each of us is a community of competing selves, with the happiness of one often causing the misery of another. 

- it [brain] also contains a part that constitutes a person, a self: the chief executive of all the subsystems. As the philosopher Jerry Fodor once put it, “If, in short, there is a community of computers living in my head, there had also better be somebody who is in charge; and, by God, it had better be me.”

- “I am large, I contain multitudes,” Walt Whitman

- One can see a version of clashing multiple selves in the mental illness known as dissociative-identity disorder, which used to be called multiple-personality disorder (=> a psychiatric diagnosis that describes a condition in which a single person displays multiple distinct identities or personalities, each with its own pattern of perceiving and interacting with the environment.)

- Some imaginative pleasures [reading novels, watching movies and TV, daydreaming, etc.]  involve the creation of alternative selves. Sometimes we interact with these selves as if they were other people

- exploring alternative identities seems to be what the Internet was invented for. The sociologist Sherry Turkle has found that people commonly create avatars so as to explore their options in a relatively safe environment. She describes how one 16-year-old girl with an abusive father tried out multiple characters online—a 16-year-old boy, a stronger, more assertive girl—to try to work out what to do in the real world. But often the shift in identity is purely for pleasure. A man can have an alternate identity as a woman; a heterosexual can explore homosexuality; a shy person can try being the life of the party

- Online alternative worlds such as World of Warcraft and Second Lifeare growing in popularity, and some people now spend more time online than in the real world. One psychologist I know asked a research assistant to try out one of these worlds and report on what it is like and how people behave there. The young woman never came back—she preferred the virtual life to the real one

- life would be swell if all the selves inhabiting a single mind worked as a team, pulling together for a common goal. But they clash, and sometimes this gives rise to what we call addictions and compulsions

- Sometimes one self can predict that it will later be dominated by another self, and it can act to block the crossing—an act known as self-binding, which Thomas Schelling and the philosopher Jon Elster have explored in detail

- According to the traditional view, a single, long-term-planning self—a you—battles against passions, compulsions, impulses, and addictions.

- The natural extension of this type of self-binding is what the economist Richard Thaler and the legal scholar Cass Sunstein describe as “libertarian paternalism”—a movement to engineer situations so that people retain their choices (the libertarian part), but in such a way that these choices are biased to favor people’s better selves (the paternalism part)

- We benefit, intellectually and personally, from the interplay between different selves, from the balance between long-term contemplation and short-term impulse. We should be wary about tipping the scales too far. The community of selves shouldn’t be a democracy, but it shouldn’t be a dictatorship, either

Full article: http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200811/multiple-personalities

A Story About A Tree is a short essay by Raph Koster, regarding the death of a LegendMUD player named Karyn. It raises the subject of inter-human relationships in virtual worlds, particularly the loss of friends, concluding that these are not just games. The incident is used as a paradigm to the human ability to grief about the loss of imaginary people as well as the aspect of death in internet-based friendships. It has been later proven that the real person, Karyn’s avatar claimed to be, never existed.

The Karyn incident, albeit not unique in nature, is considered to be a key event in the development of virtual worlds’ ethics, similar to the rape in cyberspace. The death demonstrated that people can develop feelings for each other via the virtual world medium, thus experiencing real emotions about somebody they’ve never met. A Story About A Tree is considered as a major counterargument against the “it’s just a game“-statement, whilst referring to virtual worlds. Furthermore, it showcased that while being a very real object of grief to one party, it can indeed remain just a game for another.

source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Story_About_A_Tree