Since the Internet was first introduced forty years ago, the ways people use the Internet have changed dramatically. The concept of identity on the Internet had long been a popular topic of Internet studies. From playing multiple users online games to updating status on Facebook, people use different concepts to manage the relationship between their online identity and offline identity. Through the development of the Internet in the last forty years, it is clear to see that there is a transition of Internet users’ attitude towards online representation. Compare to the early period of online communities, people nowadays have a more open mind of sharing their real life identity with others. This paper is going to examine this transition by defining the concepts of social identity and online identity, exploring the identity issues in the early period of the Internet and in the web 2.0 era.
