To a certain extent people have always had multiple personalities or personas in so far as we adapt to contexts generally, the inability to adapt, at least sincerely and not as part of a game, is what characterises some disorders like sociopathy or obsessive compulsive disorders.
However, if virtual reality and communicating or networking with others through computer interfaces becomes more the norm will it results in multiple personalities and a sort of psychological splitting becoming the norm?
Right, important distinction that no-one seems to be making here, so I suppose it's time for another psychology lesson.
To start with:
Persona =/= Personality
A personality is the
sum, the integrated complex, of qualities that constitute an individual person as percieved on the one hand by themselves, and on the other hand by others.
A persona is the social mask assumed by that person when they want to present themselves in a particular way to others. Many people posess several different personas to facillitate different kinds of social interaction. It's commonplace for instance, for someone to have differing work/home personas, priviate/public personas, etc. Their personality, as percieved by another, typically amounts to the integrated composition of the various personas they display to that person. The accuracy with which that composition reflects their subjective sense of self as their ego percieves it depends on the skill of the other at integrating the various elements they are able to percieve into a coherent framework.
Multiple personas therefore =/= multiple personalities.
If an individual's personas are percieved as distinct
personalities by another, it most likely represents some kind of failure of communication or perception on one or both parts. A person may present their various personas without full awareness of how they are coming across, and the inconsistent impression of who they are that implants in the minds of others in consequence, or they may simply not care.
Conversely, the other person may be unable to integrate the behavior they percieve into a coherent whole that adequately explains the underlying functioning that drives their apparently disparate behaviour (a failure to develop an effective theory of mind about that person) or be unable to percieve directly the deeper motivations that drive them (more of a failure of empathy) and therefore conclude, probably mistakenly, that they actually have distinct multiple personalities.
....
Now, you're talking about people developing multiple personalities in response to the proliferation of new forms of social interactions brought on by electronic media, so I'm going to try to define what a multiple personality actually
is in addition to my previous definition of what it
isn't.
Dissociative identity disorder (frequently still referred to as Multiple Personality Disorder, but in light of present knowledge perhaps less accurately) is a rarely diagnosed conditon. It's characterised (in psychiatric, as opposed to behaviorual terms) by a markedly unstable sense of self, and consequent splitting of the
underlying subjective self (so far as anyone is able to determine; we are not yet able to read minds to be certain of this diagnosis no matter what some people think) into several different subunits which are able to function with partial or total independence, and which appear to have limited or no communication with each other. It's a controversial topic, and one that I don't want to get too far into here, besides saying that as it is necessarily diagnosed symptomatically, because we do not have direct access to people's internal mental states, it is not easy to diagnose accurately. Hence the controversy and confusion that exists on the topic in the professional literature, never mind the popular press and media.
One thing that is agreed upon, however, is that the condition is strongly associated with defense responses to extreme trauma, particularly when experienced at an early age (ie child sexual abuse - victims often dissociate from themselves in order to counteract the pain and helplessness they feel). It's likely that in many diagnosed cases the person does not percieve themselves as having truly distinct identities at all, but displays their various conflicting personas as a protective measure which is so strongly habituated that it's difficult for another person to make the distinction, and difficult or impossible for them themselves to modify their behaviour voluntarily.
Rather than essaying a definitive conclusion here, I'll leave it to intelligent readers to decide for themselves how likely it is that online interactions will produce the kind of overwhelming psychic trauma that is usually associated with PTSD and childhood abuse, and the activation of the extreme coping mechanism that some resort to as a defense against this.
