Neo's Internet Identity Crisis

In the movie The Matrix, the world that almost every human thinks is real life is in fact a virtual community.  Computers create this virtual community in order to keep control over all of the humans.  Only a select few have freed themselves from the matrix and with the help of others that they recruit, they are able to wage war on the computers in order to free all of mankind. 

What I find so intriguing about The Matrix is that it is not very far off from Sherry Turle's discussion of virtual communities or multi-user domains (MUDs) in Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet.   Turle describes identity as the sameness between a person and his/her persona.  In MUDs, a person can have more than one persona.  According to the people that regularly engage in MUDs, Real Life (RL) is "just one more window."  Users have so many different personas that they can move from one to another just by opening and closing windows on their computer screen.

In The Matrix, the lead character Neo yearns for the truth.  He searches for the answers behind the matrix and eventually finds them.  The answers cause Neo to have a virtual (internet) identity crisis.   What he has thought as RL for so long is actually a MUD. 

Why is this significant?  That lies in the quote that I referenced earlier.  One user refers to RL as "just one more window."  However, should RL just be one more window?  It is scary to think that many online users today are starting to go through similar internet identity crises just like Neo.