On-line or Out of Touch?

I'm trying to understand how and why people enjoy participating in MUDs. Supposedly, they get to interact with different people, they feel they can be less inhibited, they can work on improving their "RL" personality, etc., etc. All this sounds great, but what happens after you log-off? What happens after the factor? I use to chat on-line long ago, back in 1997 or so. I thought it was great fun at the time and looked forward to it everyday. Only problem was after logging off I felt I had wasted my efforts and wasted a lot of time. Had I been improving anyone else's life, or even my life for that matter? I think not. Most of the time was spent trying to convince people to think like me or agree with me, but in the end what I said didn't really matter to anyone but me. That is where I see a problem. To me, most people are involved in on-line communities for purely self-promoting behavior. They are not involved in the give-and-take that coincides with real human to human relationships. Maybe I've been out of the game too long, but being accepted on-line by people I'll probably never encounter in any real life setting isn't on the top of my list of things to do (not that being accepted by real people in the "real world" is either). But the fact of the matter is online you can be anyone, with any problem, with any occupation, with any personality you see fit, and who cares if that persona is anything like the real you. All I am saying is people should be wary of what they take out of their on-line relationships, and also how much of their personal time and energy they put into them. Because in reality, relationships and persona's on the web are anything but reality. It is digital images and written text that people manipulate and use to put out the image they want. If written text and images was all a person needed to express their real self, the total embodiment of themselves as a human being, I feel that human being would be severely lacking. If it's a way for someone to be entertained for a few hours a week, that's great. The problem begins when people spend hours a day on-line, when the believe they are the most "themselves" on-line, and when they start losing touch with the "real world" and the real people surrounding them. Within Turkle's book one user comments on how it is an addiction. Similar to a narcotic addiction. People depend on narcotics to feel like they are themselves and face their realities (or blur them). It seems that some of these MUD users feel the same. They become obsessed with being on-line and must do so to feel they are themselves. If people become so dependent living on-line lives or altering their identity what is to become of actual face-to-face interaction. What of human-to-human relationships? I'm almost too scared to think about it.