technsolution

Debates

This week had some incredible readings! I've always been fascinated by issues of representation and virtual identities. The selection of essays for the week really addressed these concepts in (ironically) a multi-modal manner of their own - From Gabourny's queering computational history, to the exclusive modularity of UNIX coding, to the DH databases and archives and racial inequalities, to the ostracized community of gold-farmers on WoW, to the multiplicity of virtual selves, to VR rape, and to the "nature" of representation of/discourse of, and understanding of matter itself! It was truly a heady and intoxicating array of perspectives and I was intrigued by each of them!

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  1. We can be who we chose as an avatar, but how much does our “us-ness” carry over and be revealed in our avatars?  Do we get treated as our avatar or as “us”?   That is we can try to be our true selves and transcend how we seem to others, but can we overcome our social conditioning?  When we are treated badly as an avatar does it reinforce our pasts?  Does encountering “mansplaining”  when we are presenting as male make us react as a woman? Or does it suddenly seem an appropriate way to talk to a woman / perceived inferior? 

    Do we act in our roles no matter what? 

    Do we over compensate?  Are women as men super macho?  Does that reify the difference?

    For example if we are perceived as “Chinese” by the mere fact of being seen in a repetitive activity and thus assumed to be gold farming, are we locked into a role, we’re unable to prove were not,  and if we are Chinese, what then?  

    Are we freed or trapped?  What if we have no access in the first place?  Does the freedom of others lessen our lives?

    What does it say if an oppressed category wants to experiment as the other?  Is it wrong to play as another race or gender?  Is it “slumming” or voyeuristic is we go “down” the oppression scale?  Is deceptive? Is it self-hating to go “up” the scale?  Women playing men, okay --  that’s trading up!    But would we see it the same if black plays white?   

    An aspect  I find intriguing is the abilism of the  avatar world --  it’s assumed one will want to be “whole”  or to experience a life “freed” from the body’s limitations.  Disability Pride might say otherwise.  (Not to mention the communities that see their true bodies as missing parts or that fetishize amputees.)

    I choose to create a male and US-Japanese avatar (TommyTanaka)  in Second Life to see what happens.  He’s not straight, but no one knows that yet.  Right now he can hardly walk, so we’ll see what unfolds.  I’ve had female avatar in the past, but she was used for academic experiments in on-line learning and didn’t really interact much outside the campus set up for us. 

     

    Just as I find it irksome when people say English as a Second language when many of my students are on a 3rd or 4th one, I feel eye-rolly that they think this is only my 2nd life.  As if! 

      

    I loved that their registrations age range allowed that I could have be born in 1913, but I feel sad for all the 101+ year olds wanting an avatar.   

    Sarah 
  2. I'll admit right now that Scalar is absolute voodoo for me. It took me awhile to figure out how to create a page, and even now I have no idea how to edit a page that I created so I can put in all that fun multimedia material that is desired. It's a zone where there are buttons everywhere, they may sometimes be labeled, but you don't really know which one is the one you're looking for. Simpler designs would be easier, but would limit what I was trying to create (which I'm not exactly sure of yet). This will . . . take some time. However, I can say it's much better than BB, both discussion board and blog. I can easily log in from a standard user page rather than routing everything through a university account that signs me out every so often. It seems much more dynamic, and the colors are more pleasing (and controllable). On BB, you're just an extension of a student account, probing your professor for information, reading what is presented. You're not a creator or a scholar or a collaborator; you're a pupil. Compared to Twitter, Scalar a godsend of proper text and images as opposed to snippets and web addresses. I can actually converse here, which I couldn't easily do on Twitter. Your Twitter identity is you boiled down to your media savvy aspects. It's not a place for scholarship, but rather where the current check the trends to find out what's new. Identity is being up-to-date and aware. I actually did like Social Book quite a bit, though it's more concerned with annotating than creating versus Scalar. You're a student again when using Social Book, but an empowered one, able to navigate, claim, and make points. You're a participant, unlike in Blackboard. As far as the identity of Scalar, I'm still learning the ropes so can't definitely say yet. More akin to creation than the others, self is a producer and commenter on what others have produced. You are your work, a blogger in a closed network of tubes. Whether this assessment holds up or is altered by my future experiences will be seen.
  3. If an avatar is a projection of self, they can never really be our true selves by definition. As Chris Rock put it once, for the first month of dating someone, you're dating them, you're dating their "representative", or the best aspects about them with the worst removed. This puts us in quite a conundrum: we want the power to define our identity, but we don't want that power used on us, to "dupe" us. We don't want to be fooled into talking, liking, dating, enjoying, or praising someone who might not be what they say they are. Now, there used to be natural limits to this type of status-altering. Clothing, manners, and company could alter a perception of someone, and so in works like "Pygmalion" or "She's All That", a type of identity is constructed by changing the trappings. Eventually reality sets in, but part of the trappings becomes part of reality so the person is partially accepted even after they "fooled" someone. There is of course a limit to this sort of identity alteration to make most of us feel that we're not being fooled: money. Clothing and company takes quite a bit of money to change how we are accepted, and manners often require a commitment that coincides with wealth and leisure. Even when given as an opportunity for a poor person to redefine themselves, a rich, knowledgeable (and socially-conscious) benefactor is present. But what of computers? There's an initial economic and cultural cost, true, but not nearly to the degree that any of the aforementioned requirements have. If someone presents themselves as rich, thoughtful, intelligent, and suave for us, what if they're just tricking us? Not only that, but the bridge between someone being themselves and their avatar is considered wider in the computer world than in the previous analog switching of before. It is behind this indignation of being tricked that we hide behind when our innate prejudices against race, sex, attractiveness, and mannerisms are found out. When we realize that girl that we were interested in is black instead of white, we jump behind this violation of "honesty" so we don't have to admit that it would have been a deal-breaker the moment she mentioned it. When we realize that a commenter we admire might not be the person they say they are, we suddenly take back our praise for their intellectual wordsmithing. Whereas the computer world could have pulled down the very concepts of identity and expose our prejudices so that we can fix them, the modern computer world has orbited around authenticity and honesty as ways to not. They are narrowly defined, so moving things around is fine, but fabrication is not (much like a resume). Turkle, writing in the mid-nineties, wrote her article before this advent in skepticism, when the sheer playing with of identity was the point to online interactions. Danger and joy mixed into an experience that gave its users something that was inaccessible before. Then comes the dark cloud on the horizon, where Dibbell's witnessing an online rape reminds users that there are limits, limits that should be respected. In addition, it's a warning: don't believe the illusion, don't put your heart into it. You're a fool or worse if you do. Nakamura's exploration of WoW gold-farming reveals our present age where we see right through avatars to what's behind them. No longer do we read that someone is a genderless crossroad god or a rabbit or a great hero. They are simply a person sitting in front of a computer, playing a game. Digitally constructed identities are stripped away, but not socially constructed ones as race and sex determine what we say to people. We now have a privileging of engaging with others stripped down identities while we still wear the mask of our pueduonymity or anonymity. The problem is, we just can't decided upon identity and what it means. We insist on integrity from others, but irony is what compels us on ourselves and them. We see any deviation from what you "are" as lying, but we know that we would be pilloried being as we are, and aware that we are shifting one social dominance for another. For those, like Turning, that simply were who they were, we destroyed. In the end, we watch magic tricks needing to be impressed, even as we scorn those who's tricks can be figured out, or worse, don't perform for us at all.