For next class, I'd like you to build on our conversation
about performing otherness online as well as  Michele White's arguments
about how sites like ebay shape our identities as consumers through profiling
and interfaces that seemingly empower us as users in order to propose an
alternate set of criteria for creating user profiles and avatars. 

Your objective is to create an interface that:

A) complicates
the relationship between "us" and "them," 

B) calls
attention to the reductionist functions of categorization, 

C) foregrounds
performance of "self" and "otherness" within broader
questions of power and oppression, 

D) helps users better understand
racism/sexism/heterosexism/classism as "systems of advantage" based
on race/gender/sexuality/class, and 

E) makes identity less knowable/measurable.
In other words, this is a destabilizing experiment that seeks make visible how
online interfaces typically work to subjugate and normalize certain categories
of identity/modes of engagement by purposely not taking the defaults/questions/categories
provided at face value. 

If you are looking for a model to work against, you
might toy around with the user profile interfaces for sites like Facebook or
Match.com as well as the defaults/options for avatar sites like Second Life or
Bitstrips.

You will build your specifications in Scalar. I have set up
a new "path." You should explain your choices in relation to
arguments made by White, Nakamura, Turkle, etc. as well as class discussions.

In your journal entry, also on Scalar, you should take a
reflexive look at the exercise for what it suggests about the constraints and
possibilities of rethinking "identity" online. Journal entries also
on scalar, as separate page within track.

Please make certain to self-identify on both pages since
Scalar does not differentiate authors.

Make sure you are linking pages together within the path.

As always, have fun, challenge yourselves, embrace
discomfort.