technsolution

Identity

1) How do avatars potentially challenge existing social hierarchies and
how do they potentially replicate existing social inequalities and
prejudices? It is my sense that avatars paradoxically have the ability
to both reify existing social/power structures, while simultaneously
possessing the ability to problematize those same formations. As for
reifying, of course, it begins at the most basic level of access. The
"have nots" who do not have a computer and/or stable access to the
internet, as thus, denied access to this virtual community (of an
estimated 20 million+ members), as well as the social discourse(s) that
are created and used by those members. This can be seen as somewhat
analogous to those who are unable to attend universities and/or attain a
higher education due to socio-economic limitations. Further, in the
creation of an avatar, the "unknowable" users are initially prompted to
chose one of eleven different avatars in order to be the visual
representation of that individual. Of course, these beginning avatars
are seemingly the boiled-down amalgam of privileged archetypes, and
however "casual" or "subcultured" a few of the choices may be, they are
all none the less created to be considered "attractive" in the sense
that none are overweight, all have "fresh clothing/accessories."
Additionally, there is only one avatar of color, a female, and yet that
avatar (of nebulous racial categorization) appears to be one of the most
"sexualized" choices. That said, I went to the "marketplace" to
investigate the potential modifications that can be purchased to augment
the basic prototypical avatar selection and found that one of the
largest categories is the "skin" or physical appearance. Almost
universally, these "upgrades" involve fictitious enhancements that, in
effect, create and contribute to what is considered attractive. - for
females, big, pouty lips, barbie-esque body shapes and for males,
muscular physiques and chiseled jawlines.



As for the possible subversion of social inequalities and prejudices -
Interestingly and contrary to what I might have assumed, there are
actually 6 female prototypes and only 5 male. I would've thought that
there would be a greater selection of males - perhaps that's because
females are inherently (arguably) more vested in appearance? In having a
greater selection of feminized avatars, it would seem to trouble the
real life (RL), hegemonically male-dominated society. And as the
individual user can make the choice to play an avatar of either sex,
and/or a different racial background, they will be granted egress into
communities that they may otherwise be denied in RL. Once within these
communities, the user is then privy to experiences and discourse(s) that
could be seen as "privileged" and thus, given the simultaneous ability
to trouble or problematize those communities and their social
structures. Indeed, as Turkle notes:



Traditional ideas about identity have been tied to a notion

of authenticity that such virtual experiences actively subvert. When each

player can create many characters in many games, the self is not only decentered

but multiplied without limit.







2) How might Turkle, Barad, Dibbell, Gaboury and Nakamura see the
experience differently? Well I think Turkle, in considering the
postmodernist simulation of multiple selves, SecondLife easily
intersects with this essay. In SecondLife, we are creating virtual
identities that are in essence fragments of who we are in RL. We may
chose how that representation acts, speaks, and engages (or not) with
the larger community. In RL we do not have the fluidity that VR offers
and this fluidity. Dibbell acknowledges that though these are immaterial
worlds, (which problematizes spatial, community boundaries, as well as
temporal), they none the less can have RL impact. In her detail of a
rape case that occurred in a MOO - the individual users involved had
very strong, RL reactions to the event <-- this ties into our
discussion last week about the power of discourse and as Dibbell notes
"Words make things happen - the same way that pulling a trigger does."
And while these experiences aren't "real" in the traditional sense, the
reverberations of the bullets fired, can in fact, hit the user's with a
true sense of urgency and true representation of RL traumas. Barad nods
to the issue of representation and how discourse shapes both our
understanding of the world as well as how it simultaneously creates (and
limits) it. How the user interacts with SecondLife, and the population
of other users, as well as the discourse that is created both in-game
and out/about-game (message boards, RPing, etc.) helps to define the
experience that we have with the platform of VR. Nakamura addresses the
racialization of WoW, but that can be easily layered on the environment
of SecondLife. There are existing communities that seem to mimic RL
issues of racism. closed-mindedness, etc. which almost suggests that
there isn't a true escape from the socially-limiting world that we
physically inhabit. It seems in most VR communities - all the horrible
things about RL societies and communities bleed into the ephemera of VR
because it is, after all, none the less created by, and inhabited by,
living human beings.



3) How does the exercise tie in with Earhart and McPherson's critiques
of DH scholarship when it comes to issues of race and other forms of
"representation?" The experience of creating a SecondLife avatar seems
to reify Earhart's sense that while the internet was once thought of as a
new, uncolonized space of real freedom that wasn't policed and
regulated, there appears to be the same old hegemonic power structures
at work. There remain issues of race, gender, religion, sexual
orientation, etc. which are re-enacted in SecondLife's many communities.
As for his commentary on the wishes and dreams for a more universal
literary cannon and and expanded DH archives, SecondLife (not so unlike
the early internet) can (perhaps naively) be seen as mimetic in that it
appears to have the capacity to offer just such a utopian space of
equality, but in reality, it seems that the power structures that be,
will continue to act on and have influence in these spaces. McPherson's
argument is similar, yet chooses to approach the issue from a
coding/discursive perspective in which the very "language" of coding
seeks to pigeon-hole representations into modular bits of
pre-conceived/limited fragments. In this sense, the DH (as a field
itself, not so unlike Eng Studies,) has become fragmented into so many
sub-specialties and hyper-disciplinary fragmentation, that it, too,
appears complacent and/or even subordinate to the logics of this
modularization.

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  1. are my comments beging posted? And what is this constant CAPTCHA