why should you?

BTW- 10 years ago there was a movement called “post autistic economics” from France I believe…worth some googling.

I suggest “post autistic virtuality” will be required soon as the antidote to these meanderings.

It didn’t last long. I soon found out that if I said or did anything particularly clever as my alternate identity, I wouldn’t get any credit for it in my real life. The converse is also true, of course — if you do something particularly bad, you wouldn’t get blamed.

This is equally true in a business setting. It’s hard enough building up one resume and set of references — much less building up two different ones.

And, like several of the posters above said, if something goes wrong, I want to be able to pick up the phone and talk to a real person.

Sure, there are projects that can be done anonymously. For example, I’ve grown comfortable with buying things on eBay from individuals who list items anonymously, but have a good reputation with other buyers. But I am even more comfortable with sellers that link to their business websites, and provide full contact information.

When it comes to business services, and long-term projects, it is even more important to be able to confirm references and be able to contact service providers offline.

And yes, real people can do bad things just as easily as anonymous people can. But real people can also pay fines, and go to jail. As Bernard Madoff did. It is much more difficult for a real person to give up their identity — their home, family, friends, colleagues — and start fresh. For a virtual identity, all it takes is a click of a mouse.

In fact, I currently have a project that was hired out virtually, on an OpenSim grid. The vendor has since failed to deliver, and I cannot contact him online — he’s not on the grid, he’s not answering his email. Fortunately, I have his real world telephone number, and will call him if the situation continues, and find out what’s going on.

Avatars can pop in and out of existence at a whim. They can’t sign contracts, and they can’t open bank accounts.

Given my choice, and if everything else was equal (skill, price, etc…) I’d always do business with the vendor with the longest track record, with the most contact options, and with the most solid business presence.

– Maria

So, in virtual worlds, this is another means of communication, with different roles. Trust who you will trust for reasons of your own, in RL or SL.

As to identity transparency, I’m going to sound culturalist here, but that’s such an anglo-american point of view in general. I was a Unitarian Universalist minister’s kid, but my family was not WASP — I learned by the time I was a toddler that I had roles to play. When I was at church, I got to be Minister’s Daughter. When I was at home with nothing but family, I got to be Playful Little Kid. When I wanted to be alone, I got to be Quiet Reading Kid. All of these roles were like different personalities — different affects, emotes if you will, set of behaviors, and often different outward knowledge sets (i.e. what was talked about at the dinner table didn’t get discussed with parishioners).

This is BASIC to most world cultures — the idea that in your life, you are honor bound to fill very different roles. Your behavior in the professional space, or as a student, or as a spouse, or with people of your own gender (or not), or within the family circle, or even with the older or younger generations of your family will be *radically* different.

Behind it all, there’s a self, but often the desires of that self are less important than the honorable demands of the roles one plays.

Anglo-Americans generally have some notion of this, but they think they are unitary, brash, and honest because they don’t fragment themselves so much this way. Anglo-Americans generally think submerging the needs of the individual for the group is a sacrifice, not an honor or duty. They often also think that people who would put honor or duty before individual need are sick or dangerous.

Well, me, I think both sides have their sick or dangerous individuals and manifestations.

How does this relate to avatars? For some of us, coming into a virtual world just meant trying to figure out how we fit in a new set of honor and duty, community and relationship obligations.

Without having alts, I have several distinct personalities in SL. There is Shava Suntzu, the beautiful assistant to Tuna Oddfellow, gracious hostess and stage hand for the Odd Balls. There’s Shava Suntzu, sometimes SL journalist and amateur scholar of virtual worlds, philosopher around identity, pseudonymity, and anonymity. And there’s Shava Suntzu, entrepreneur and technologist for Oddfellow Studios.

The “beautiful assistant” Shava is lighter and airier, cheery, and chatty on small interesting topics.

The journalist/philosopher is slower and deeper in thought (she’s the one who spoke at SLCC on Art, I suppose!).

And the entrepreneur is more assertive and forward, a promoter.

Of all of these, the “beautiful assistant” is the most theater, but they are all me, and they correspond to faces, masks over masks, I use in the real world.

In Buddhism, we identify these masks as ego — they are not you, but they are masks you assume. The self is more fundamental than the (virtual) worldly trappings and relationships by which you define yourself to others.

In linguistics/anthro they call this “registers” when applied to how we speak. The way you talk to a small child is likely quite different to how you talk to your boss. The tone you assume with your lover and the tone you use with the checkout person at the supermarket are likely to be nuanced at least a bit.

If you become sensitive to the role of roles in your life, you’ll see that all of SL and RL are role playing games. It’s the only dance there is! At root, the dancer/player is…you. And the dance/game is to find out who “you” are, when the masks are off.

We remake our masks, our egoic selves throughout our lifetimes, as we move into new jobs, new communities. You don’t need an avatar to do that, but avatars are relaxing because they are so low risk, and low bandwidth, compared to RL.

Many people use SL to “find themselves” for their RL — who are you when expectations don’t impinge?

For many these experiments will wash back into RL.

Botgirl Questi said it well:

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Botgirl’s Stages of Avatarian Awareness. (Nods to ArminasX Saiman)

1. Virtual Identity is a psychological creation (as opposed to one’s real Human Identity).
2. Virtual identity is real.
3. Virtual Identity and Human Identity are both psychological creations.

====

Feel free to play with your SL avatar — and then play with your RL avatars too. See how many you can identify, and how many of them you really like. You might be able to modify or even eliminate a few alts, or add one or two.

It’s not split personality. It’s *normal* to have different faces to different roles, in any reality.

The answer lies partly in context. If I am wearing my gorilla avatar in a jungle setting, they will probably suspend disbelief and accept me as a gorilla (assuming I act the part). If I am wearing it while discussing programming for metanomics, they will probably look past the avatar entirely.

This is one reason Metanomics often focuses on the real life identities of our guests–because the context is actually one of a conversation between the people behind the avatars. But that isn’t always the case. Goth designer Raven Pennyfeather came on the show in her goth avatar, and that was who she *was* for us, just as Stroker Serpentine appeared and *was* his most studly avatar.

Maybe the most in-between case was Ted Castronova, who appeared as a dwarf female troll. He didn’t have an avatar, so we simply announced to the community what he wanted, and some kind and artistic soul made one that he loved.

Ted clearly felt comfortable in his avatar, and while he was still Indiana University Professor Edward Castronova, there did seem to be an influence of the troll as well.

Wait, did I just call Ted a troll? Well, he *has* been critical of Second Life….

I don’t use them for business, but I do find touring the grid as an abstract is interesting, if only in how much less people interact with me. Clearly the digital represetnation helps people join a “clan”. The business people and their business suits, the furries and their animalistic avatars, the super blinged out unrealistic female avatars… the form helps people define where you are trying to “fit in” and what you are rebelling against.

Going abstract leaves people with little to hang their “first impression” on. Of course they can read my profile and there is much there to work from, but it is unlike when I show up in a place wearing the “correct” avatar to fit on (or vice versa) prompts an obvious reaction.

After five years of using SL an avatar just becomes an annoying 3D model. It makes me cringe to have an anonymous person with a cute avatar that’s bought into LL’s “find love” try to flirt with me or befriend me. Like I’m supposed to be flattered by their attention because they have a cute avatar. No thank you!

Don’t get me wrong here by the way. There’s often a false dichotomy set up between “completely linked” and “not linked at all”.

While linking my name to my avatar identity led to a certain loss, the benefits have outweighed that loss. HOWEVER, those are my particular circumstances. Not everyone will share them, and it’s unfair of me to judge why someone might prefer to remain anonymous. Where I get irritated is by blanket statements and policies - “You MUST provide your real name in order to establish trust”.

It’s simply not true.

Someone with a “real identity” can be a cheat, a fraud, or a criminal just like some anonymous hacker. In other words, there are a lot of different ways to establish trust, and no single blanket policy can likely encompass all of them.

There’s a second false dichotomy which is that without real identity you can’t establish legal protection, and yet identity escrow handles that quite neatly - put your identity in escrow with a lawyer, reveal it if there’s an event trigger, problem solved.

But that would presume that I have established trust with your avatar in the first place - and examples like Scope Cleaver demonstrate that we can accrue reputation to avatars. In fact, my concept of the avatar is as a repository - an embodiment of information, trust, reputation, and connections that can quite neatly help us to manage the varying levels to which we interact with communities on-line with the hope that we can also do so in a way that protects us from corporate and government surveillance and other forms of data mining.

But where all of this leaves us isn’t with avatarism but rather a more nuanced view of how avatars can express a spectrum of “realities” - they can contain personal expression, identity projection, identity information, creativity, immersion and augmentation. This would suggest that avatars start to embed their own meaning, much like an author’s story takes on a life and meaning of its own, often unintended, after it’s published.

Whether avatars give us an excuse to be deceitful is not, I don’t think, solely a product of allowing us to be anonymous, but rather a product of what we do with that anonymity, just as power itself, while often corrupting, is only so if we make it such. But while we may imbue avatars with meaning because of who the “real we are”, they also end up as having meanings that are also socially constructed - just as our personalities in the ‘real world’ can be considered constructed by the environments in which we perform, influenced but not related on a 1:1 basis by our intent.

And so avatars provide a deeper clarity to the broader human question: what do I want to be in the world, how is the world a partner in that construction, and do I have a sense of self because of my name, my actions, my status, my connections - or is my “self” ephemeral and shifting, a product of all of these.