Are there earlier versions of me?
I have this idea that avatars can mean more to us than stand-ins for our atomic selves, that they are more than just proxies for meeting in person and a convenient way to give us something visual to look at while we stare at PowerPoint slides together.
But I’ve been feeling out of synch lately, as if everyone else has decided that we should explain avatars as nothing more than glorified chat clients, and that to make them palatable to people who haven’t been here before we need to connect them on a sort of 1:1 direct basis with our birth names, and probably make them look like us, and port all of the conventions and dress codes of the actual world into the virtual one.
It’s why the new Second Life Web site kind of rubs me the wrong way: it feels like a giant ad for Miami Beach or Milan or somewhere – filled with beautiful, glamorous people wandering around excessively gilded places but where we ultimately don’t worry about much more than whether our hair style is unique (yet not too unique) or whether we own the hottest new pair of shoes. I mean, if I wanted Sex in the City I’d run out and buy the DVDs.
It’s not like I don’t get how hard this is to explain. I’ve tried explaining it to people at work or clients and I’ve gotten better at sort of easing them into it. Start small, talk about how you meet “people” from all walks of life from all around the world – and isn’t that a great way to save money and to make collaboration easier from a distance?
But it’s the conversation that follows which is more important – because I’m convinced that if virtual worlds keep pounding away on the ‘meet cheap’ drum then we’ll be collectively hitting our heads when something better and cheaper comes along – and our clients or colleagues or friends will have missed the point.
So long as we miss the stories about identity, and creativity, and innovation, and ‘deep collaboration’ then people will pigeon hole virtual worlds into “WebEx with avatars” and they won’t come back – someone will invent some little iPhone widget that provides a snappy, easy-to-use video conference system and by comparison virtual worlds will seem clunky and cartoon-y.
I mean – you think Cisco isn’t working on a dozen different ways to get together virtually that have nothing to do with avatars?
Whose Voice Is It Anyways?
It’s funny how these things go, because against this backdrop, my aunt e-mailed me. I never get a lot of time to explain avatars and virtual worlds to her, and I pointed her to this blog. And she asked the question:
“Well I have finally started reading your postings. I am still struggling with the difference between your voice and that of Dusan. How does your brain and thinking change when you write as Dusan?
….Is there an avatar for dummies site that I could check out that would explain the basics? I’m sure that avatars wouldn’t want to be bothered writing such a thing.”
Now – you need to know my aunt to know that she’s not being coy or tongue-in-cheek or anything (you get so used to sardonic humor on the Web you start assuming that someone is being snarky or ironic).
But her question gets to the heart of it don’t you think? Based on a 20 minute conversation about virtual worlds and reading a few of my, um, pithy posts, she’s either asking whether I have a split personality and is secretly phoning my relatives to see if I should get help, or she’s asking the question that most of us don’t get around to until the 6-month mark (what is it about hitting 6 months in a virtual world that brings out all the identity questions?): am I me?
Now, if only there was an easy way to answer.
Being There
So the first thing to understand is the sense of being there. Which is also counter-intuitive proposition number one: how does staring at a computer screen and an avatar representation of yourself (and others) equate to a sense of presence?
And it’s not a detached thing, not like playing a game or solving a puzzle where the ‘thing’ is outside of you. I’m talking about your brain…your focus, emotions and attention actually sort of being present inside that 3-D space. And this feeling will only increase with time as screens become larger, as we use more gestural devices, as we start to lose the keyboard and the mouse entirely and yeah, maybe eventually get to those goggles so that our field of vision is entirely contained in a virtual space.
Now, there are lots of theories about this. There’s all the brain plasticity stuff and neural pathways and whatever else. Nick Yee had his famous (though flawed) Stanford study on how our avatar appearance impacts our sense of self-worth. And this week, I came across a study that seems fairly well designed, which concludes that avatar posture and eye contact impacts how we act:
The researchers were able to influence participant behavior by changing the eye gaze of the avatars the participants were seeing. For example, if a person was speaking and the researchers wanted that person to keep speaking, the researchers would make the other avatar continue to make direct eye contact (even if the real person was not doing so). The avatar that was made to look attentive and passive was also be made to nod to indicate agreement or understanding (even if the participant was not doing this), which made the human on the other end continue to talk longer.
In other words somehow our brains see avatars as people, and respond to them in the same way.
And I’d propose that it’s not just people, it’s also environments. I was talking to someone the other day who said that she felt cold when she’s on a sim with snow.
Or I can say that I feel more relaxed when I’m here (which is also one of the reasons I bought it in the first place, it has an almost spiritual effect on me, and might also partly answer another question from my aunt about yoga practices in SL):
Photos by way of Bettina
So when Philip Rosedale, guru and mad quip genius, said that the great thing about Second Life is that it doesn’t have the threatening eye contact of real life – he wasn’t wrong (he’s rarely wrong, he just expresses his rightness in endearing ways). What he was pointing out is that we can be in a place….not just watching a place like you watch a video, but actually feeling like you are THERE….and that place can be kinder and gentler and you can connect with the people in it in ways that your mind and heart interpret as real.
But is My Avatar Me?
So, premise one: it feels real.
Premise two: if it feels real, our avatars are therefore US.
Except, well, it depends on what your definition of “me” is.
There are as many theories about avatar identity as there are schools of sociology or philosophy or approaches to anthropology. It strikes me that virtual worlds can accommodate them all.
Maybe the avatar is our shadow self. Maybe avatars are socially constructed personas. Maybe avatars remind us in the Buddhist sense that reality is illusory anyways. Maybe our personalities are so integrated and well-rounded that our avatars really ARE as tightly coupled to our ’selves’. Maybe they allow us to assume parts of our persona in order to explore those inner voices that may otherwise have no place for expression.
In one way, avatars are no more or less ‘different’ from who we are than how we express ourselves in different atomic and on-line communities: I may be one person at work and another at home and another at the local club and another on Facebook.
Where the difference arrives, I believe, is that we are given a fuller range of tools with which to express personality: we can assume a different gender, become an animal, be older or younger, more beautiful or more terrifying. We can dress and interact in environments that make us rich. Or we can wear tattered clothes and wander through an alternate steampunk universe or in silico future.
The Story Box
So we have places that provoke a reaction – relaxed, gritty, modern, warm, terrifying, sterile….whatever. And we have a sense of presence in which we are able to express sides of who we are using a wider range of expression than available in actual life.
And where this gets even more interesting is that we share these spaces, and the spaces that we share can be co-created.
The simple experience of building something with someone else in a shared space is, I believe, the great (mostly unmeasured) power of user-generated virtual worlds.
And this combination is what I call the Story Box (and which also gives rise to what Prokofy called the Crystal Ball, a concept with which I completely agree).
It’s a story box in the same way that Alberto Manguel discusses poetry in his Massey Lecture:
Makers shape things into being, granting them their intrinsic identity. Still in a corner of their workshops and yet drifting with the currents of the rest of humanity, makers reflect back the world in its constant ruptures and changes, and mirror themselves in the unstable shapes of our societies, becoming what the Nicaraguan poet Ruben Dario called “celestial lightning rods” by asking over and over again “Who are we?” and by offering the ghosts of an answer in the words of the question itself.
Virtual worlds extend our personal poetry into a community of shared exploration and creation: of our identities, our environments, and of our personal and communal meaning. They are not immune to the flip side of positive creation, of course, but they allow us to explore the limits of our humanity. As Kevin Kelly wrote:
A major theme of this present century will be the pursuit of our collective identity. We are on a search for who we are. What does it mean to be a human? Can there be more than one kind of human? In fact, what exactly is a human?
We get to play with answers to these questions online. In Second Life, or in chat rooms, we can chose who we want to be, our gender, our genetics, even our species. Technologies gives us the means to switch genders, inhabit new forms, modify our own bodies.
At the same moment, we have the rise of hyper-realities. These are simulations so complex, convincing, and coherent that they have their own reality force. A fake so good, it is sold and bought as a fabulous fake. A Disneyland so enticing, that it spawns its own “fakes.” There must be something there to fake. Or Photoshopped images so obviously unreal that they have their own reality. Synthetic materials more desirable than natural ones. Originals inferior to their reproductions. Who cares what is real and what is memorex?
These hyper-realities launch questions such as whether a assault in virtual space counts as an actual violent assault or mere virtual assault. How much of our real lives is mental? How much of reality is a consensual hallucination? Where do our minds end and outside begin? What if it — everything outside of us — is all mind?
The faster and greater our lives become mediated — the more time we spend communicating through technology — the more urgent this question of “what is real” becomes. How do we tell the difference, if any, between realities and simulations? How do these redefine humans?
Our Obligations
So we explore these frontiers and express ourselves in different voices than our own which are, nonetheless, who we are – the gift we’re given in this world is to create, and the product of that gift is as much an expression of who we are as the soft murmur of touch and talk before we go to sleep.
But coupled with the opportunity for exploration is the peril of power, because code, like the unspoken norms of a group or tribe, is not morally neutral.
Code, which is increasingly interconnected with the tools for self-expression, even if it becomes self-perpetuating and written by the machines themselves, holds peril because values are embedded in how it’s created. This threatens the moral structures upon which our communities are based because it threatens our concepts of privacy and individuality and tribe. Code gives rise to change which is not inherently bad. But we often fail to extrapolate how the values embedded in the code that gives rise to that change will play out – we either pretend its not there, or we pretend that it’s immune to the tendency towards concentration of power.
And I’m going to dig out the quote I previously pulled from a speech Philip Dick made in 1978:
So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing. It is my job to create universes, as the basis of one novel after another. And I have to build them in such a way that they do not fall apart two days later. Or at least that is what my editors hope. However, I will reveal a secret to you: I like to build universes which do fall apart. I like to see them come unglued, and I like to see how the characters in the novels cope with this problem. I have a secret love of chaos. There should be more of it.
Do not believe—and I am dead serious when I say this—do not assume that order and stability are always good, in a society or in a universe. The old, the ossified, must always give way to new life and the birth of new things. Before the new things can be born the old must perish. This is a dangerous realization, because it tells us that we must eventually part with much of what is familiar to us. And that hurts. But that is part of the script of life. Unless we can psychologically accommodate change, we ourselves begin to die, inwardly. What I am saying is that objects, customs, habits, and ways of life must perish so that the authentic human being can live. And it is the authentic human being who matters most, the viable, elastic organism which can bounce back, absorb, and deal with the new.
And so the promise that we can somehow remain authentically human because we’re able to respond to change, because of our innate ability to bounce back, because we can deal with the new. But I’d propose we can only do so if we also remember the many ways in which our universes can break down.
“We hold fast to a social identity that we believe lends us a name and a face, but equally fast we move from one definition of a society to another, alternating again and again that presumed identity. Like characters in a story that keeps changing, we find ourselves playing roles that others appear to have invented for us, in plots whose roots and consequences escape us. .Even when declaring allegiance to one place, we seem to be always moving away from it, toward a nostalgic image of what we believe that place once was or might one day be….and yet, partly because of our nomad nature and partly due to fluctuations of history, our geography is less grounded in a physical than in a phantom landscape. Home is always an imaginary place.”
Excellent post, yes, these are the interesting questions. I believe though that all our ‘lives’ are as real as each other. The psychological changes that need to be accommodated are connected to the realisation that we are (becoming) cyborgs…..
The cyborg’s dilemma, according to Frank Biocca (http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol3/issue2/biocca2.html) being that….
“The more natural the interface the more “human” it is, the more it adapts to the human body and mind. The more the interface adapts to the human body and mind, the more the body and mind adapts to the non-human interface. Therefore, the more natural the interface, the more we become “unnatural,” the more we become cyborgs.”
It’s mostly fear of change we have to deal with as we move through this elastic future.
Soror – I really wish we had some new terminology. Boellstorf calls it actual vs. virtual in order to avoid the word real. It’s all real and yet within the real is virtuality, which allows a wider range of expression than reality. We have one life which we express in different venues and so we often live double, triple, or multiple lives, even when we aren’t being um duplicitous.
I love the quote btw – thanks for posting the link!
When I saw this earlier today the usual flood of things to say, well, flooded in. Always I have much to express on this subject of Avatarianism and many examples so I usually decide that it’s not possible to present a well-rounded view in less than book form and I abstain. “Why bother?” is my usual decision. Trying to explain the nuance of Avatarianism to a scoffer is like trying to explain finesse to a billy goat (this opinon formulated while reading vitriol on other blogs along these lines).
I stand with the Scope Cleavers (poor Scope, the unwilling poster-child of Avatarian professionalism) and the idealisms of Extropia. My avatar IS ME. I have nothing but contempt for the ID/A/S/L crowd. It’s what we rebirth ourselves in cyberspace to get away from … the superficial judgmentalisms and the power-trippers who proclaim “if I can’t pre-judge you (by race, sex, age, appearance, somatotype, or fashion sense) and I can’t easily sue you then I refuse to trust you.”
[Takes a short break to calm down, makes some tea, continues ...]
I have to say (and this is most likely the only reason I’m posting) that the day you “knuckled under” (my term) to “persuasion” from Metanomics to provide biological credentials (a policy revelation that immediately put them on my personal poop list) was sad. Until then I counted you as a noteworthy Avatarian who was now a noteworthy blogger with an avatar.
Seems like the subsequent posts from you are also personal reactions/reflections of that loss. True? False? After all, Avatarian Dusan Writer is dead, relegated now to an on-line alias. But that’s also a lot of what the nay-sayers who reject Avatarians don’t get; they know, and we know that they know, that they are speaking to and dealing with an individual human being — one who is bringing their views, their personality, their ethics, and their humanity into the purely digital aspect of reality — and should continue to behave as if they are. Because that human being has (creatively and imaginatively) brought into being a persona for the personal and artistic satisfaction and joy of it should not be counted as a moral weakness (a desire to deceive) or a personal insecurity (a desire to hide). To do so is prejudice, pure and simple. And to degenerate into the rationalization for exercising that prejudice is tantamount to any other prejudicial generalization, such as “All [insert mistrusted nationality or race here] are lazy and dirty.”
At a conference once Philip Linden said something to the audience along the lines of “You are eventually going to HAVE to get an avatar, whether you like it or not.” Very true. In a former post you said, “We’re here. We have avatars. Get used to it.”
What I say is, “We’re here. We ARE AVATARS. Get used to THAT.”
Great insights and writing from you as usual, Mr. Thompson.
Cal – your response hit a real emotional chord. Thanks for that.
You know, the post I haven’t written is the one you talk about – the loss of Dusan Writer as distinct. It’s something I keep dancing around really….because I’m not sure yet how to describe it, I guess, or maybe I haven’t come to terms with the loss. When I try to figure out “yeah, but what’s missing?” I come up with something very odd and nameless. Maybe it’s fear – fear that I’ve forgotten and can’t get it back? Or fear that I’ve lost part of my ‘true self’?
But some day, I’ll get it all down I guess.
(By the way, before I go on – it was NOT the policy of Metanomics to ask for real names but there was a subtle sort of pressure, probably self-inflicted. Now that we own Metanomics, I can tell you we try extremely hard not to put that pressure on anyone…so please don’t give up on us.
)
What I will say is that anyone who tries to downplay the impact of linking avatar and birth name/actual identity is either selling a bill of goods for their own purposes, or never had an avatar identity in the first place – and doesn’t understand the power and beauty of it. All the claims about trust and contracts and ‘we need to do this for business’ are window dressing for, well, for what I honestly believe is a lack of imagination or experience.
Having said all that – Dusan isn’t an alias. The mask, as Jung might say, is fairly tightly fitted, but I’m still Dusan. I’ve been Dusan too long now and too deeply for that not to be the case. It’s just that often I’m Doug at the same time.
But there is a certain loss in how close we’ve become.
Guilty, per usual, of lack of term definition (that’s what book glosseries are for!) …
From my own personal private dictionary which resides only on my desk and is generally speaking of no interest to anyone else whatsoever:
Avatarian: A person who is known only via his/her graphic avatar and not otherwise. AKA: A Digital Person.
avatar: The digital persona or representation of a known person, used as a communications tool in virtual spaces. A cartoon alias.
As for Metanomics: I did not say “policy” I said “persuasion.”
However, plug noted. And Personal Poop List is constantly under revision so don’t fret.
The majority of people who have avatars, have them in worlds such as WoW. And that majority doesn’t expend time wondering who or what or why of those avatars. They are disposable play toys. And perhaps that is the healthiest way of thinking about them. Indeed, most gamers never fail to voice how backwards they think SL is as a world.
In the WoW gaming worlds, the identity is firmly linked to the account because of payment on file. Pay to Play.
Second Life is an anomaly. I also believe it will never reach critical mass. Enjoy it while it lasts. The future will be the WoW model.
No one in WoW discusses their Orc or Gnome as a new and wondrous identity.
Mel – you’re misinformed. Where do you think Castranova and his entourage spend all their time? And I have 4 books that include significant coverage of WoW, ranging from its economics to cultural norms to the meaning of guilds to…you guessed it, avatar identity. And those are the ones I bought – forget all the academic publications and studies on it.
People were writing about avatar identity long before SL came along and they’ll be writing about it long after its gone.
And yeah, gamers never fail to voice how backwards SL is…but not as a world. Their issue is generally with its lack of game mechanics and visuals that don’t match the game aesthetic – which is, as you know, near impossible to achieve in a non-sharded dynamic 3D environment in which you can create stuff on the fly.
As such, the mechanics are about creation and avatar embodiment where WoW is about guilds and leveling up – about which you’ll find no end of Wikis, cheats, guides, blogs, forums and rants.
Each platform with a different emphasis, perhaps, but each finds people exploring what it means to be in a virtual world, how the economics work, how it makes them feel, how they learn or communicate, and what their avatars or guilds or armor means to them.
Cal – thanks for the definitions.
I need to get an altatarian maybe?
[...] virtual worlds Dusan Writer has posted an excellent essay, Am I Me: The Voice of the Avatar, in which he questions what it means to be human in a virtual world, specifically Second Life. Most [...]
Yes, I’ve read Castronova and others. And I would really like to know where they found all these thoughtful people in the games of Wow etc.
Because I look around and I see players with names like “Ilikebaconneggs” and that is baseline for naming. Which indicates to me that a person like that and others like him/her do not spend time wondering about the autonomy of his/her avatar. And if you look around SL, you see a lot of that as well. For everyone who uses the baby name site for their character, there are a bunch who don’t care.
Unfortunately or fortunately (depending on the person), new developments run on money makers. Blue Mars, for one, looks like a place that creates closed game-like worlds. Which is more in line with places like WoW than SL.
Mel – I guess two things. Your initial claim was that in SL we all sit around brooding about what our avatars mean for us, and then say that the majority of people don’t do that. And I’d agree – the number of people having these conversations is like the number of bloggers (and blog readers) – a tiny percentage of the number of people actually in the world.
So, for the most part, people don’t care about these conversations. They just wanna have fun.
WoW, Blue Mars, Sony Home – I don’t disagree that the ‘world’ model with game mechanics and levels and clear tasks will likely remain the preferred type of entertainment. We’ll see whether Blue Mars makes money, we know that WoW and SL do.
But I never claimed that SL would swallow up entertainment.
I also think, however, that things like augmented reality, mobile, and browser-based entertainment is more of a threat to the Blue Mars model. The metaverse will include them all.
There seems to be a running argument going on more generally about whether SL should be more game-like, whether music will be the killer app, and whether it can be a kind of mass media entertainment platform – I think I’m on your side in saying that I’m not sure I see it. Time will tell, but my instinct is that within the big scheme of things, SL will have a hard time reaching Facebook or WoW-like numbers.
But that doesn’t mean it won’t thrive because of the mixed uses possible on the Grid, and that as a result avatar and identity issues will continue to percolate – SL as a test-bed, of sorts, for wider trends related to on-line identity and personal representation.
I have had both independent and linked avatars in various worlds, going back to the 300 baud days of primitive text “worlds” (the most interesting of which were the MOOs, which were the textual pioneers of user generated content). I can understand the liberation that an unlinked avatar can bring: you can be anything/anyone and the repercussions of your actions only extend to your avatar. This in turn means that you can act out a persona which is different from your own daily personality to an extreme level.
There is something cathartic about it, but looking back at it I can also state that I’m not impressed by my youthful exuberance for what I now see as deceit.
I use the word deceit deliberately, intending the negative connotations that come with it. As a young teen many of my actions would today carry criminal charges for someone. Cybering with both genders (as both genders) alone would be enough in today’s climate to have sealed the fate for some of my “partners”. But leaving aside those indiscretions, the creation of fake personalities can easily lead to the creation of a false “backing” personality as well. A well known example was the Wikipedia editor who faked multiple degrees and other credentials for the sake of gaining “authority” in his edits. My teen years were filled with such false personalities backing my false avatar self.
Upon entering college it became clear that I had allowed this deceit to creep into my day to day life as well and I resolved that it would stop. A new city where nobody new me meant I could for one last time create a new persona: my new “real” persona that I would carry forward, one that spoke the truth unflinchingly to (in part) make amends for my poor teen choices and in part of avoid ever backsliding into that land of deceit.
It is with that background that I entered Second Life and had my head photographed and that image used for my avatar. I was doing business, trasacting in real world money and at no point would an unlinked avatar been plausable. I do have an alt, but only so I can code in quiet while chat business messages go to my e-mail for triage… he never leaves my sim and simply looks like a younger version of me (Second Life is vantiy first).
Does this mean I don’t think people should have avatars or engage in avatarism? I think that long term avatarism actually creates an new “entity” to which trust can be bestowed… but only to a very limited point. I would never “invest” with an avatarist. I would always approach anything said or done by an avatarist with a shaker of salt in hand, understanding that while those actions or words may be self consistent, they may not reflect the person behind them. It is important to realize that legal action can not be taken against avatars, no judgements of meaning enforced against them… only the real person behind the avatar can actually back up any words or statements with any meaning.
All of that doesn’t mean that avatarism isn’t possible to be good fun, a great escape, cathartic or otherwise a positive experience. But it also means that avatarism can be a way to evade responsibiltiy, cause trouble without recourse, invite unwarrented trust, create financial harm without restitution and perhaps most dangerously, cause people to unknowningly violate laws with real world implicatons.
A very interesting dialogue going on here, and a subject dear to my heart, John in particular I thank for your frank and open sharing “grin”
In the past some have been ruffled by the comments regarding transparency/anonymity as if people like myself have said “you must be directly connected” this is not the case but if? and it looks like it will be the case that dealings with people whether in organic form or Avatar will converge at some stage be it social or business, just be true to form in both.” I of course do not refer to how you look but in your manner/essence”
There is an innate fear within us as humans to fear the wolf in sheep’s clothing and as such any anomalies between your avatar and yourself will at some stage be seen/felt, and take it from me most uncomfortably.
Thanks for a great dialogue.
Julius Sowu Virtually-Linked London
Wonderful comments John/Kwame.
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.
Just want to say how much I enjoyed reading your post .. I normally skip very long posts to which others have sent a link (this one via Carol on Twitter – thanks Carol!), but I had to read all of this one! Much food for thought. (Not sure which name to use .. I went for the SL avatar one!)
I also dislike the SL website. I dislike how it tries to encourage people to project themselves into their avatars. “Dance, Love, Work” *pukes* It’s embarrassing and makes me ashamed to be associated with SL.
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!
One question I have been playing with recently is how people react to abstract avatars. I have several avatars that are modern art and not humanistic in any way.
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.
[...] Dusan Writer’s Metaverse » Am I Me: The Voice of the Avatar Blogged with the Flock Browser [...]
One thing I haven’t seen mentioned in the post or comments is the role of the other person interacting with your avatar. As in theatre, the audience is required to adopt a position of suspended disbelief. Identity is a very personal issue, but some philosophers argue that there is no identity without ‘the other’. What are others to make of me when I don my gorilla avatar (which is becoming ever more comfortable)? Do they/should they suspend disbelief?
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….
What I tell people about trust is this: Many of us in business deal with vendors all the time. We probably never see a real person, but only communicate on the phone or in email. Depending on the organization/culture surrounding that group, the individual on the other end of the wire may or may not be accountable for what s/he says, how s/he acts toward you, or commitments that s/he makes.
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:
====
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.
When I first discovered IRC when I was in college 20 years ago (Internet Relay Chat, for you youngsters, and you had to walk uphill both ways to get to it) I set up an alternative identity for myself.
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
“One thing I haven’t seen mentioned in the post or comments is the role of the other person interacting with your avatar.”
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.
[...] blog. I was reminded of it because of the discussions I’ve been having with my aunt about avatar identity. I won’t share the entire stream of that conversation, but it touched upon issues of [...]