Avatars of Oneself

Zoe is an American woman who has found that “drawing the line and standing firm has always made me feel like a bitch, and, actually, I feel that people saw me as one too.”[3] For two years, however, she played an online role-playing game using a male character where “as a man I was liberated from all that.” She made mistakes in her unfamiliar role, but learned from them. “I got better at being firm but not rigid,” she says; “I practiced, safe from criticism.” Case is an American man, who plays a similar game but always appears as a woman. He travels within its virtual world, interacts with others through their characters, and contemplates why all his own are women. “My female characters are interesting,” he says, “because I can say or do the sorts of things that I mentally want to do, but if I did them as a man, they would be obnoxious.”[4] In Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet, Sherry Turkle records these and other fascinating accounts of people who achieved liberation through online games. Both Zoe and Case, despite differing in gender, used them for the same purpose. “Playing this woman,” says Case, “lets me see what I have in my psychological repertoire.”[5] Gender-swapping allowed each to be more assertive, something they found difficult to do otherwise. “A virtual gender swap,” writes Turkle, “gave people greater emotional range in the real.”[6] To achieve this liberation, as in Hinduism, they used avatars: appearances of themselves in a world less real than the one they fully inhabit. “Avatar” derives from a Sanskrit word (avatara) meaning descent, but because of stories like those of the Gita the word is also taken to mean incarnation, embodiment, the taking on of flesh. The god’s avatar permits him to manifest himself for a time in this world; he is more fully elsewhere. The same is true of those who play online games. An avatar may be killing dragons atop a steed in cyberspace, but in “meatspace” the real person who plays it is sitting before a keyboard in Pittsburgh. To capture this similarity, gaming pioneers deliberately adopted the Sanskrit word and Hindu notion, decades before our technology made the comparison irresistible. In both cases, after all, an avatar is an appearance in one world of someone more real from another. The similarity is not idle. It may help us understand who we really are and what we should do with ourselves

Digital Culture, Play, and Identity: A World of Warcraft Reader

Review of Digital Culture, Play, and Identity: A World of Warcraft Reader / edited by Hilde G. Corneliussen & Jill Walker Rettberg. MIT Press, 2008

Issues in the study of virtual world social movements

Virtual worlds are online three-dimensional worlds that are often constructed to look much like the real world. As more people begin to use these virtual worlds, virtual communities are emerging enabling various social activities and social interactions to be conducted online. Based on a literature review of social movements, virtual communities and virtual worlds, this paper suggests a framework to guide IS research into this new and exciting area

Analysing qualitative data from virtual worlds: using images and text mining

There is an increasing interest within both organisational and social contexts in virtual worlds and virtual reality platforms. Virtual worlds are highly graphical systems in which avatars interact with each other, and almost every event and conversation is logged and recorded. This presents new challenges for qualitative researchers in information systems. This paper addresses the challenges of analyzing the huge amounts of qualitative data that can be obtained from virtual worlds (both images and text). It addresses how images might be used in qualitative studies of virtual worlds, and proposes a new way to analyze textual data using a qualitative software tool called Leximancer. This paper illustrates these methods using a study of a social movement in a virtual world

Digital native identity development in virtual worlds

In the transition from childhood to adolescence, teens are engaged in defining who they are and finding a place in the wide world creates insecurity. Digital natives are growing up as part of digital generation where technology is ubiquitous in a young person’s life. One online technology commonly used by digital natives are virtual worlds. Increasingly, they have come to rely on this digital media to help them navigate the challenges and issues they face in this period of life. This paper presents a research framework designed to provide a road map for the IS community in conducting research into this new and exciting area of virtual worlds and their impact on digital native identity development

Intratextuality, Trauma and the Posthuman in Thomas Pynchon’s Bleeding Edge

In Bleeding Edge Pynchon uses again a female unconventional detective, as he did in The Crying of Lot 49, with the ultimate aim of evaluating the condition of America. However, whereas Oedipa had to deal with an understanding of American society in terms of science and religion, in Bleeding Edge Maxine is at pains to understand a society ruled by the new paradigms of posthumanity and trauma. By focusing on the binary life/death, the article evaluates Pynchon’s portrayal of current society as posthuman and disrupted by a new type of social stagnation related to the control of information flow, a situation that demands the role of an active protagonist, in line with later theories in the field of trauma studies. The textual analysis points to information, terrorism, and web addiction as the new dangers that Maxine has to cope with if she wants to pull society back to motion

A metaphoric cluster analysis of the rhetoric of digital technology

This thesis seeks to identify and explain some technology in order to more fully understand modern communication. This study makes use of metaphoric cluster analysis to examine the technological rhetoric of Nicholas Negroponte