Our Avatars, Our Projected Selves

Our Avatars, Our Projected Selves
Jezebel


This article kind of jumped out at me with all the social media and networking avatars out there and what it really is symbolizing and what it is doing to us and our society. The question remains “Does a "sexualized" avatar invite disrespectful behavior online?” This article is about a research study conducted to measure human empathy toward human actors compared with digital representations, with the finding of “men judged the avatar pleading for sympathy more harshly than the actress.” It was said that what the avatar was wearing is what triggered a reaction in men. “A specialist in human-computer interaction, Fox published a smaller study in 2009 that confirmed that men responded with sexual stereotypes to avatars coded as being aggressive or sexual, and commented to the New Scientist that the belly baring shirt and more prominent breasts of the avatar sparked the reaction.” 40% of Second Life residents join mainly for sexual activity. There was even a section in the article talking about how a blonde hair blue eyed avatar changed her skin to an attractive African American woman and later faced a great deal of racism being called racial epithets by strangers and even by her own friends. Something I found interesting was this particular passage talking about the lack of race options:
“One of my black female students last semester reported being sexually harassed in Second Life, when she created her avatar to reflect herself (interestingly, she was at first annoyed that she couldn't create an avatar that accurately reflected her skin shade, which already says something about the kind of racial exclusion the "game" already practices), but once she wandered around Second Life as a "black woman," she kept getting sexually harassed. Which, of course, was reason enough to leave the online environment because, you know, we can experience that OFF line. Granted, Second Life offers individuals various opportunities to "escape" their real lives, like creating an avatar that's not even human or even an Earthling, but still...what does it mean to reproduce the same experiences that one encounters offline in cyberspace, especially if someone doesn't want to "escape" their racial and gender identity, in fact wants to represent themselves similarly but in a digitized format?”
after reading this I am extremely turned off to Second Life, I have heard about it before but never really had much intrest in it. I have the sims to satisfy that need! Haha! Regardless I was really disappointed to hear some of the discouraging comments and sexual behavior associated with Second Life. We all have to take this into consideration and just be careful out there on the web. Remember, race and gender bias exists online because it exists in real life, and it manifests itself in various ways, some of which are very hard to measure.