Avatars of Second Life

Stepping into Second Life, I don't *do* anything particularly remarkable. I am still sitting behind the same computer desk as always, ensconced comfortably in my apartment. No one else is around, and yet suddenly I am among many people--not friends, no, perhaps not even acquaintances, but people nonetheless. Most of them do not appear at first glance to be the type of people I would invite back to my apartment, as women dressed in Abercrombie & Fitch with augmented porn star bodies are rarely my guests here, but suddenly I don’t have much choice who I invite onto my desktop. People wander through the scene without paying me much attention; each of them intent on whatever task brings them to the virtual realm, whether it is for work or play. The world is so vast that it’s rare to encounter a large collective, but the groups that do gather have purposes as diverse as any mass in the so called real world.

It’s easy to mock these fellow travelers in the virtual realm—as Rheingold notes, “…critics often voice their sadness at what people have been reduced to doing in a civilization that worships technology, decrying the circumstances that lead some people into such pathetically disconnected lives that they prefer to find their companions on the other side of a computer screen” (Virtual Communities). These Playboy bunnies and California surfer boys are easy targets with their devotion to a world where a fake tan can be acquired with just the touch of a button. But before I could hope to judge their disconnected states, I have to step back, as it were, and take a long hard look at myself first: of course, that’s just a matter of changing the perspective, and I can see that my own virtual body is a fully-realized Goth would-be vampire chick with a nonexistent waistline and very fake red hair. No doubt I’m not exactly coming across as the best choice for an invite to a cocktail party myself.

But of course, this isn’t my “self.” While my options as far as companionship have widened in a manner beyond my control, my options for myself are seemingly limitless: my physical presence in the virtual world was akin to a virtual Barbie doll, and just as capable of assuming impossible proportions. This Goth bears as much resemblance to “me” as these Playboy bunnies no doubt bear to their makers: "The woman behind an avatar has control over the knowledge of herself she allows to spread into the virtual domain. Her voice is not heard, her physical body remains unseen--the text that conveys her thoughts travels directly, her mind is her avatar" (Avatara).

There are even freedoms it takes time to recognize: a virtual body can be any color, any size, and any combination of gender identities [as the avatars come without sexual characteristics, only with a vague gender label, the possibilities are fairly endless]. The choice of these characteristics is heavily waited precisely because it is a choice: while one cannot pick his or her race at birth, in virtual space skin color is simply a digital paint job. Making the assumption that anyone who is white in the game is actually white anymore than it is safe to assume that a woman is actually a woman. We take all our biases and stereotypes with us to the virtual realm even though nothing in that realm is as it seems. Rheingold calls this transformation, when witnessed in its earlier stages through MUDs and early virtual worlds, as the dissolution of identity boundaries:

Similar to the way previous media dissolved social boundaries related to time and space, the latest computer-mediated communications media seem to dissolve boundaries of identity as well. One of the things that we "McLuhan's children" around the world who grew up with television and direct-dialing seem to be doing with our time, via Minitel in Paris and commercial computer chat services in Japan, England, and the United States, as well as intercontinental Internet zones like MUDs, is pretending to be somebody else, or even pretending to be several different people at the same time (Virtual Communities).

Calling my fellow citizens in the virtual realm of Second Life “McLuhan’s Children” brings up vague images of a utopian future embodied in a Global Village, where trafficking in cultural ideas moves well beyond the realm of physical locality and people live in a connected world [although without understanding of the forces at work, McLuhan allowed for a dystopian vision as well]. McLuhan described his vision of the Global Village as a “simultaneous happening,” where "'time' has ceased, 'space' has vanished” (Medium is the Massage 63). Second Life is but one symptom of this concept: in Second Life, I might wander into a virtual mall where people are gathered from across the world: Taiwan; Australia; Turkey. We’ve folded space to coexist in a place that is not a place, in an address that cannot be mapped.

But with so many places to gather, the only way connections made within this space can be sifted through and made to have meaning is in the specificity of the contact. We encounter people every day—both within and outside of virtual space—without forming lasting bonds. We may become closer to those who share our geographic locale and our neighborhood concerns, or form friendships with others who go to our school or work with us or take pottery classes or obsess over cinema—whatever it is that makes us passionate. The virtual realm can be an immediate community for networking with others that share our interests, as Rheingold observes:

In a virtual community we can go directly to the place where our favorite subjects are being discussed, then get acquainted with people who share our passions or who use words in a way we find attractive. In this sense, the topic is the address: you can't simply pick up a phone and ask to be connected with someone who wants to talk about Islamic art or California wine, or someone with a three-year-old daughter or a forty-year-old Hudson; you can, however, join a computer conference on any of those topics, then open a public or private correspondence with the previously unknown people you find there. Your chances of making friends are magnified by orders of magnitude over the old methods of finding a peer group (Virtual Communities).

In Second Life, the familiar constraints to meeting those with shared interests in the “real world” emerge once more. Just walking down the street in Second Life does not connect you with those who share your interests. The odds become slightly better if you move to a place in the virtual space that might attract like-minded others: an art lover may be more easily found in a simulated gallery or a wine aficionado in a virtual bar. The geographic model is thus Second Life’s weakness for the formation of community, as unlike the message boards that Rheingold considers Second Life is not so easily sorted by topic. A novice to the Second Life universe is less likely to find her way to a community than a newcomer to a message board where users are already gathered to discuss a specific topic.

However, one weakness that the message board system has when compared to Second Life is in the creation of a feeling of being part of a community. The only visual presence a user of a bulletin board generally has is the placement of an image under his or her avatar name, and the usual method for tracking one’s status in the system is the accumulation of rank by the simple number of messages posted. The presence of an avatar in Second Life, by contrast, accumulates in the body of the avatar and possibly through the ownership of land and the building of a home. An avatar can become immediately recognizable to the community where they have built their reputation: “For people whose lives are controlled by parents or professors or bosses, there is a certain attraction to a world in which mastery and the admiration of peers is available to anyone with imagination and intellectual curiosity” (Virtual Communities).

Status is not the only currency available in Second Life to those with imagination. Whole islands can be built and bodies formed based on the ideas of an individual. In the real world, it can take hundreds of thousands of dollars to realize a dream like one’s own manor or retail store: in Second Life, such a dream can be more immediately realized with the investment of time, ideas, and a bit of virtual currency transformed from real money. An avatar can live out dreams that the real self might never have known, as the mind freed from body roams outside of space and time.