Identity, gender and death

We make money not art has an interesting piece about the work of Marc Owens, including a description of a RL virtual transgender suit and an facility known as Second Death which will terminate your avatar after a random amount of time in-world (terminate as in permanently delete the account).

The first would probably go down a storm at SLCC?

The second is quite interesting. One might say, I suppose, that our avatars die when we do, or when the virtual world(s) in which they are manifested die (whichever comes first)? As I've argued before, I think the personas we see in our avatars are bigger than a particular avatar in a particular virtual world and I'm not sure I have a particular desire to feel virtual grief in the way described here anyway. But it's an interesting project nonetheless.

Open Habitat

I mentioned the Open Habitat project in my last post but didn't highlight their blog (because I hadn't spotted it!). There's some interesting stuff there, particularly around our notions of online identity and what it means to collaborate in virtual worlds.

Worth keeping an eye on I think...

Identity crisis?

Wagner James Au has an interesting blog post, Web 2.0 Is The Bridge Between 1st And 2nd Life Identity, suggesting that:

a tremendous level of Second Life activity really takes place within Web 2.0 systems which weren't made with the metaverse in mind. In this mesh of various Internet identities, we reveal different aspects of ourselves on different mediums, depending on the social circles who follow us there. It's a phenomenon we're only beginning to understand, one that Gartner's Adam Sarner dubbed "Generation V" and Botgirl Questi evocatively illustrated on her blog

I left a comment saying that when I recently introduced a limited level of Twitter support into the Second Friends Facebook application I left myself with a small, but very real, identity crisis.
The problem is that I tweet separately as both Andy Powell and Art Fossett and I couldn't work out which one I should link to my Second Friends profile.

It seems to me that the picture is going to get increasingly "confused", especially with expected growth in alternative virtual worlds, alts, etc. There is very little that I do with my first life online identity (email, blog, twitter, etc.) that I don't now also do with my second life online identity and I suspect that this is fairly typical. Art Fossett has a blog, an email account, a Twitter account, and several other outlets. He doesn't have a Facebook page, but only because I chose to surface that particular aspect of his online identity thru the Second Friends Facebook application.

As I join other virtual worlds I anticipate doing so as Art Fossett - at least, that is what I have done to date. I have other virtual world personas - but none of them feel as much a part of me as Art Fossett does. All of which leads one to conclude that Art Fossett is not simply Andy Powell's Second Life avatar but a more general persona which happens to surface most obviously in Second Life currently.

So, back to my dilema about which Twitter account to link to my Second Friends profile... in the end I decided to link my Art Fossett Twitter account to my Second Friends application, figuring that the application is really about linking my Second Life persona(s) to my real life Facebook page - there are other tools for linking in my first life tweets.

Myself to myself - What not to Rez follow-up

I went to the Emerge event.

I turned up incognito - it was a party at a conference about online identity after all.

I kept myself to myself by and large.

Here's a picture of Josie Oh dancing. Nice dress mate!

It was fun ... but might have been more interesting if everyone had come as an alt?

'What not to Rez' fashion show

The JISC Emerge project are hosting an evening of entertainment, What not to Rez, on Emerge Island later this evening - 7pm UK time.

On naming...

There are a couple of slides in my talk (see previous post) to do with identity - one concerning appearance and one concerning naming.

In discussion at the end of my talk, someone raised an interesting issue about naming...

No-one in Second Life has their own name - it simply isn't possible given the way that names are assigned. You have to choose a surname from a pre-determined list. The questioner wondered if the act of having to choose and use a new name would be a hurdle for some students? I'm not sure.

It was also noted that remembering a second name for every student would also be a hurdle for teachers and lecturers!

I wondered if it might be possible to get round both these problems by selecting a surname for a whole cohort of students and then asking them to create their first name thru some algorithmic transformation of their real name. So for example, instead of being 'Art Fossett' I might be 'AndyP Fossett' or some such.