Disclosure, Identity and Friendship

[Widget Whiteberry]

In virtual worlds, everything is up for negotiation. Under what circumstances do we reveal name, race, age, gender, marital status ... time zone ... blog names, facebook and twitter identity, links, etc.

What do we reveal about ourselves to our SL friends and colleagues and playmates? What do we want to know about them? What is too much information? If we maintain a firewall, how much information leaks through? With whom do we share our voices? Do we have Skype accts for our avs?

What of alts? How many, for what purpose and which of our contacts know the name of our alts? Dusan Writer posted a thoughtful and well researched exploration on the implications of alternative avatars: http://dusanwriter.com/?p=237 for transparency, identity and social interaction.

I have a Skype acct for my av, which allows me bypass SL voice when talking with one or two people. I've exchanged real names with some, but not all of the people on my Widget Skype acct. I make no secret of my gender, my time zone,or the region in which I live; much less my politics, or my opinions. As to other details of my life, I find myself asking if I or the other person have a 'need to know.'

[Vivienne Cassavetes]

Post today by Prokovy on "Anonymous, Unaccountable Avatars"

[Joe Clark]

Great question! SL problematizes the ideas of reality and identity, in much the same way that philosophy, religion, and race/gender studies have been doing for some time -- so much so that it's a bit surprising to me when I encounter controversy over whether one's SL presence is "real" or "genuine." Don't we already know about Maya? Haven't we already queered gender? :-)

Augmentationists want "authenticity" and find the whole idea of hiding your name & contact info a little bizarre, as it would be (IMO) to do so in something like this Ning group. In such media there are occasionally good reasons for anonymity, but not frequently in the environmentalist realm, I'd venture to guess. I can see it being more appropriate in, say, an LGBT group or one concerned with domestic violence, socially proscribed behaviors, etc.

On the other hand, Immersionists find this obsession with "authenticity" a kind of buzzkill. My alt has a lot more freedom - not just to engage in dubious activities I don't want everyone to know about, but to truly exist as an alternative persona, which IMO is entirely in line with the idea of a virtual world.

I think this issue is always going to crop up, possibly as a red herring, because there will always be gray areas between MUVEs as spaces or places, to borrow a concept from Geography. Tool vs. context. Medium vs. universe.

My alt has a gmail address and never uses voice chat. A few people have ferreted out the amanuensis behind the alt and even gigged me for being inauthentic, but I say get over it (and they do). Maybe it's my theater and fiction-writing background--or the fact that I'm a Gemini :-)--but I fall very easily into the idea of an invented persona and it feels quite natural. This is not just a black bar over my eyes in photographs, but an alternative way of being. I think that distinction (alt as mask vs. alt as persona) is important to remember.

My non-alt, JS Saltwater, is pretty transparent.

This is a great topic, and I'm glad to learn about this Ning!

[Widget Whiteberry]

As a personal matter, I find learning to be authentic a life-long effort. Or rather, finding and expressing my authentic voice. Or voices. SL provides a remarkable range of opportunity for me to explore and express facets of my inner landscape, becoming more mindful along the way. Because I am not given to narcissism, the relationships I develop along the way, and the people I get to know, become an integral part of that exploration.

The *me* I bring to the table is not limited to a single role or affiliation and while I think I am more augmentative than immersive in my approach to SL, I seem to need to use both approaches. Maintaining something of a firewall seems to acknowledge the realities of vr and allow some of those relationships to develop in the absence of verifiable identity within circles of friends or colleagues.

The firewall, such as it is, is not intra-personal. Or, as one of my first SL friends often advised: the feeling are real and it is you, the typist, who experiences them.

I do notice that the social skills I learn in SL translate nicely to my off-line life.

[Card-carrying Buddhist]

Disclosure of identity is a process I am still working out and working on. A small circle know my rl name and some rl circumstances, and sometimes I wish that circle were smaller, these days. One person I now know in rl, teetering on the brink with another.

What is identity? Really? A collection of what? If you take away some of the whats, and replace them with other whats, is that an alt? It's all pretty shifty.

Almost essenceless.

Speaking of which


The cause of restlessness is the ego-centered mind.

When one has the idea of "I," there is no end to ego.

Only Buddha said that this "I" is essenceless: no one else did.


Thus, there are no methods other than his in order to attain complete peace.


--Kamalasila-



Which begs the question in both RL and SL: Who/what is this thing I am calling "I" on a daily basis?

[Eos Amaterasu]

I think that one of the aspects of this is that identity is not a thing, or set of attributes, which unfortunately is how most code tends to look at it. It is, as Card-carrying Buddhist and others say, a process, something arising in co-dependent origination, from concatenations of causes and conditions. I like Buckminster Fuller's "I seem to be a verb."

It's interesting that often when you talk to people about identity they talk about what they can be. In the USA, you too can become president of the USA.

I'm relatively new to SL, but already I feel it can give me new opportunities for embodying, new ways to find myself in the interactions of others with me, new ways to create society and societies.

I guess what's intriguing is how much of what gets expressed in identities and alts are explosions of pent-up repressions, and how much is actual play with what's possible with new combinations of forms, their limitations, and space.