Letters to the Editor

• What Does It Mean to "Lie" in Second Life?

  [Read the article: The coming age of lying avatars]
  [Read more letters about this article: Here]

  As a longtime Second Life (SL) resident and virtual worlds researcher, I wonder when I come across arguments like the one Manjoo attributes to Donath (I haven't read Donath's article and only have Manjoo's account of it), what exactly "lying" means in a alternate reality like SL.

  I don't subscribe to the position that SL is all "play" and so it doesn't matter anyway (my experience in SL is very real and very personal to me). But neither do I worry too much about "authenticity" or "truth-telling" or whatever. Many people gender bend and role play (these are probably among the deepest "lies" one can engage in in cyberspace). But are they lies? When I gender bend and role play, I am often exploring or cultivating a part of myself, identity, or even sexuality that I cannot attend to in reality, and to me it is profoundly and even painfully honest. But I don't tell everyone I'm a gender bender or whatever. Does that make me a "liar"?

  The problem, I think, is that the player's relationship to her or his avatar is complex. An avatar is at once idealized, representative, expressive, experimental, voyeuristic, playful, socially shaped, and technologically conditioned. With all of those going on simultaneously--and not just for me, but for everyone I interact with, and we all know it--where exactly is the stable standard of authenticity to which I measure my own honesty?

  I don't mean to dismiss the concern out of hand, but I wonder if oftentimes that concerns like the problem of lying rest on a dubious foundation, a simplified notion that the avatar is a stable representation of the "real world self" (as if that weren't a deeply problematic category of its own).

  I am familiar with the work of Donath, who is a star in the field of computer-mediated communications, and I highly doubt she is naive about the issues I am describing. But the ways these ideas get filtered in the media and discussed suggests to me that we, as a culture, have an as yet underdeveloped awareness of the relationships between our avatars and ourselves.

  As virtual worlds are used for more--much more--than just gaming, and as more and more of us create, and cultivate, avatars, this issue will, I think, rise in importance.

  Permalink Thursday, July 5, 2007 01:20 PM