The moment we have all been waiting for: Hannah Littlefield in online avatar form. I tried to make my avatar as realistic as possible but as you can seen my South Park style version of myself only contains faint traces of my real life self. I have never made an online avatar before and to be honest the experience was actually entertaining to some degree. You can decide to make your avatar look similar to your real life self or you can create a whole new cyber-identity that looks nothing like you at all.
The freedom that you have while creating your online personality is so great and the best part is that no one knows if you are lying about what you actually look like. When I think of people who would want to create an online avatar that looks nothing like them I tend to picture an old man pretending to be much younger, thinner, and with slightly more hair trying to impress some naive adolescent girl (who might not even actually be an adolescent girl for that matter). However, who is to say that making your online avatar to look a little more youthful or thinner than your real life self is bad?
Here is an online avatar that I found:
The avatar is of Jason Rowe who is 36 years old and unemployed. He has been using his online cyber-identity since 2003 and plays up to 80 hours a week as his avatar personality! That is what I call dedication to an alternate identity. David Bell in his article Identities in Cyberculture talks about identity. Bell explains that in our western culture we have the idea that each of us are born the way that we are and this is our true and real self. This self is stable. But what if we are not actually born into our true self? The picture of this man makes me wonder if when he look in the mirror he is content with his "true self," or if he desires something more. I know when I look in the mirror I am seldom completely happy with myself and I have the sneaking suspicion that others feel the same way.
Bell explains that our concepts of identity have been radically transformed by the rapidly growing cyberculture. Although there is an endurance of "old identities," these so called "new identities," and online avatars may in my view before the way of the future. With more and more of peoples everyday interactions being online everyone who is online will have the opportunity to either simply tweak their actually appearance like I did with my avatar or radically create a new identity and build a new self with the help of cyberspace. So the question is: what will your identity look like in cyberspace?
