Avatars R Us

Identity tourism: a dream of crossing over racial boundaries temporarily and recreationally with no risks associated with being a racial minority in real life (Nakamura, 1995, 'Race In/For Cyberspace: Identity Tourism and Racial Passing on the Internet').

Avatars! (1997)

"I want to argue that photography and cinema, as media of light, at the very least lend themselves to privileging white people" (Dyer, 1997, White).

In a statement of his vision of the future of avatars in virtual worlds, Moses Ma believes that there are signs "of an early basis for an emerging 'operating system' for socialization" (Damer, Avatars!, 1997: 449).

Life on the Screen (1995)

Since 1995 a number of supposedly universally accessible 2-D and 3-D avatar worlds have been developed for the Internet and then 'inhabited' simultaneously by geographically dispersed computer users who can communicate in mediated text or speech and animate a virtual graphical presence to others in their world. (If you have a RealPlayer G2, then listen to this BBC Radio 3 broadcast on virtual communities sent out in Feb 1999).

What does it mean to say one 'inhabits' a virtual world?
Who gets to 'inhabit' and how is communication between the virtual participants - who are physically and materially located somewhere in geographical, social and cultural space - 'locally' organised?
How is virtuality accomplished?
How is communication envisaged in these virtual communities?
You see me here, embodied as a graphic animation - how does this embodiment in virtual space shape my identity, my social interactions, and my intercultural encounters with others similarly embodied?

Have I transcended the shackles of my physical body and its cultural codes?
Who am I? And what communities will have me as a member?

Click the image for a puzzle...

The Mobilix advert below first appeared in the Danish press and on billboards in the early Spring of 1998. Three Danish words "Samtale fremmer forståelsen" ("Dialogue promotes understanding") bridge the starkly contrasted images of two women separated by an abyss of white space.

The woman on the left is white and stereotypically Nordic; she wears sunglasses. The woman of colour on the right wears a veil typical for a devout Muslim woman; only her eyes are visible. Both stare out of the advert at the viewer; not at each other. For a reader, this advert may conjure up the binary distinction between the West and the East, between native and immigrant woman, between emancipation and oppression, between freedom of expression and censorship, between Christianity and Islam, played out through the contrast between the women's appearances, dress, and fashion. This is one of those Benetton-inspired advertising campaigns which ambivalently insert themselves virus-like into contemporary social debates on, for example, immigration, religion, gender and discrimination. This one promotes the salvation narrative that a value-free communications technology can provide the means to overcome deep social and cultural divisions. It also reinforces the assumption that troubles in intercultural encounters are a matter of communicative misunderstanding between two distinct, homogenous cultures.

Compare it to the simulacrum of the intercultural in the image below. The image created by Roger Zuidema for the book Avatars! is called 'Avabar scene', a composite digital mixer of avatars from the many different virtual worlds that have been implemented using the Internet as both communications medium and distribution network.

All are gathered in avaface-to-avaface presence in a 3-D environment, which resembles a large hall with a bar and dance floor, tables, pillars and an aquariam. It is a bounded public space, a supposedly egalitarian, neutral place, where people meet, chat, socialise and make friends. Since none of the software required to 'inhabit' the different worlds yet have provision for avatars to transfer with integrity between worlds, such a 'gathering of the tribes' in the new virtual 'global village' is not currently possible.

What then are we to make of this fantasy image? Does it signify an ecumenical vision of a global community to be realised through us 'inhabiting' new virtual communications technologies with representations such as avatars? Is it a means to 'meet' other virtual cultures, to surpass the digital apartheid of software interface design, to potentially contaminate other cultures, yet to universalise affordances through standards?

Given that these digital virtual environments often support a strong sense of sociality and community despite their crudeness, and that they are created and maintained in and through interactional, semiotic and linguistic practices, and that they are likely to have a profound effect on society and (inter)cultural practices, then we need to study them critically and prudently, yet with an engaging curiosity.

References:

McIlvenny, Paul (2001). Avatars R Us? Discourses of Community and Embodiment in Intercultural Cyberspace. In Allwood, Jens & Dorriots, Beatriz (Eds.), Intercultural Communication - Business and the Internet: Papers from the Fifth Nordic Symposium on Intercultural Communication, 1998, Gothenburg, Sweden: Papers in Anthropological Linguistics 27, Department of Linguistics, Gothenburg University, 129-147. Appears also in the first issue of the electronic journal Intercultural Communication, 1999.

McIlvenny, Paul (2000). Performing Re-mediation in Graphical Cyberspace: Mediating Agency, Body and Identity in Virtual Interactional Practices. In Digital Borderlands symposium, May 2000, Norrköping, Sweden.

McIlvenny, P. (1999). 'Here's Me Looking at Me Looking at Me Talking: From Broadcast toWebcast to Served Talk in Virtual Worlds' Presented in the Broadcast Conversations: Interaction in the Media conference, Roskilde, Denmark, March 1999.

McIlvenny, P. (1999). Is There a Community in This Technology? And Is It Gendered? Plenary lecture presented in the 9th Annual Conference for Women's Studies and Gender Research, Aalborg, 11th - 12th April 1999.