Who Am I? Who R U?
Read the following transcript of a fragment of text conversation between two avatar-embodied participants in an ActiveWorlds environment. A is showing B around hir virtual home that ze built.
It is a useful exercise to first try to figure out what was happening from the recorded trace of the chat window, without regard for the actions and gestures of the embodied avatars. Can you make sense of it? Who is A and B? What gender are they? What ethnicity are they?
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21A: just curious are you black?
B: hah
=B: cause im a dredd
=A: what?
A: Yes
B: dredd avie
A: yes
A: are you?
=A: no big deal
=B: does it matter?
B: ok
B: nope
A: ok
B: r u?
A: No
A: I am 100% Irish
B: and proud of it?
A: I guess
=B: im a half irish :-)
=A: never really thought of that
A: coolThe transcript simply records the text messages that appeared one after another in the chat window of the client software (each text message sent to the other participant was also temporarily displayed above the head of the avatar who 'spoke'). However, the equals sign placed before two messages by different participants (eg. lines 3 and 4) gives some indication of the temporality of message reception that is often significant for the interaction. The equals sign marks when two messages appeared simultaneously for all practical purposes. Messages are unseen by other participants until they are explicitly sent by hitting the carriage return, so when two messages appear in the chat window almost simultaneously they are often sequentially misplaced if read literally.
So what do you think? You can see what A looked like, and you can see what B looked like. Surprised?
Here is my analysis of the encounter...
In line 1, A asks a direct question about B's 'racial' self-identification, making relevant 'race talk', but carefully aligning her/himself innocuously - "just curious" - to the social import of the question. Given that they - or their avatars - are visible to each other in 3-D virtual space, the question may look puzzling at first. B's immediate response is to type "hah", a common laughter token, yet clearly a trouble source for A, who initiates repair with a next-turn repair initiator in line 4. Almost in overlap, B makes a suggestion as to what may have generated the curiosity, what motivates the question beyond the "just curious"; namely, a prior noticing that she/he is virtually embodied as the Dredd avatar, a system-provided avatar and name suggestive of dreadlocked, dark-skinned features (as well as the comics character Judge Dredd).
Following a brief sequential asynchrony, A displays agreement with B's account in line 7. Thus, the participants have oriented to the inferences one can make about the cultural identities of others from their embodiments. In line 8, A asks the question again, thus treating the prior talk as an insertion sequence, and pursuing a relevant answer. In lines 9 and 10, both participants orient almost simultaneously to the force of that reassertion: that it may be taken as not innocent, eg. racially motivated. They resolve that giving an answer to this 'yes/no' question will not provide grounds for substantive action by A. B answers no, then B asks the same question of A, to which A answers no. At this point, it becomes evident that neither A nor B are choosing avatars that reflect their offline ethnic identities. This is not uncommon since, as Nakamura (1995) points out, we see the rise of identity tourism online: a dream of crossing over racial boundaries temporarily and recreationally with no risks associated with being a racial minority in real life.
Next in the conversation, A declares in line 16 that "I am 100% Irish", an elaboration of her/his answer that positively ascribes to her/himself a pure ethnic identity category that is hearable as comparable to, yet distinct from, "black" as part of the membership collection 'race' . Thus, we can reason that to be 100% Irish is not to be black, racially untainted by a drop of black blood . A and B negotiate their situated perspective on 'race' while doing alignment, but they do so at this moment by drawing upon a hierarchy of realities: one's ontological status is grounded in identifications in the offline physical world. A's question "are you black?" is understood as "are you really black in the offline world?" Later, B's response in line 17 asks for clarification of A's alignment to her/his own prior statement. B reformulates A's prior turn by probing, possibly recontextualising it as a boast, to which A responds with ambivalence.
Nakamura (1995) observes that "some forms of racial passing are condoned and practised since they do not threaten the integrity of a national sense of self which is defined as white." The chat dialogue above is indicative of the presumptive accountability of participants to their choice of embodiment when they have 'chosen' a non-dominant form or feature that becomes 'noticeable'. In fact, it is through these noticings and categorisation practices that parties attempt to (re)construct the relations between the centre and the margins while embodied in the virtual domain. White is still invisible, non-white is accountable . In addition, one can be accountable to the authenticity of taking on that embodiment in relation to one's 'real life' identifications. It is clear from this example that ethnographic and ethnomethodological attention to the practices of the everyday, of ethnification, and of boundary maintenance, is needed to avoid the reification of wishful features of virtual communities over actual situated practice.
