Hey everyone. My name is Spencer Dorcik, and I’m a junior Psych major from Cleveland. I originally considered a minor in Communications but ended up deciding against it. However, as a result, I’ve taken a decent amount of Comm courses and the idea of applying what I’ve already learned in my Psych classes to the field of communications (and especially the internet) was too good to pass up.
I’ve always been kind of intrigued by the issues of gender identity and equality, including the idea that gender is a socially constructed concept, not a biological one. The internet provides a unique environment for the playing out of gender roles because it is both anonymous and socially constructed, whether it’s an instant messenger conversation, a chat room, a blog, or an online game. Specifically of interest to me are the cases of males adopting female personae online.
My topic of interest exists in just about every online space that Wallace has a category for. However the two most important to this phenomenon, I feel, are the spaces of synchronous chats and what Wallace calls metaworlds, that are more common today in programs such as Second Life and online games such as World of Warcraft and Everquest. We’ve probably all heard the stereotypical story of a guy that meets a girl in a chat room but then the girl turns out to also be a guy. Most of our immediate reactions would be to laugh about the ridiculousness of the situation, but it can also be examined more closely. In a society that is (albeit slowly) working towards a more tolerant atmosphere surrounding homosexuality and transgendered individuals, why do such a large number of people still feel the need to hide behind the internet’s all-encompassing anonymity? Perhaps it is because our society still is not that accepting. Perhaps it is because an individual wants to play out some personal fantasy in the comfort of not being “discovered”. It seems, in some ways, a risky game to play, especially with how many sexual predators use the internet to find new potential victims, as specials like To Catch a Predator have shown us.
Bob already touched on the gender role-play found in MMORPGs below, but I’d like to further examine the motivations for this particular kind of identity alteration. The alternate gender role experience found in online games and social programs such as Second Life varies from that of the chat room in one key way. First, the gender identity in these programs is maintained through the use of visual avatars, characters that can appear masculine or feminine as one chooses. In a chat room, gender is only confirmed through what one says. However, the other side of that coin is that males playing female characters has become such a routine fact of life in online gaming that discovering a female character is actually a man at a computer somewhere is much less weird than the same experience in a chat room.
This issue has grabbed my attention and I look forward to hearing what the rest of you have to say about this.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
Hey Spencer! I I think that your post brings up some very interesting points and I am especially intrigued in your reference to gender being "a socially constructed concept, not a biological one." I am interested in this because it makes me wonder why men or women choose to act like the other gender online and what that means about society's construction of that gender. The question is whether society's construction of each gender allows people to fully experience life as the opposite sex online or whether a major part revolves around dressing and participating in daily activities that society deems appropriate for each gender. Can people actually feel as if they were living as the other gender merely through conversations and avatars online? Then you brought up the idea about people being able to hide themselves online which got me to wondering if their online fantasies are still socially constructed and not biologically? I know this is quite a question, but I think that the ideas you proposed about the Internet's anonymity is going to lead to answer bigger questions in the future.
Post a Comment