My Meez
I created this Meez because he is physically different than my real life identity. To begin with he is male, I am female.
I wanted to give him crazy blue hair, but every time I tried to save the hair, it disappeared. In contrast, I have black hair that rarely gets colored or altered. I dressed him in punk attire to make him appear young. While I think skull shirts rock, I don't think it is appropriate for a pregant 30 year old (me) to wear them. And finally, my Meez is Caucasion and I am Korean. Because I was adopted, I mostly identify with Caucasion culture (namely Scandinavian), but my features are quite different than this Meez that I created.
In my opening statement, I mentioned that my Meez was physically different than me. However, I believe we have a simliar personality. I have masculine personality traits, therefore creating his "persona" was easy. In my writing and acting classes I usually take on the male perspective. I feel more comfortable speaking in first person as a male.
Perhaps that is why I found Gurak's statement "And no wonder women are still having difficulties gaining access to cyberspace" (Gurak, Cyberliteracy, p. 71) surprising. I have never encountered 'sexism' on the internet. Nor did I ever think it was gender biased.
Further I realized that my type of communication on the internet is like a males, " assertive, sarcastic and rude to boot" (Gurak, Cyberliteracy, p. 71). I used to work in an HR position at a company where 95% of the employees were females. I was often confronted on my 'short, emotionless emails'. As a result, I began using smiley emoticons to soften my communication approach. " This use of such emoticons as smileys is often a feature of women's discourse, used to deflect the tension of a situation and provide a bit of comfort for the reader." (Gurak, Cyberliteracy, p. 73).
Last week I was neutral on the subject of falsifying one's identity online. But now, after this activity, I see how fascinating it can be to create an avator, adopt a new personality, and explore a different side of yourself. I would be interested in trying out my male persona to see how men react to it. I believe it would be similar to Shakespeare's As You LIke It, when "Rosalind and Orlando meet 'man to man', as Ganymeade and Orlando, they are able to speak freely" (Turkle, Life On the Screen, p. 216). It would be entertaining to see how long it takes until the man figures out that I am actually a woman. Now if only I could trick one of the sexist Rensselaer alums...
Comments
You mentioned that in your workplace where the others were mostly women, you were conmfronted about your "short, emotionless e-mails". Do you think you would have been taken to task about it if you were a man? Or was it because your e-mail style didn't fit the expectations of how a woman should communicate that it was seen as problematic? I wonder, too, if using emoticons and other "female" tools in e-mails brings a more favorable response from the reader. Women are generally considered to have better social engineering skills, and it seems like if men thought they could get more accomplished by writing like women, they'd do it.
Posted by: e_rose | February 11, 2007 05:56 PM
I as well found it very interesting and fascinating creating a different gender and idenity through the meek.com website. It would definately be intriguing to see how long I could portray my opposite gender, personality, etc. before another person caught on to the falsification. Since I have had no experience at all prior to creating this Avatar for this course, I think I would have a much more difficult time figuring out if an individual is really truely who they portray themselves as through their Avatar.
Posted by: E Milbrath | February 11, 2007 09:23 PM