Life in the Network

NOOOOOO my whole message was typed and a wrong manipulation erased everything... Let's start again.

I just spent at least one hour on Meez, trying many combination to find my perfect opposite. I have been a gothic girl having fun in a cemetery, a princess visiting a saloon, and I'm finally a woman in bikini taking care of her pig, in a US military camp... It's away enough from me to be my icon.

For me, the first step we have to go through creating our meez icon is a perfect "résumé" of this week's readings : "Please select a gender". When I first discovered Internet, I did not even think of the possibility of presenting myself as a female user.. and I did not imagine people doing that. I don't remember very well but I may have been in the same situation as Tucke "naming and describing a character, but forgetting to give it a gender" (210).
However, after a few months of using Internet, and geting used to it, I finally tried to connect as a female user, by curiosity. Contrary to the examples given in readings, I never tried to build a personality or some relationships as female, but I was just going to some chatrooms sometimes, to see how it felt to be a female online user... HORRIBLE.
I agree with Gurak when she writes : "switching gender via the Internet can be an enlightening experience". (79). I had no idea how male users could be agressive and insulting for girls. Generally, the main chatroom remained "clean" before some administrators moderated it but the private messages I was receiving were insane.. After 2 minutes into the room, I had dozens of messages asking me if I was interested in having sex etc... My answer "No" was generally followed by "you have been ignored by this user" or "So why d'you come here?".
Internet is definitely a mysogin place.

About the trust I give to other users, it depends on the kind of website I'm on. The chatrooms I used to visit were I believe full of people like me, switching genders.
However, I know visit some message boards which are completely different. I am a regular user on one of them for 5 years now, and it deals with music. People don't come on it to make some new friends but to talk about music, and I met in real life almost all the users... The purpose is not the same and I would say that I trust these people.