Avatar idea scrapped!!!

Just a bit of random research for our groupwork: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_identity This issue of gender and sexual resignification raises the notion of disembodiment and its associated implications. "Disembodiment" is the idea that once the user is online, the need for the body is no longer required, and the user can participate separately from it. This ultimately alludes to a sense of detachment from the identity defined by the physical body. In cyberspace, many aspects of sexual identity become blurred and are only defined by the user. Herein again questions of truth are raised, particularly in reference to online dating and virtual sex. As McRae (1997, p. 75)

We wanted to create an avatar to prove this theory from first hand experience and we were gonna add the features so that people online are attracted to the avatar, we could technically be speaking to anyone on there. I just added a fake passport, number on the account and it said that it was checked against the government records within about 2 seconds, which I don’t believe and even if its true, its obviously not correct. We believed this even though our account was free, we actually fell for the words just because it was on the screen. Unfortunately there has been many technical errors afte the application and the uni firewall is blocking us from downloading the software to create an avatar so we scrapped that idea and have instead decided to look at online communication, how and why it happens with specific reference to Second Life.

I was thinking its wierd how people get a bad impression of chatrooms and forums and social networks yet we all use it, I mean some countries go as far as restricting and monitering access, horror stories of internet dating and friendships always appear in The Sun newspaper and I was thinking ahy is the negative emphasised so much? Well Nigel said print news is becoming out of fashion and news is more sought after online, so newspapers give a biased opinion to influence us to buy their newpapers. So half of what they say is always exxagerated.