I think it is very bizarre that people actually do gender-swapping and play a different role. It is crazy that people can go home and act like they are a different gender.
This link has been bookmarked by 27 people . It was first bookmarked on 12 Feb 2008, by Bill Wolff.
-
17 Oct 11
-
Children also grant new capacities and privileges to the machine world on the basis of its animation if not its life. They endow artificial objects with properties, such as having intentions and ideas, previously reserved for living beings.
-
Granting a psychology to computers can mean that objects in the category "machine," like objects in the categories "people" and "pets," are fitting partners for dialog and relationship
-
A 21-year-old college senior defends his violent characters as "something in me; but quite frankly I'd rather rape on MUDs where no harm is done." A 26-year-old clerical worker says, "I'm not one thing, I'm many things. Each part gets to be more fully expressed in MUDs than in the real world. So even though I play more than one self on MUDs, I feel more like 'myself' when I'm MUDding."
-
If a persona in a role-playing game drops defenses that the player in real life has been unable to abandon, what effect does this have? What if a persona enjoys success in some area (say, flirting) that the player has not been able to achieve
-
The psychological effects of life on the screen can be complicated: a safe place is not all that is needed for personal change.
-
And once we take virtuality seriously as a way of life, we need a new language for talking about the simplest things. Each individual must ask: What is the nature of my relationships? What are the limits of my responsibility? And even more basic: Who and what am I? What is the connection between my physical and virtual bodies? And is it different in different cyberspaces? These questions are equally central for thinking about community. What is the nature of our social ties? What kind of accountability do we have for our actions in real life and in cyberspace? What kind of society or societies are we creating, both on and off the screen?
-
Multiple viewpoints call forth a new moral discourse. The culture of simulation may help us achieve a vision of a multiple but integrated identity whose flexibility, resilience, and capacity for joy comes from having access to our many selves.
-
are richer and more compelling than the real life around them.
-
People can get lost in virtual worlds
-
-
26 Nov 10
-
27 May 10
Martin Lindner"Windows have become a powerful metaphor for thinking about the self as a multiple, distributed system," Turkle writes. "The self is no longer simply playing different roles in different settings at different times. The life practice of windows is that of
-
28 Jun 09
-
21 Mar 09
-
multiple personae, romance, and what can be counted on as "real" in virtual space
-
As players participate, they become authors not only of text but of themselves, constructing new selves through social interaction.
-
The anonymity of MUDs gives people the chance to express multiple and often unexplored aspects of the self, to play with their identity and to try out new ones. MUDs make possible the creation of an identity so fluid and multiple that it strains the limits of the notion. Identity, after all, refers to the sameness between two qualities, in this case between a person and his or her persona. But in MUDs, one can be many.
-
Creating screen personae is thus an opportunity for self-expression, leading to her feeling more like her true self when decked out in an array of virtual masks.
-
The integration of the social Achilles, who can talk about his troubles, and the asocial Stewart, who can only cope by putting them out of mind, has not occurred.
-
And once we take virtuality seriously as a way of life, we need a new language for talking about the simplest things. Each individual must ask: What is the nature of my relationships? What are the limits of my responsibility? And even more basic: Who and what am I? What is the connection between my physical and virtual bodies? And is it different in different cyberspaces? These questions are equally central for thinking about community. What is the nature of our social ties? What kind of accountability do we have for our actions in real life and in cyberspace? What kind of society or societies are we creating, both on and off the screen?
-
The culture of simulation may help us achieve a vision of a multiple but integrated identity whose flexibility, resilience, and capacity for joy comes from having access to our many selves.
-
-
08 Feb 09
my serendipitiesarticle by Sherry Turkle on her book: "Life on Screen"
-
09 Aug 08
-
Play has always been an important aspect of our individual efforts to build identity. The psychoanalyst Erik Erikson called play a "toy situation" that allows us to "reveal and commit" ourselves "in its unreality." While MUDs are not the only "places" on the Internet in which to play with identity, they provide an unparalleled opportunity for such play. On a MUD one actually gets to build character and environment and then to live within the toy situation. A MUD can become a context for discovering who one is and wishes to be. In this way, the games are laboratories for the construction of identity.
-
And once we take virtuality seriously as a way of life, we need a new language for talking about the simplest things. Each individual must ask: What is the nature of my relationships? What are the limits of my responsibility? And even more basic: Who and what am I? What is the connection between my physical and virtual bodies? And is it different in different cyberspaces? These questions are equally central for thinking about community. What is the nature of our social ties? What kind of accountability do we have for our actions in real life and in cyberspace? What kind of society or societies are we creating, both on and off the screen?
-
Technology is bringing postmodernism down to earth itself; the story of technology refuses modernist resolutions and requires an openness to multiple viewpoints.
-
In Wim Wenders's film Until the End of the World, a scientist develops a device that translates the electrochemical activity of the brain into digital images. He gives this technology to his family and closest friends, who are now able to hold small battery-driven monitors and watch their dreams. At first, they are charmed. They see their treasured fantasies, their secret selves.
-
However, the story soon turns dark. The images seduce. They are richer and more compelling than the real life around them. Wenders's characters fall in love with their dreams, become addicted to them. People wander about with blankets over their heads the better to see the monitors from which they cannot bear to be parted. They are imprisoned by the screens, imprisoned by the keys to their past that the screens seem to hold.
-
-
06 May 08
-
A 21-year-old college senior defends his violent characters as "something in me; but quite frankly I'd rather rape on MUDs where no harm is done." A 26-year-old clerical worker says, "I'm not one thing, I'm many things. Each part gets to be more fully expressed in MUDs than in the real world. So even though I play more than one self on MUDs, I feel more like 'myself' when I'm MUDding." In real life, this woman sees her world as too narrow to allow her to manifest certain aspects of the person she feels herself to be. Creating screen personae is thus an opportunity for self-expression, leading to her feeling more like her true self when decked out in an array of virtual masks.
-
-
15 Apr 08
-
In an introductory programming course at Harvard University in 1978, one professor introduced the computer to the class by calling it a giant calculator. Programming, he reassured the students, was a cut-and-dried technical activity whose rules were crystal clear.
-
-
Kelly Burnstechnology and people
-
Add Sticky Note
What is virtual gender-swapping all about? Some of those who do it claim that it is not particularly significant. "When I play a woman I don't really take it too seriously," said 20-year-old Andrei. "I do it to improve the ratio of women to men. It's just a game." On one level, virtual gender-swapping is easier than doing it in real life. For a man to present himself as female in a chat room, on an IRC channel, or in a MUD, only requires writing a description. For a man to play a woman on the streets of an American city, he would have to shave various parts of his body; wear makeup, perhaps a wig, a dress, and high heels; perhaps change his voice, walk, and mannerisms. He would have some anxiety about passing, and there might be even more anxiety about not passing, which would pose a risk of violence and possibly arrest. So more men are willing to give virtual cross-dressing a try. But once they are online as female, they soon find that maintaining this fiction is difficult. To pass as a woman for any length of time requires understanding how gender inflects speech, manner, the interpretation of experience. Women attempting to pass as men face the same kind of challenge.
-
-
-
-
Add Sticky Notehese Sherry Turkles have authored a new book, Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet, published November 30 by Simon & Schuster. Life on the Screen tells how the computer profoundly shapes our ways of thinking and feeling, how ideas carried by tec
-
Wow this is so exciting.
-
-
-
12 Apr 08
-
25 Mar 08
-
06 Mar 08
-
MUDders
-
-
05 Mar 08
-
The lessons of computing today have to do not with calculation and rules, but with simulation, navigation, and interaction. The very image of the computer as a giant calculator has become quaint and dated. Fifteen years ago, most computer users were limited to typing commands. Today they use off-the-shelf products to manipulate simulated desktops, draw with simulated paints and brushes, and fly in simulated airplane cockpits.
-
I am clearly having a hard time hiding my lifetime habit of looking up words that I don't understand, because Tim tries to appease me by coming up with a working definition of orgot. "I ignore the word, but I think it is sort of like an organism. I never read that, but just from playing, I would say that's what it is."
-
the notion of the machine has expanded to include its having a psychology
-
something in me; but quite frankly I'd rather rape on MUDs where no harm is done
-
-
-
MUDs are a new kind of virtual parlor game and a new form of community. In addition, text-based MUDs are a new form of collaboratively written literature. MUD players are MUD authors, the creators as well as consumers of media content. In this, participating in a MUD has much in common with scriptwriting, performance art, street theater, improvisational theater, or even commedia dell'arte. But MUDs are something else as well.
-
-
-
Stewart, playing on MUDs led to a net drop in self-esteem. MUDs did help Stewart talk about his troubles while they were still emotionally relevant; nevertheless, he is emphatic that MUDding has ultimately made him feel worse about himself. MUDding did not alter Stewart's sense of himself as withdrawn, unappealing, and flawed.
-
How am I going to dig my persona's self out of this mess? Because I don't want to go on like this. I want to get out of it.... You can see that playing this woman lets me see what I have in my psychological repertoire, what is hard and what is easy for me. And I can also see how some of the things that work when you're a man just backfire when you're a woman."
-
Other partners of virtual adulterers do not share Beth's accepting attitude. Janet, 24, a secretary at a New York law firm, is very upset by her husband Tim's sex life in cyberspace. After Tim's first online affair, he confessed his virtual infidelity. When Janet objected, Tim told her that he would stop "seeing" his online mistress. Janet says that she is not sure that he actually did stop.
-
TinySex poses the question of what is at the heart of sex and fidelity. Is it the physical action? Is it emotional intimacy with someone other than one's primary partner? Is infidelity in the head or in the body? Is it in the desire or in the action? What constitutes the violation of trust?
-
We, too, are vulnerable to using our screens in these ways. People can get lost in virtual worlds. Some are tempted to think of life in cyberspace as insignificant, as escape or meaningless diversion. It is not. Our experiences there are serious play. We belittle them at our risk. We must understand the dynamics of virtual experience both to foresee who might be in danger and to put these experiences to best use. Without a deep understanding of the many selves that we express in the virtual, we cannot use our experiences there to enrich the real. If we cultivate our awareness of what stands behind our screen personae, we are more likely to succeed in using virtual experience for personal transformation.
-
-
14 Feb 08
-
Relationships during adolescence are usually bounded by a mutual understanding that they involve limited commitment. Virtual space is well suited to such relationships; its natural limitations keep things within bounds. As in Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, which takes place in the isolation of a sanatorium, relationships become intense very quickly because the participants feel isolated in a remote and unfamiliar world with its own rules. MUDs, like other electronic meeting places, can breed a kind of easy intimacy. In a first phase, MUD players feel the excitement of a rapidly deepening relationship and the sense that time itself is speeding up. "The MUD quickens things. It quickens things so much," says one player. "You know, you don't think about it when you're doing it, but you meet somebody on the MUD, and within a week you feel like you've been friends forever."
-
-
13 Feb 08
-
In the games in the Sim series (SimCity, SimLife, SimAnt, SimHealth), you try to build a community, an ecosystem, or a public policy. The goal is to make a successful whole from complex, interrelated parts. Tim is 13, and among his friends, the Sim games are the subject of long conversations about what he calls Sim secrets. "Every kid knows," he confides, "that hitting Shift-F1 will get you a couple of thousand dollars in SimCity." But Tim knows that the Sim secrets have their limits. They are little tricks, but they are not what the game is about. The game is about making choices and getting feedback. Tim talks easily about the trade-offs in SimCity - between zoning restrictions and economic development, pollution controls and housing starts.
-
-
12 Feb 08
-
G ender >
-
ender-swapping on MUDs is not a small part of the game action. By some estimates, Habitat, a Japanese MUD, has 1.5 million users. Habitat is a MUD operated for profit. Among the registered members of Habitat, there is a ratio of four real-life men to each real-life woman. But inside the MUD the ratio is only three male characters to one female character. In other words, a significant number of players, many tens of thousands of them, are virtually cross-dressing.
-
-
-
Add Sticky Note
What has she found? That the Internet links millions of people in new spaces that are changing the way we think and the way we form our communities. That we are moving from "a modernist culture of calculation toward a postmodernist culture of simulation." That life on the screen permits us to "project ourselves into our own dramas, dramas in which we are producer, director, and star.... Computer screens are the new location for our fantasies, both erotic and intellectual. We are using life on computer screens to become comfortable with new ways of thinking about evolution, relationships, sexuality, politics, and identity."
Turkle's own metaphor of windows serves well to introduce the following samplings from her new book. Those boxed-off areas on the screen, Turkle writes, allow us to cycle through cyberspace and real life, over and over. Windows allow us to be in several contexts at the same time - in a MUD, in a word-processing program, in a chat room, in e-mail.
"Windows have become a powerful metaphor for thinking about the self as a multiple, distributed system," Turkle writes. "The self is no longer simply playing different roles in different settings at different times. The life practice of windows is that of a decentered self that exists in many worlds, that plays many roles at the same time." Now real life itself may be, as one of Turkle's subjects says, "just one more window."
-
I really like how Turkle is setting up her discussion here. The windows metaphor is a wonderful move into the discussion of how different spaces encourage/result in multiple representations of identity. Though published in 1996, we can see this today in Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn spaces, as well as how and where we blog.
-
Is this "projecting ourselves into our own dramas" the reason that Tukle is talking about herself in the third person? Does the individual have any "self"?
- 1 more sticky notes...
-
-
So, going back to Wenger, a person is just a nexus of all of his or her selfs. Does this make sense?
-
-
-
-
10 Mar 06
Public Stiky Notes
Would you like to comment?
Join Diigo for a free account, or sign in if you are already a member.