As I answered the mid-term question on identity tourism, I realized I’ve know some people who have played different roles on games, switching gender, ethnicity, or whatever they wanted, and it seemed acceptable. Yet, I’ve also know people who have been very hurt by people pretending to be someone they were not in an online chat or other online community. What makes the situations so different? That is what inspired me to think about the different situations and explore more about how identity tourism and its role in virtual communities.
For my paper I am interested in researching and discussing identity tourism in virtual communities. I will look at what virtual communities accept and even expect identity tourism, and how other communities see identity tourism as a lie and inappropriate, to say the least.
My argument is that; even though Identity tourism is the same whether in chat rooms, communities such as facebook or twitter, or online gaming, it is only acceptable in some communities. Online gaming is one place in the virtual world where identity tourism is deemed ok, maybe even encouraged. However, when in a chat room or similar community people generally expect you to represent yourself in a real manor; they expect you to be true to yourself.
Maria Bakardjieva’s talks about online relationships, and how different people use them in different ways. I will use this article to talk about how some online relationships are real and portray the real people and how others do not, and the attitudes and feelings that these relationships cause.
Lori Kendall discusses online communities, specifically that of BlueSky, and how identity tourism works in a community such as this. People generally accept people for who they are in real life and expect people to portray a real version of themselves.
In Nakamura’s article “Race in/for Cyberspace: Identity tourism and racial passing on the internet” she discusses role playing in spaces such as LambdaMOO. Nakamura states that in LambdaMOO people are required to create an identity and the requirements there of. From this I will touch on the acceptable liberties within creating an identity in a space such as this.
Works Cited
Bakardjieva, Maria. "Virtual Togetherness: An Everyday-Life Perspective." The Cybercultures reader. Ed. David Bell and Barbara M Kennedy. 2nd. New York: Routledge, 2000. 237-253.
Kendall, Lori. ""Oh No! I'm a Nerd!": Hegemonic Masculinity on an Online Forum." Vol. 14 (2). Sage Publications, Inc., April 2000. 256-274.
Nakamura, Lisa. Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008.
Nakamura, Lisa. "Race In/For Cyberspace: Identity tourism and racial passing on the Internet." The Cybercultures Reader. Ed. David Bell and Barbara M Kennedy. 2nd. New York: Routledge, 2000. 297-304.
Turkle, Sherry. "Looking Toward Cyberspace: Beyond Grounded Sociology Cyberspace and Identity."
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If your argument is, as you say, essentially that it is ok to try on identies in some places and not others, there's a "no kidding!" attached to that. What you need to look for are specific places and instances (pick a social networking service and an exmaple to discuss, and then pick some game & character to discuss) and then figure out the WHY behind the question. In other words, after your "However..." sentence, the next sentence would be your argument as to why that is the case.
ReplyDelete* Contact me via e-mail if you want to work out any aspects of your argument or organization along the way, or to evaluate scholarly sources (provide citation and annotation in the e-mail), or to bounce presentation ideas off me.