Tuesday, February 3, 2009

Professional Avatar

A professional Avatar?I think this brings us back to the whole question about identity. Should our SL avatar be somehow close to our RL person or should we rather select a radically different shape and look?This all depends on your approach to SL.
Will your SL be an extension of your RL or do you rather see it as an opportunity to experiment with a different identity?Looking at the question from this angle it would be entirely up to you to select the look of your avatar.But then remains the question, if there are already any norms established on SL that are different from RL or if we tend to reproduce a social framework that is closed what we are used in RL.So if these norms are close to RL then we could be thinking, yes there should be "professionally dressed" avatars in suits and ties for business meetings.If those norms are different, what are these norms. Are we allowed to dress differently, meaning we could wear jeans and t-shirt instead of a suit and a tie? Would we have to keep a human shape?What if we have a business meeting on SL? What do the other participants expect and what might be implicit rules?These questions are difficult to answer and only the experience with a certain target group might show some tangible results. I think the cautious way would be to start with an hypothesis about the target group and see how the "look" might actually impact the whole session.
My hypothesis would be that in general you have more freedom to select the look of your avatar than you would have in RL. But it might that in certain contexts you would still need to be compliant with a set of implicit norms. Eventually I would not call it a "professional avatar" but rather introduce some norms for the look in case you believe that is needed.

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