Menu-Driven Identity Workshop Response

I think the questions about categories and picking-a-box for Hotmail and Yahoo! have been thoroughly discussed, so I will look at Lavalife and Second Life (questions 1 & 2, I suppose).

The Lavalife site tends to reduce users to objects that you place in boxes according to rigid categories, the same way you might sort books or cars (when you search cars online, you choose age, colour, make, model ...). If you click on a person's name you can see their about-me spiel, which allows a bit more self-expression, but on the whole the site just imposes its own structure on the complexities of identity. This seems a bit patriarchal to me ...

(Incidentally, I just saw an ad for Lavalife while browsing another site; it had a picture of a blonde, blue-eyed chick and the text "Lavalife - Meet sexy singles right now." I think this confirms that they're pandering to what's seen as common heterosexual male desires.)

Meanwhile, it's pretty obvious that Second Life is playing on the "your real gender, race etc. don't matter online" idea to sell their service. This is nicely illustrated if you click the link to the Second Life home page, where there's a big graphic (which freaked me out!) of a person's "real" identity juxtaposed against their Second Life identity, using one of those face-cut-in-half pictures. I thought it was interesting that they chose to show a "real" Second Life user in that picture, rather than a totally virtual construction ... perhaps this is because of people's yearning to know everyone else's "true" identity (like we discussed in the tute)?

Continuing Caz's theme of intent, I think the makers of Second Life earnestly set out to create a world where identity really was fluid and really could be defined by whatever a person wanted to present themselves as. All of their marketing material (if you explore the site) sounds much like the utopian "gender is irrelevant" writing from the early days of the Net.
However what they've produced doesn't really live up to this completely disruptive and radical kind of thinking. To me it seems like a bit of a caricature (also as mentioned in the tute), in that there's a limited range of categories you can use to build your identity. For example, although there's a mix of ethnicities and made-up names in the surname list, much of it is just token diversity (I didn't see any Chinese-sounding names). Also, the pictures on the site of Second Life avatars all look like fairly "normal" people to me, except for unusual clothes or hair colours, so even though people are able to create wild and radically different personas, they actually don't, and just to stick to categories they know (or if they do, it's not highlighted on the site).