 In Second Life, intimacy mingles with a range of emotions. “Consolation,” by Leila Carroll, depicts how intimacy accompanies grief.

September + October 2008

[ 1] Goffman, E. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Harmondsworth: Penguin,1969.

interactions

day snapshots; users with such profile pictures are presenting themselves rhetorically, that is, with an interest in causing others to perceive them in a certain way. In short, avatars are (often deliberately) poor as literal representations of users, but they are rich as performed expressions of how users perceive themselves and/or desire to be perceived.

This formulation of avatars as symbolic performances echoes a conceptualization of sociologist Erving Goffman [ 1], who saw human identity in general as the stage-managed performance of everyday social activities, in which situationally appropriate behaviors are set up “on stage,” and situationally inappropriate thoughts or behaviors are left “backstage,” out of sight. For example, a person behaves differently and uses different kinds of language in front of friends, colleagues, and family.

As interaction designers, we might ask how the stages, or interactive ecologies, we create

regulate or encourage identity performance. Presumably, a collaborative whiteboard in Adobe Breeze is a different sort of stage than a map for a death match in a first-person shooter, such as Halo. Likewise, we might explore ways that identities are performed in surprising ways that seem at first glance to transcend the needs of a given stage. For example, in Second Life, role-playing communities have formed that add considerable layers of social complexity and rule-based social expectation to a virtual world that already seemed to have plenty of both. But why did they do it, and what can we learn from it?

 

From Online Representation to Online Subjectivity Rather than understanding online avatars as representations, designers should instead understand them as subjectivities. A representation is a static signifier, a word or a picture that refers to the real thing. It is always sepa-

rate from what it signifies, and through this separation, it can also lie. A subjectivity, in contrast, is a living force, an agent that both acts in the world and is constituted in the world through action. Because it is constituted through action or performance, it cannot lie; it is as it does.

The way we conceptualize avatars as designers has profound implications for what we design. In the context of cybersecurity, say, in an online-banking application, a representational notion of identity is fully appropriate. The bank and the user both need to know that the online representation of the other indeed truthfully represents their interaction partner. Phishing, of course, violates this by offering a false representation of an online partner. But a banking transaction is not analogous to an emotionally involved exchange of intimacy, be it romance or even friendship. In online friendships, actions— shared experiences, expressions of empathy, deep conversations—