Online Community and Identity

Cyberspace: Term originally coined by science fiction novelist William Gibson in his 1982 short story, Burning Chrome, and further popularized through its use in his seminal cyberpunk novel Neuromancer, written in 1983

Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts… A graphic representation of data abstracted from banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding.

-William Gibson, Neuromancer

Avatar: Term originally popularized by science fiction author Neal Stephenson in his 1992 novel Snow Crash. Avatars referred to the virtual simulation of the human form in an fictional online virtual reality environment.

Second Life- an embodiment of the Metaverse?

Online life can allow an individual to stand in the spaces between selves and still feel one. To see the multiplicity and still feel a unity

-Sherry Turkle, Our Split Screens

Levels of participation in online communities:

1. Peripheral (Lurker) – An outside, unstructured participation

2. Inbound (Novice) – Newcomer is invested in the community and heading towards full participation

3. Insider (Regular) – Full committed community participant

4. Boundary (Leader) – A leader, sustains membership participation and brokers interactions

5. Outbound (Elder) – Process of leaving the community due to new relationships, new positions, new outlooks

In most online communities, 90% of users are lurkers who never contribute, 9% of users contribute a little, and 1% of users account for almost all the action.

If Twitter were 100 people

Ok Cupid Trends

Burger King’s Facebook Campaign

Avatars to have business dress codes by 2013

Online Consequences- failbook
MIT project to determine facebook sexuality

Projects

Online experimentation and freedom – Post Secret

Digital identity persistence after death- Death Switch

Computer theorist Raymond Kurzweil talks about his avatar project, Ramona

Invisible Threads is a mixed reality performance installation created by Eyebeam artists Jeff Crouse and Stephanie Rothenberg. The project explores the growing intersection between labor, emerging virtual economies and real life commodities through the creation of a designer jeans sweatshop in the metaverse Second Life. Simulating a real life manufacturing facility that includes hiring Second Life “workers” to produce real world jeans sold for profit, the project provides an insider’s view into current modes of global, telematic production.

Second Front

Second front is a performance art group in the online virtual world of Second Life. Taking their influences from numerous sources, including Dada, Fluxus, Futurist Syntesi, the Situationist International and contemporary performance artists such as Laurie Anderson and Guillermo Gomez-Pena, Second Front creates score-based performances and interventions that challenge notions of traditional performance, virtual embodiment and the culture of immateriality.