Back to Avatars

Found this little tidbit in Sunday's Modern Love column by Daniel Jones. Writing just before Valentine's Day, he shared some insights from past columns. He neatly reinforces my previous posting on Second Life and Avatar luuuv (well, there's another, less family friendly word for it, but its almost V Day, so let's disguise it).

I'm a very carnal girl. If I'm going to have a fight with a fellow, I'd rather do it face to face-as Jackson Browne once wrote in a song, I love the thunder and the rain. And if I'm going to be enraptured and swept away with passion, I'm darn well going to want to look into someone's eyes and share the experience with him.

HOW TO REMEMBER THAT WHEREVER YOU GO, THERE YOU ARE
Online communities like SecondLife allow members to create animated versions of themselves called avatars that can go on dates, fly, carouse, even engage in prostitution. Theodora Stites wrote vividly in this space about how she conducts much of her romantic life this way and confessed to enlarging her avatar’s chest and perfecting its features to attract suitable male avatars.
You might assume that on SecondLife you are protected from the emotional upheaval of real relationships because the animated couplings tend to be, well, fake. But here’s the catch: They’re not fake. It’s still you behind the screen and you who is being accepted or rejected, with all the attendant joy and pain. As Theodora explained, “I’ve found that I act much as I do in real life, and my SecondLife relationships tend to fail the same way my real-life relationships do.”