Menu-Driven Identity Workshop Response

1. Which categories are available for users to choose from when signing up for Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail or in order to use the Second Life gameworld? What presumptions do these categories make about users, and what does the absence of certain categories of identity say?
4. Are any of the websites you've visited inherently racist? Why or why not?

When people want to sign up an email account, same kind of information they need to put in for registrant, so do in Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail. Both of the email services require similar data to sign up, such as first name, last name, gender, date of birth, and state/post code. However, are those information true? And are those information able to describe a person?

When people send me email, the data of the sender will be the name, the email and the ID (like the Yahoo ID, i.e. the name appear before the @xxx.com). A question raise up, why I need to fill in my gender and country code? Is that ‘male’ and ‘female’ already enough for all people? What about the transgender and intersex? Moreover, in those internet service, e.g. Yahoo, no matter you sign in to email, knowledge or some newsgroup, people are not represented by their name, but the Yahoo ID, then why I still need to input some useless data?

Furthermore, I think the email address had already indicate the race of the user, such as hk, jp, nz, au, and uk. I can say it’s a kind of racism but just separating different nation people, although what they do is trying to help different nation’s people to use the service more easily. One of the website Takarazuka http://kageki.hankyu.co.jp/ all in Japanese, they do have the English version, but it didn’t consist as many information as Japanese, I know those play might target on Japanese, then why translate it in English and lack of information?

How many email accounts you got? I got five, one from HKU SPACE, one from UWA, and three from Yahoo! Mail, beside the college emails which representing OiYing Man, those three email account are representing different ‘me’: Candy Man, Ying Man and also Pian. So, which one is representing me? All of them, but just different identity.