Workshop - Menu Driven Identities

When we want to sign up for Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail or Second Life gameworld, there are some basic information we need to provide unless we cannot continue. For instance we need to input the surname, name, sex, date of birth and country. Secondlife have two parts for register, the different between Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail is user needs to input the real self’s information and the name for the game. It can be illustrates that the real identity and the “net” world identity are different supposedly in Secondlife. This reinforces the “tradition” in the virtual community that people would not use the real name to meet other.

Furthermore, there is the interesting thing about the category of “country” that user needs to input. For the category of “country”, Hong Kong, Taiwan and China are provided also, but how about Tibet, Inner Mongolia? As Hong Kong is not a country, but it appears in the list, then why those minority group are disappeared? Besides, when we need to input the first name and last name, the last name one is the list that we need to choose and all of them are the westerner name, if I am Chinese, what can I choose?

Also, in Lavalife's, as we need to fill the categories: sex, seeking target and their age range, and the purpose (casual dating, relationship and intimate encounter). The result is they are westerners and Australian, as I select different purposes, there is the same result. It seems that what even you choose, “they are” what you can choose.