With my new found obsession with the hit new CW show Gossip Girl, I decided that, having the opportunity to lead a second life in the computer based multiplayer space Second Life, I would try and emulate my absolute favorite character on the show, Blair Waldorf. Thus, I entered the Second Life community as a Resident named Blaire Kirax, and interacted with other avatars, or digital representations of self, in a variety of different communities that Second Life offered.
After choosing the name of my avatar, the next step in Second Life was to choose what Blaire would indeed look like. While I choose the general avatar named “City Chic,” I quickly changed pretty much everything about Blaire as soon as I could; everything from her hair color and length to her clothing to her foot size to her height were immediately altered. I was extremely careful as to how I created Blaire’s image because as Yee & Bailenson point out in their 2007 study, the avatar is our entire self-representation, and it is the primary identity cue in online environments. Therefore, taking parts from the Hyperpersonal Theory and following what is known as the Proteus Effect, I used behavioral confirmation and selective self-presentation to create an avatar that would look like what I felt people would expect from the identity that I wanted to portray. In simpler terms, as defined by Yee & Bailenson, the Proteus Effect is when people conform to the behavior that they believe others would expect them to have.
Although Second Life allows people to do pretty amazing and extravagant things in it, such as buy real estate, buy goods and services, run businesses and organizations, attend school, and go on vacations, I stuck to the simplest aspect of this online world. In the orientation island that all new Residents must begin in, I learned how to chat with people, search for things, and travel. I additionally was able to do some pretty cool things that I would never be able to do in real life, such as walk under water, fly, and ride a Segway.
After completing the orientation section, I was then transported in to the Bear Dream Hub community, and this is the space where I started interacting with many of the other avatars. Because I created an avatar that I felt was pretty attractive, I was extremely confident in approaching people for conversation. Furthermore, I was much more upfront in the Second Life space than I would ever be in real life, and was not afraid to say or do anything as Blaire Kirax. I had a pretty intimate conversation with an avatar named Sebastian, and these findings are aligned with what Yee & Bailenson found in their study, as they concluded that the attractiveness of people’s avatars impacted how intimate participants were willing to be with a stranger. Because I felt that my avatar was on the attractive side, the Proteus Effect came in to play, and confirmed Yee & Bailenson’s thesis that self-representations have a significant and perhaps more importantly, instantaneous impact on our behaviors. As they noted in their study, as we choose our self-representations in virtual environments, our self-representations shape our behaviors in turn. These changes happen not over hours or weeks but within minutes (Yee & Bailenson 2007).
Although I only used Second Life for only a little more than an hour, it is easy to see how online gaming such as this can lead to Problematic Internet Use, problematic behavior related to too much online time. Caplan’s “vicious cycle” explanation outlined in his 2004 study does a great job explaining how an Internet space such as Second Life leads to the development of problematic behavior such as this. Furthermore, the nature of the space allows lonely individuals to be attracted to the greater anonymity, greater control over self-presentation, more intense/intimate self-disclosure, less perceived social risk, and less social responsibility that such a space offers.
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