First official ENGL 3116 post.

Assignment # 2:

            After viewing my follower’s site, http://carmenwarren.blogspot.com/, I noticed great differences between my own personal avatar and hers. First off, neither image reflects any direct physical resemblances between us and rather reveal an unknown, unidentified cyber-persona of what we picture in our minds. The true beauty of avatar creation is that it is completely sporadic, instantaneous, and impulsive, yet the end result always seems satisfying to the creator. Having both utilized a website called, http://www.doppelme.com, our images have the same basic structure and characteristics, though mine is much more simple than hers, which contains a scenic background, a fore ground, and a complex outfit. Perhaps the more intricacies contained in Carmen’s avatar may reveal: her availability and greater amount of time devoted to the project, the more intense brainstorming she did before and during the project, etc. Should Carmen receive a higher grade on this assignment since she created a character that is much more complicated, pleasing to the eye, and unique? According to David Bell, no, because ‘cyberspace reflects the poststructuralist critique of the subject’ and we in turn, “can be whoever we want whenever we want”. Since the poststructuralist theorists, like Bell, view the subject as constantly undeterminable, unstable, and changing, they would likely characterize each existing “avatar” out there in cyberspace as only ‘temporary’, much like our own personas. Likewise, my own refusal to spend more than five minutes creating my avatar may reveal my own internal perspectives and awareness of the temporary position of the avatar, while Carmen may have chosen to better prepare a literal re-presentation of herself in her avatar and attempt to get a better grade (?). So, perhaps the real question one should ask when critiquing someone’s webpage, blog, avatar, etc. is whether or not it (in any way) reflects that person’s personality and identity. Personally, I would argue that cyberspace personas typically have no correlations with real life personas. The poststructuralist notion that puts great emphasis on identifications, rather than identities, strongly supports my argument. In the case of avatars, we definitely include some specific attributes that may define our physicality (e.g. I chose short, brown hair to reflect my own), but mostly, we choose other traits according to liking, desire, unusualness, etc. In conclusion, both mine and Carmen’s avatar reflects a temporary mind-created image of ourselves, in which our interests and group identifications are established.