In the online world as in the real world, issues of personal identity affect how we relate to others. Culture in online environments is created by these understandings and misunderstandings about a person’s gender, race or nationality. As the net grows not only in size but also in diversity, it is important that we take these issues into account as designers and participants of this new medium.
The physical self is the locus for a wide range of social cues: gait, race, gender, hairstyle, gestures, etc. which all place the person in a particular location in society. If you are in a particular culture there is so much you can read into simply this arrangement of two people. You can read things into the type of setting that they are in; you can read things into his posture and haircut. If you are not in that culture there is all the issues of what you can't read into it. It is an example of the huge number of very rich cues that we get both about social class and the relationships between people. All kinds of things come in embodied social cues.
Embodied social cues are sparse in the virtual world. In text-based environments, one's utterances emerge independent of any visible, palpable self. And graphical environments, while they hold out future promises of subtle gestures and virtual fashions, are still far from that stage; today's graphical environments with their simplisticly rendered avatars provide even fewer social cues than their textual counterparts, for they are missing the nuanced cadences of the written, conversational word. This dearth of social cues is both good and bad. One of the most widely hailed features of on-line communication is its democratic levelling: one's thoughts and ideas, rather than one's age, race, gender, etc., are the first things known about one. Yet social cues are not simply vehicles for prejudice; they play an essential role in the formation of community and in our comprehension of social interactions. In particular, cues that reveal who one has become, that show one's affiliations, beliefs and interests, (as opposed to those based on one's genetic traits) are an integral part of communication.
REFERENCES
Frissen, V. (1991)"Trapped in electronic cages? Gender and new information technologies in the public and private domain: An overview of the research", Media, Culture, and Society, vol.14, p.31-39.
Herring, S. (1994)"Gender differences in computer-mediated communication: Bringing familiar baggage to the new frontier", Paper presented at the American Library Association Annual Convention, Arlington, TX.
Annabel Johnson 19:53, 28 Oct 2004 (EST)
