Discussion forums, avatars and people
I moderate a discussion forum. It is a continual (inner) struggle to let the forum be what the members want and to reign them in when they go too far.
Often there are crisis that arise because members can represent themselves to be other than they are or because people do not believe that people are who they say they are. Other problems come from people not acting on (through?) the forum as they would in real life. Being a car forum full of young guys, this often takes the shape of posturing and insults that would probably never be said aloud in a pub, or, if they were said, would end up in one or more bloody noses.
The participants of these electronically mediated virtual communities acquire skills that are useful for the virtual social environments developing in late-twentieth-century technologised nations. The participants learn to delegate their agencies to body representatives that exist in imaginal spaces contiguously with representatives of other individuals. The become accustomed to what might be called lucid dreaming in an awake state — to a constellation of activities much like reading, but an active and interactive reading, a participatory social practice in which the actions of the reader have consequences in the world of the dream or of the book. The older metaphor of reading undergoes a transformation in a textual space that is consensual, interactive, haptic, and that is constituted through inscription practices — the production of microprocessor code. The boundaries between the social and the “natural” and between biology and technology take on the generous permeability that characterises communal space in the most recent virtual systems.
From Allucquère Rosanne Stone The war of deire and technology at the close of the mechanical age, 1995, MIT Press, pg121
