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July 25, 2007, 02:20 PM ET
Academics Chat About Their Digital Appearances
A group of educators gathered around a campfire in Second Life’s Boracay Island this week to chat about the appearances of their avatars, their digital alter egos. Beth Ritter-Guth, who teaches English and women’s studies at Lehigh Carbon Community College, and in Second Life is the glamorous, blonde Desideria Stockton, dressed for the occasion in a purple gown. She adopted her look to research how women would treat an intellectual Barbie. “I looked in my niece’s Barbie bag and buy only clothes that are like the clothes in her bag,” she said.
“The real Beth is much less glitzy and thus doesn’t experience the blond jokes or the cutesy-pie crap” that Desideria experiences, she added.
Alan Levine, a vice president at the New Media Consortium, said he adopted the avatar known as CDB Barkley, who is half-human, half-dog, because he uses dog metaphors a lot for blogging.
“It’s my own play on the old New Yorker cartoon about ‘on the Net no one knows you are a dog,’” he said.
The chat was briefly interrupted when a provocatively dressed avatar named Clare Lane sat on the campfire.
“Clare, watch you don’t become toast,” someone else told her.
“It looked like a chair!” she replied. —Andrea L. Foster
Categories: Virtual-Worlds
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