Sunday, November 29, 2009

Pseudonymity, Separatism and Multidimensional Thinking

There have been a couple of very interesting conversations going on over the last few days related to two blog posts on the topic of human and avatar identity:
  • "Pseudonynimity AKA Privacy" by Soror Nishi decried what she sees as a growing consensus in the avatar community that revealing one's human identity is a good thing.  Soror finds the "avatar AKA human identity" trend boring and wrong-headed.
  • "There is No Wall" by Lalo Telling put forward the idea that the "Augmentationist/Immersionist" conversation would be better served by replacing those terms with "Separatist/Integrationist." 
I decided to go up the mountain with my visualization tools and see what might be revealed on the topics. Here's what I came back with:

This first graphic takes the binary view of pseudonymity discussed in Soror's post and attempts to reveal the multi-dimensional complexity beneath the surface.

Human and Avatar Pseudonymity Continuum

This next graphic explores the "what" of Lalo's Separation/Integration concept.

Human and Avatar Integration Factors

I'll write more about the graphics and their underlying ideas later this week.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

This is great stuff Botgirl! I look forward to reading your upcoming posts, describing the graphics.

I think this is going to become an increasingly important topic in the coming months. One that while having been extensively debated within VWs, will be a part of everyday RW conversations.

Isabeal Jupiter said...

Nice graphical representation of the concept and interesting typologies. It definitely needs more exploration.

sororNishi said...

As usual your clarity is a welcome addition to every discussion.... look forward to more, this is culture being born, I think.