thing. Way back when the default male shape in SL seemed to be a cross between a Greek God of War and an American Football player, I basically wanted a skinnier, frankly weedier looking avatar. Years spent in real life not able or wanting to fit in with any sort of stereotypical alpha male behaviour has left me enthusiastic to express a more gentle, more intellectual maleness. I’ve had a few AOs over the years too, but I’ve always eschewed anything with any sort of threatening stand. My current AO is something of a fidget, always stretching and moving from foot to foot. It makes me look a little uneasy when I’m amongst a crowd of solid or graceful standers, which is fine by me because that’s exactly how I do feel amongst gatherings of people. This said, however, it would be untrue to claim that these aspects of my identity are my sole identity. As I wrote in my very first column for AVENUE, the whole beauty of SL and its anonymity is that it allows us to explore aspects of ourselves which we might not have had the courage to explore in real life. There is nothing preventing us from exploring more than one of these. We can do these in our existing avatars to a certain extent, however the same anonymity which facilitates the first online identity can also facilitate the second and the third and the fourth. I might decide to adopt a whole new writing style and persona, for example, spend time exaggerating
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my more eccentric qualities or live life as a female. For a while in 2011, I contemplated living as a plywood cube with a gender-neutral name, just to see how people responded to someone where they had no cues whatsoever as to RL gender or lifestyle. One of the first things you discover in a new identity, after all, is that people respond to you completely differently. Identity is a socially constructed phenomenon. It’s a two-way thing. There are plenty of dark sides to this fragmentation of identity, such as exploring the freedom to express hate views, deliberate deception or anonymous bullying – all topics I have written about in various ways over the years. This is by no means by default a peaceful human voyage that lies ahead of us. Like it or not, however, digital identity is going to come the big issue of the decades to come and it’s going to be a lot more complicated than sorting profiles into arbitrary categories. We need to start getting our heads around this issue, and soon. Huckleberry Hax writes novels set in Second Life®. You can download these for free from www.huckleberryhax.blogspot. com