Word: avatars
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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About a year ago in my first visit to Second Life, the popular online virtual world, I spent half an hour trying to make my avatar, or online character, look like a hotter version of myself - which isn't easy when you don't know how to use the tools. When I finally made it onto Money Island to mingle, a stranger approached me and said, "Hello there, Devon." I froze. Then I tried to run. I was desperately searching for the teleport tool when my sister walked into the room, peered over my shoulder at the computer screen...
...assistant professor of communication at Stanford, studies the way self-perception affects behavior. No surprise that what we think about ourselves affects the confidence with which we approach the world. What is a surprise is that this applies in the virtual world too. With my plain=Jane avatar and my inexperience in Second Life, I did what most people would want to do in an uncomfortable social situation: run away...
...experiment, published in Human Communication Research last year, researchers assessed how an avatar's attractiveness affected human behavior, both online and off. Thirty-two volunteers were randomly assigned an attractive or unattractive avatar (attractiveness was rated by undergrads in a survey beforehand) and instructed to look at them in a virtual mirror for 90 seconds. Then they were asked to interact with other avatars, controlled by the experimenters, in a classroom-like setting. Overall, subjects using good-looking avatars tended to display more confidence, friendliness and extroversion, just as in the real world: they approached avatar strangers within three feet...
...Republicans the dominant party of the past 40 years. The left believed it was all right for people like Wright to condemn white America but it was "blaming the victim" to criticize the antisocial behavior-the crime and family disintegration-going on in the black community. When Obama-the avatar of a new generation of progressives-stepped away from Wright, he stepped away from 40 years of liberal self-laceration...
...born to play Moses, Ben-Hur, El Cid, Michelangelo. At the very moment Marlon Brando was freeing film-acting from good manners, Heston proved there was thrilling life in the endangered tradition of speaking well and looking great. And when he wasn't the movies' avatar of antique glory, he was our emissary to the future: the last man on earth in two dystopian science-fiction films, Planet of the Apes and The Omega Man. Heston was the alpha and omega of movie manhood--our civilized ancestor, our elevated destiny...