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Internet Michés
Sunday, April 27th, 2008 07:31 pmReading through the latest essays in my "virtual worlds" course, I expected to find, despite my repeated warnings, the usual crop of Internet michés. "Michés?" I hear you ask. A miché is a conceptual blend of "myth" and "cliché": something that is untrue but is unthinkingly accepted because it is so quotable. It's a kind of condensed urban legend. "Anyone can access any information they need through the Internet," is a favourite miché among my students because it is something they can put in the introduction to almost any essay on the Internet without thinking about it; of course if they did think about it for even a second, they would recognise it as a blatant falsehood. Even though the amount of information stored on-line is now so great that if it were written down on parchment by medieval monks it would take them a million years just to do the illuminations for e-bay, there is still some information that you cannot access through the Internet. For example, once in a while a particularly innovative but not particularly ethical student hits on the idea of plagiarising from a book that is not available on-line. And then I assume that there are some details about my personal life which are unknown even to Google (at least I hope so, given that my wife has finally started using that Macbook we bought last year). But even if we ignore this little hyperbole, where does the "anyone" come from? I've reminded the class several times that most people do not have Internet access, and they have even read a chapter of Snowcrash containing the following pithy description of the state of technology in the near future: "In the real world—planet Earth, Reality—there are somewhere between six and ten billion people. At any given time, most of them are making mud bricks or field-stripping their AK47s. Perhaps a billion of them have enough money to own a computer." Even so, when it comes to writing an essay, students have an uncanny ability to forget everything they have learnt in class and fall back on a kind of mental template for essay-writing.
Another miché is "Paedophiles use the Internet for grooming their victims by pretending to be teenagers." If I set an essay about the advantages and disadvantages of any online service, this will come up. All legends, they say, have a grain of truth, and this is no exception: there certainly have been cases where something like this has happened. But not only is it hardly typical of adult-teen online relationships (adults also talk to teenagers about things like World of Warcraft, Xena or Perl hacking), it is probably not even typical of those involving sexual predation; apparently the majority of adults wanting to find teenagers for sex present themselves as adults because teenagers—or at least the kind of teenagers they are looking for—are more flattered by the attention of adults than by the advances of their fellow teens. Then of course there is a blatant contradiction in the sentence itself. A paedophile is an adult who is sexually attracted to prepubescent children, so he would be wasting his time chatting to teenagers.
On the other hand, some of the essays I received actually managed to challenge some assumptions about online behaviour. For example, I had assumed, along with the rest of the class, that people generally constructed avatars that were much better-looking than their real-life selves: "Awesome You", as David Wong puts it. In some online environments, like World of Warcraft or Guild Wars, it's pretty hard not to do this, since all the characters are so damned good-looking: you can't role-play an ugly elf, and even the half-orcs have a certain panache. But where users have a bit more freedom, it looks like they don't beautify themselves as much you'd expect, or at least they don't think that they do. In a poll conducted by Zogby International for Second life, people were asked if and how they would alter their avatar's appearance to make it different from themselves. Only 15% said they would want to create a radically different avatar; 18% said that they would enhance their masculine or feminine characteristics, while 44% said they would want their avatar to look pretty much like them (the rest were not sure). On the other hand, if that's true, how come there are so few podgy avatars in Second Life, and why is everyone so tall and youthful? Perhaps the mid-points of the sliders are misplaced.
Another miché is "Paedophiles use the Internet for grooming their victims by pretending to be teenagers." If I set an essay about the advantages and disadvantages of any online service, this will come up. All legends, they say, have a grain of truth, and this is no exception: there certainly have been cases where something like this has happened. But not only is it hardly typical of adult-teen online relationships (adults also talk to teenagers about things like World of Warcraft, Xena or Perl hacking), it is probably not even typical of those involving sexual predation; apparently the majority of adults wanting to find teenagers for sex present themselves as adults because teenagers—or at least the kind of teenagers they are looking for—are more flattered by the attention of adults than by the advances of their fellow teens. Then of course there is a blatant contradiction in the sentence itself. A paedophile is an adult who is sexually attracted to prepubescent children, so he would be wasting his time chatting to teenagers.
On the other hand, some of the essays I received actually managed to challenge some assumptions about online behaviour. For example, I had assumed, along with the rest of the class, that people generally constructed avatars that were much better-looking than their real-life selves: "Awesome You", as David Wong puts it. In some online environments, like World of Warcraft or Guild Wars, it's pretty hard not to do this, since all the characters are so damned good-looking: you can't role-play an ugly elf, and even the half-orcs have a certain panache. But where users have a bit more freedom, it looks like they don't beautify themselves as much you'd expect, or at least they don't think that they do. In a poll conducted by Zogby International for Second life, people were asked if and how they would alter their avatar's appearance to make it different from themselves. Only 15% said they would want to create a radically different avatar; 18% said that they would enhance their masculine or feminine characteristics, while 44% said they would want their avatar to look pretty much like them (the rest were not sure). On the other hand, if that's true, how come there are so few podgy avatars in Second Life, and why is everyone so tall and youthful? Perhaps the mid-points of the sliders are misplaced.
