Avatars and Self Esteem

Over at Technology on a Shoestring, he recently blogged about an NPR podcast about Stanford's Virtual Human Interaction Lab. To save you the time of listening to the entire podcast, I'll quote the part that I think is relevant:

"One of the more interesting findings they observed was that when a person picks a better looking avatar from a set of possible avatars, the student will take on some of the attributes of the avatar. For example, subjects were asked to fill out an online dating form in which they picked people they thought they could reasonably date. The subjects who had selected a good looking avatar filled out an online dating form where they projected better possible matches. I should mention that the dating service form was filled out an hour later and that the avatar was not used or associated with the dating system."

Though these students are a lot older than the ones whose "self identity" is in the beginning stages of development, a la Erikson, it still indicates a positive influence from using an online avatar. As many reservations as I have expressed about this phenomenon, the evidence for it seems to be gently edging towards significant.

More on Identity

Sherry Turkle (MIT) wrote an article entitled "How Computers Change the Way We Think" in the Jan 2004 Chronicle of Higher Education. I thought this snippet was particularly interesting and conflicts with the somewhat relieving information I posted about last....

"Avatars or a self? Chat rooms, role-playing games, and other technological venues offer us many different contexts for presenting ourselves online. Those possibilities are particularly important for adolescents because they offer what Erik Erikson described as a moratorium, a time out or safe space for the personal experimentation that is so crucial for adolescent development. Our dangerous world -- with crime, terrorism, drugs, and AIDS -- offers little in the way of safe spaces. Online worlds can provide valuable spaces for identity play.
But some people who gain fluency in expressing multiple aspects of self may find it harder to develop authentic selves. Some children who write narratives for their screen avatars may grow up with too little experience of how to share their real feelings with other people. For those who are lonely yet afraid of intimacy, information technology has made it possible to have the illusion of companionship without the demands of friendship."

Hmm....the research continues.
Image Credit: http://web.mit.edu/sturkle/www/

Social Networking, Avatars and Child Development

A few more peices fell into place today. I finally had some time to sit down and begin the awesome task of finding the budding research about child development, specifically identity issues, and online avatars/social networking. It's time-consuming work because there is no definitive text. Marshall McLuhan started thinking about these issues in the 1970s, and of course Piaget and Erikson both performed copious research on identity in general. However, I have not come across anything substantial. Today, I learned about Dr. Marina Bers from an article in the Boston Globe. She has created a social networking space for children suffering from serious medical conditions. That's not really what's interesting, though. She's interesting because she has done research on identity and computer technology. I emailed her. I've got my fingers crossed. I also read a blog post by Larry Johnson about Avatars and identity. One of the folks who posted a response was a technology teacher in Florida. She's supposedly conducting research AS WE SPEAK on the very issue. I emailed her too.

Maybe they can help me figure out if I need to be more than lightly concerned about the students at my school having two (sometimes three or four) such disparate identities. Maybe they just learn to juggle identities like they juggle tasks. Maybe their brain really is able to separate out what is real and what is online. Maybe.