Nakamura 1.0

Point of interest from the text:
1. immediacy of communication and the struggle between text and visuals;
2. IM as supplementary (not replacement) for the body, in terms of race and identity

1. "AIM buddies are tools of person-to-person communication in a way that other avatar, such as gaming avatars from nonnetworked games, are not" (43). I have to take issue with her on this point. First, if a game isn't networked, of course it wouldn't be good for communication. The only people you'd be connected to would be the same room with you playing the same game. Second, I am unconvinced of AIM's superiority in the context of communication. If prefaced by the notion of multitasking and communication while completing some other task as so many of us have used IM for, then yes. In an endnote to the above quote, she bases her point on the fact that networked and online games like the Xbox system and WoW are more focused on completing a mission or a quest than conversing, and MMORPGs charge a fee which can discourage usage. Although Second Life allows for a limited access, free membership, she doesn't feel this compares with IM's accessibility. I feel that a distinction needs to be made, perhaps "committed communication" (Second Life) and "multitaked communication" (IM), based on the level of attention the user needs to give the interface. I've done some research on Second Life, and while people use it for a variety of activities, a major one is connecting with other people. The author of one book, I, Avatar, talked about all the time he spent sipping wine, enjoying the sunset and chatting with friends. While this still seems a little odd to me, it's representative of a much deeper form of communication (visual, spatial) as opposed to IM (textual). So maybe what's more at stake here is the issue of time. Because while both IM and Second Life span distance, which is the hallmark of communication these days, Second Life require constant, real-time attention akin to actual conversation. IM is more forgiving. I'm curious about how time and distance, in addition to textual and visual, factor into notions of communication?

2. What, then, about the notion of supplementing vs. replacing the body? From page 49, Nakamura bases the supplementary imaging of IM on the fact that individual already know the race, gender, nationality of their friends and these visual elements add to that knowledge. Whereas in Second Life again, the user is replaced by a "physical" avatar representation of themselves. Often, users feel these avatars embody another part of themselves and sometimes "have a mind of their own" in that people act differently in virtual world than in the the real world. If you "replace" your body with an identical avatar, do you eliminate your race/ethnicity/nationality? She says that supplementing race/gender/etc accentuates what other already know about you. Her big question is based on the fact that the internet is becoming increasingly visual and that therefore we need to be more diligent about diversity of how we represent ourselves. Given how badly I and everyone else did on alllooksame looking at pictures of people and guessing their ethnicity, I wonder how we would do if we guessed at people's buddy icons, or even their Second Life avatars.