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September 11, 2006
Avatars are human, too, a Stanford study of Second Life finds: "Male avatars (whether created by a man or a woman) stood further apart than female avatars, for instance, and were more likely to avert their gaze. And when an avatar gets within a few metres of another, the user reduces eye contact by moving their character to face slightly to the right or the left of the other 'person' ... Social interactions in the online virtual environments such as Second Life are governed by the same social norms as social interactions in the physical world."
Optimize magazine provides a practical guide to buying software as a service.
Tom Zeller Jr. writes on the ethics of sock-puppetry, pointing out that even Walt Whitman made use of an anonymous avatar to promote his own work.
Posted by nick at September 11, 2006 08:44 AM