A Virtual Second Self & Digital Courtesy

In this article Can You Hear Me Now, the author mentioned that many people have the opportunity to experience a virtual second self due to computers since later 1990s; people can do whatever they want to do in their virtual world. This statement made me think of the comments brought up in last week's discussion. Some female classmates talked about having two avatars that are in different genders while playing the game. They said that they can act completely different when being a male avatar like being a jerk or mean to others online. This is a very interesting psychological change in a person's state of mind when doing something like this in online game. I used to play online games but never had an experience like that. I always picked a female avatar, but my behavior of creating and presenting my female avatar in the real world maybe a little be similar to my classmates'. That is, I usually would dress her up in a completely different way which I would not wear things like that in my real life like fancy gown, really high-heels, mini-skirt, heavy make-up,etc. And my female avatar would act completely like a lady who comes from a high-class family which does not resemble me or my background in my real life. So I guess this is what the author of the article has been talking about--a virtual second self. Since I won't be able to experience those things in my real life, I just wanna to see how it goes or feels like in my virtual second life. Hmm~ it also makes me wonder how I would act when I present myself as a male avatar. Maybe next time when I play an online game, I'll give it a try to see how it goes!


Another interesting point that drew my attention in this article is that it talked about how people "try to" show some "digital courtesy" such as occasionally stopped using the laptop or giving the speaker some attention during a conference. Indeed, this kind of stuff happens a lot in today's world, especially after the emergence of iPad and laptop, and not to mention "smartphone". This comment quickly reminded me of two experiences I had in the past few months. I took one course in TC which the instructor of that course was super nice and flexible; the structure of the course was basically lecture-based. So after a few weeks, I saw some of the classmates starting to use their laptop to do other things like doing online shopping, using online communicative tool to chat with their friends, doing an assignment for another course, etc. Another incident that I had happened in this summer. I helped out as a teaching assistant at an international summer college for students from overseas to take courses. My friend also helped out as a TA for a math course. One day she showed me this picture. You have to take a closer look to understand what happened at that moment.

Yes, this did happen in class. The student was watching a cartoon Crayon Shin-Chan by using his laptop. This seemed to be very ridiculous to me because they spent around 400 USD on for the credits, but this student should choose to be like this in class. It also seemed to be disrespectful to the professor who was teaching the class then. Because of things like this happen in class, no wonder many teachers would ban students from using cellphones or laptops in class in order to make sure that students are really learning at that moment or prevent students from being distracted or lured by the laptops to do something irrelevant to the course. And this kind of phenomena (use the technological tools in a wrong way in class) is universal. I believe that schools around the world all have this kind of problem and try to find solutions to deal with it. This brings me the questions of how do we regulate students' use of the technological tools like laptop for the right purpose, and how do we strike a balance between regulation and the freedom of using them?