Can Avatars Face ‘Digital Discrimination’?
“Digital People” now see avatar rights as a philosophical issue, making a stand against the constraints of ethnicity, gender, and other unchangeable accidents of birth. “I must have lost almost half of my potential contracts because the companies wouldn’t deal with an anonymous avatar,” says an architect operating out of Second Life. “I offered the companies a real world proxy who could sign all the papers, but it didn’t seem to help,” complains the architect.
The controversy may raise the ultimate question about accepting the concept of “transhumanism,” so this article ended up featured in the World Transhumanist Association’s magazine H+. The article even points out that some Digital People are objecting to using physical-world standards for measuring their online reputation like earned degrees and past corporate employers.
Do self-designed avatars simply reflect our self image better? Or is it all a grand an elaborate lie? The article also notes Second Life’s ban on child avatars already imposes a limit on the virtual world through a fear of misuse by child predators, but “Small-breasted short women who want their avatar to look like their real body have been subjected to insults and discrimination based on this fear.”
But is it really possible for an avatar to face digital discrimination?
