http://meganhaditcoming.blogspot.com/2007/12/im-lori-drew.html

(Provided that it’s really her, but it’s certainly self-justifying enough to satisfy my spectator’s position.)

” A Missouri prosecutor said Monday no charges would be sought in the case of a teen who hanged herself last year after chatting on MySpace, although he said adults should have prevented the tragedy.”

More on point, though, I would like to challenge your second to last paragraph, regarding the difference in personal connections we feel to our MySpace pages versus our avatars in virtual worlds. I’m not entirely convinced by your statement that, “I just flew to the top of a cool building” is entirely demonstrative of the fact that we are more personally affected by actions taken against our avatars versus those messaged to us via our personal profiles in social networking sites.

MySpace pages represent what would be a modern, digitized version of a phone-book. They contain information about our lives that is (mostly) factual, including personal photographs, likes and dislikes, et al. Correspondence received through social networking sites is typically forwarded directly to our personal email addresses, or at least checked as often. Given those facts, I find it difficult to differentiate any statements made against me through a social networking site from anything that would be said against me via email, over the phone, or in person. It is _me_ that they are attacking, not an avatar.

In Second Life and other virtual worlds, we are less personal. Linden Labs advocates that SL is, indeed, our ‘Second Life’, and many users are reticent to share details of their actual life with users that they meet. In fact, it tends to be only those who are doing business or pursuing other more real-life-related endeavors (e.g., the law) within Second Life who are willing to release their real information. Everybody else (a relative super-majority of the users) are not being completely honest about themselves. ‘First Life’ tabs in profiles are often left empty. As such, they are detached from their character in a way that is perhaps best captured in the third-person way that we view our ‘avatar’ walking around the world. In that sense, saying ‘I just flew to that building’ is simply an in-character (see, e.g., roleplaying) way of maintaining the suspension of disbelief required in most virtual worlds. Even in worlds like Second Life where ‘roleplaying’ is not explicitly required or present (c.f., e.g., World of Warcraft, Ultima Online), there is still an element of it in every-virtual-day activities.

That being said, I believe that there is a disconnect between avatars in virtual worlds and the puppeteer pulling the strings. Since the avatar does not always map 1:1 with the person at the keyboard, I think that there may be less internalization than a direct attack on the person him/herself.

I’m certainly not arguing that there are no emotional connections: certainly, many SL users maintain relationships within the game, and thus open themselves up to emotional involvement. And certainly, the possibility of IIED claims within such worlds has merit and ought to be explored. But, I feel that the claim that somebody is more likely to be hurt by their avatar receiving a few personal blows than their ‘MySpace’ profile attracting it is inaccurately blurring the explicit personal connection between a person and their online personal profile.