Workshop Response to Menu-Driven Identities

The gender dichotomy continues into cyberspace, even the Second Life gameworld requires users select ‘male’ or ‘female’. Every single one of the four sites required users define their gender.

No site offered categories to define race or ethic heritage. The absence of these categories suggests the sites assume the user is Caucasian. Despite the categorical information being used to tailor ads and surveys to the user ethic origin does not feature. It makes me wonder if users of hotmail or Yahoo! on a global scale also automatically receive ads which feature the ethically dominate population for that country.

The ‘identity’ offered on Lavalife did accommodate ethnicity. It was surprising Lavalife offered this option considering that users can post photos of themselves which clearly indicate ethic origin. Can registered users of the site search for potential soul mates via ethnicity? Identity on Lavalife is defined by age, location, height, body type, and ethnicity if listed. For the majority of searches I did, ethnicity was listed as ‘white’ or ‘asian’ although most ‘white’ (according to the corresponding profile picture) users did not list their ethnicity. The one ‘asian’ user I came across took the trouble to list ‘asian’ under ethnicity.

It suggests that the majority of users are ‘white’ and therefore do not bother listing their ethnic background. Furthermore the broad ‘white’ category glosses over several potential ethic origins, the site implies that ‘white’ equates to Australian. In reality ‘white’ could mean anything from Scottish to South African heritage.