On Oct 25, 2010, at 1:43 AM, Sal Armoniac wrote: > Many who read the article think erroneously that it reflects his opinions. > He is making an index of what he sees society at large to consider proper > "personhood."
I hadn't seen it before, but had a sense of it: the notion of the dividing lines and of what is meant by "rights" is far from satisfactorily absolute. It's a many-to-many relationship -- for any one "right" there is a set of enumerable characteristics of a being that has those rights, and vice versa. So if the "right" we're talking about is "being locked in a closet until needed", a broom doesn't have that right, but a dog does. If the "right" is freedom of speech, a dog doesn't have that right but a mentally disabled person does. In the context of avatars, consider that a single 28-year-old male is generally strongly discouraged from hugging children he doesn't know, but if he is in the avatar of the Goofy character at Disney World, the same actions are encouraged. I can't quite get my head around it, but is it possible to create appreciable layers of avatars/personae? I don't think it's possible because it becomes too convoluted for a person to maintain. I feel like I can only emulate someone whose knowledge base is fictionally-expanded subset of my own (i.e. take something I know a little about and leverage that to appear I'm fully knowledgable in that topic). So I could adopt the persona of a NASA engineer reasonably convincingly, and perhaps a [real] NASA engineer could adopt the persona of an interpretive dancer, but if I were to try to be a NASA engineer who is acting as an interpretive dancer, the middle layer collapses and it's just me alternatively acting as either the engineer or the dancer, but not both layered. I do think it's possible to make simplistic layers: vague gender identities come to mind. In the vein of my Goofy analogy earlier as it relates to rights, consider a 15-year-old girl has a 37-year-old male persona online; he enters a chat room as a 15-year-old girl and tries to "pick up" other 15-year-olds. Is there anything unethical or illegal going on? ---Jason Olshefsky http://JayceLand.com/ http://JayceLand.com/blog/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "R-SPEC: The Rochester Speculative Literature Association" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/r-spec?hl=en.
