Hi, my name is Margie Morris.
I'm going to be talking about a study that I conducted with Daniella
Rosner, Paula Nurius, Hadar Dolev,
and others at the University of Washington, Seattle. Our paper is called,
I Don't Wanna Hide Behind An Avatar:
Self Representation in Social VR among Women in Midlife.
This was a qualitative exploratory study where we recruited from
two social VR communities that I had spent some time in.
We conducted in-depth interviews with 10 women,
following an online exercise in which participants shared images of the avatars
that they used in different social VR apps,
and described what they tried to convey in those avatars and what they didn't
want to convey.
We analyzed results following the process of
reflexive thematic analysis by Braun and Clark.
This project extends work in many different
areas, particularly avatars and diverse representation. For example,
work by Baker on older adults,
Zhang on avatar preferences among individuals with
disabilities, and Freeman and others
on self-representation among young adults,
particularly those considering gender transition.
We also build on work related to embellishment and veracity in digital
self-representation. Some core work was done there by Nicole Ellison.
I'll describe our findings in terms of how women wanted to
express age on their own terms.
I'll walk through four thematic threads. The first
was presumed youth,
the backdrop in most of the social VR
applications that our participants spent time in.
This was a culture of youth,
particularly in some applications such as VR Chat,
where there weren't clear options for indicating
age.
Age-related cues, for example,
voice or other information that one shared )photos or
stories about one's life) elicited negative reactions. One woman, described how,
while walking around VR chat and
talking, was
harassed by someone who came up out of the blue and said, "''oh,
you sound like such an old', with such disdain in his voice."
Because of this culture and
the fear of being ostracized,
many went along with the idea that they were
young particularly because they had heard warnings about old
people -- some of whom were,
some of whom were younger than themselves.
Others though wanted to assert age for a variety of reasons,
either to push for more social representation
or to convey
seniority and experience,
as is the case here through gray
hair.
And in some cases,
the assertion of age was motivated by concern about how others
would think that they saw themselves.
We describe this as layered impression management.
As the woman here says,
"people might think I'm trying to appear younger than I really am."
The second theme is the Struggle to Represent the Physical
Self which we talk about in terms of Grappling with Gray,
Refusing Hypersexualized Bodies, and Wavering Perceptions of Self.
Grappling with Gray is really about the lack of nuance in the available tools.
Many people, including this woman, 47 years old,
who has and loves her gray
hair
but
points
out that whereas in real life her air is salt and pepper,
the choices are more dichotomous in social VR -- gray or black.
And the same kind of duality played out in terms of representing skin and other
aspects of the body as either young or old
rather than gradations.
There was an objection to the expression of
sexuality.
Clothing options that integrated body parts tended to represent the body in a
hypersexualized way.
In some cases these felt really like caricatures
of the female body, and in other cases,
they (the coupling of clothing and body parts),
prevented people from wearing men's clothing and still representing as
women.
The representation of age was complicated by
wavering perceptions of self:
as people looked at images of themselves,
they described going back and forth between
seeing age and kind of denying it,
being surprised by their own image and kind of reckoning with it.
This woman says, "yoYu know,
I'm surprised when I see myself in a reflection... Oh,
it's me. I still see an old woman ... But your face starts to,
it's a different face when you see yourself smiling and your wrinkly face.
I don't feel this joy that I can hide in VR.
I feel like I want society to have this." So she wants to reckon with her
changing image, and she wants society to as well.
The last theme is about Presenting a Best Self Authentically.
So this is about getting beyond the physical self to present other aspects of
oneself: personality,
sense of humor, aesthetic
sensibility...That
meant that there could be a disparity between how one looks offline
and how one looks in an avatar without creating a conflict. As
one woman says, here, "it looks like me, but it's an enhanced version ...
my best self...
it represents my personality." Another woman says "iIt's not exact by any
stretch of the imagination,
but it feels like a skin I can feel comfortable in."
Sometimes this
was a desire to integrate elements of a background.
This was something that people did in playful ways,
in social media and in other
representations of themselves. And one woman describes it as an "echo"
that when other people have something in their background,
she can better understand who they are --clues to the things they're
interested in or,
or clues to their identity.
So the takeaways from this or the implications for design have,
you know, clearly to do with nuance,
providing more options for gradation and subtlety,
and that can be done in part by disambiguating clothing and bodies
having more diverse body types and resisting caricature when it comes to
presenting age and sexuality,
age and gender. And secondly, digital portraiture, a looser concept,
is about depicting the self psychologically,
culturally,
and
aesthetically.
It is about allowing people to represent themselves rather than
be depicted. It may involve integration with the environment.
And somehow have images (digital self-representations) that people can reckon or
negotiate with over time. I wanna thank the participants
who were involved in this study and close colleagues who
provided guidance and ideas and various levels of
support. Sunny Salvo, Renee Shelby,
and Cynthia Bennett all played crucial roles from Google.
We conducted expert interviews to guide the study with Nicole Ellison,
Karen Alexander, and Jessica Outlaw. Prior to the study,
I led a Directed Research Group at the University of Washington with a great
deal of help and support from John Akers who directs the UW Reality Lab.
Kaitlyn Green was a leading student in that Directed Research Group
and, who helped pilot methods and did other work that ended up shaping this
study. And finally wanted to thank Jennifer Mankoff,
who directs the Make4all lab at the University of Washington.
Thank you very much.