Avatars? Possible Project?

Have you seen the movie Surrogate? 

If not, check this site out, gives you a summary of what it is about: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0986263/

Will our world eventually become like this? 

 Recently I read an article called, Avatars, Identity, and Walkies. The writer first explains what an avatar is and how it developed. When the internet first came out, we could pretend to be who we wanted to be and eventually that developed into the games that we have out. Examples of such are second life and RPG games. We pretend to be people when in reality we do not act like those creations at all.

http://www.sciencetext.com/avatars-identity-and-walkies.html

The writer said something interesting in the text that I felt that it was profound to share.

Those of you that participate in avatar-based markets, do you feel that this is true?

I feel that as we get more involved with the internet, the more that we are losing a part of ourselves. There is good in having a balance between reality and the digital realm. In my previous blogs, I wrote about the concept of Simulacrum. If we can't seem to decipher reality and creation, then what is the purpose of continuing in a false reality?

Media isn't all bad. There are pros and cons to the media and how people choose to act on it. For example there was a study done on avatars. I think this would be a pretty cool project to do. The title of this article is called: You and your ugly avatar.

http://www.sciencetext.com/you-and-your-ugly-avatar.html

This deals with creating two types of avatars. One attractive and the other not attractive, in other words, ugly. As a group of people created these, they analyzed how many people interacted with the two avatars. The research group found that the more attractive avatars were popular versus the less attractive. In a sociological perspective we can learn from this research about how different people are on the internet versus how they are in reality. We know in reality that attractive people usually are popular, and from this article we learn that it is the same in a virtual setting.

In order for us to understand the pros and cons of the world of finding your identity through avatars I think that we do something along these lines of creating two types of avatars and see which of the two are more popular. Instead of creating less attractive and attractive, we can do something more extreme and see how popular of the two are. Both would have similar personalities, but one would be an animal and the other would be human. But this idea is still up in the air.