how i entered the room: old school internet lyming

the following are stream of consciousness thoughts as, i attempt to enter second life for the second life (i will document my previous encounter later, as it feed whatever insight follows). 

back in the day i use to spend a large portion of my free time online.  i would date online, meet most of my college male friends online, entertain myself online. i am not going to say that i spent my whole life online, that would be misleading, it was closer to me using online to access people who in my day to day, lived, and embodied experience i did not generally come in contact with, people who i more closely identified with then those i found in baltimore, or my small community.  i was not recreating myself, quite the contrary, it was a far more accurate performance of self then was allowed at home.  being online slowly became a way for me to express and embrace whatever quirky traqits occurred to me on that particular day, in that particular moment.  i like to believe that at the time when i got online (about 1994) this virtual universe lent itself to this.  on irc (internet relay chat) the most distinguishable traits about me were my screen name, and the a/s/l (age, sex, location) tag line that back then was a profile, that is until you spoke to me. back then to speak to someone online meant that you had to create yourself through words, through conversation, metaphors, and a dance of lyrics. of course we eventually all obtained scanned photographs, learned how to ftp them to our unix accounts, and attached them to e-mail sent in pine.  however, your initial introduction was the text.  it was not until 1997 that wbs emerged, which allowed you to be in a chat room and have a picture of yourself for immediate scrutiny.  slowly but surely this became your first introduction, what is this person suppose to look like in the "real world", and am i attracted to that.  eventually wbs became go.com, when go.com killed their internet chat rooms the people i hung out with migrated to either (or both) blackvoices.com or blackplanet.com.  of course there was always aol.com and  yahoo.com personals, but i never really took to either of those.  over time my social needs changed, my self awareness changed, my physical looks changed and my geographic location changed.  around 1999-2001 i realized i was not particularly interested in meeting people in these places.  it wasn't satisfying. eventually blackplanet gave way to sites like adam4adam.com and men4now.com.  these sites did away with any pretense, or rather they became the pretense (i firmly believe that men in these sites use sex as currency as they attempt to get to something that transcends the pyshcial, even as these spaces work to trap interaction in the realm of the physical).  perhaps the type of people i identified with also outgrew these sites, it became harder and harder to make friends or share conversation with people who listened to interesting music, thought interesting thoughts, used peculiar syntax, or whatever i decided would turn me on that day.  i eventually gave up. 

and here i am in 2007, participating in a course that, as part of the requirements, dictate that i spend more time online, socializing, then i have done in many years.  i will be the first to admit (as i have a thing for self confession) that i am not pleased with the prospect.   as i hear others speak about secondlife and how it has piqued their interest all i can do is wonder, "are they for real?"  i come to this filled with my experience of 6 active years online, where i feel in love a handful of times, made life long friendships, and experienced more than my fair share of disillusionment, as well as a desire to be more firmly embedded in a real world.  it has taken me two weeks of resistance to orient myself to this as school work and a research project, as opposed to a reactivation (or potential reactivation) of things i believed had been left behind me. 

that said, as i write this i am aware of a few (additional) things.

1. i have never consciously misrepresented myself in any of my past online encounters, and only been lied to about "who someone was" once (to my knowledge); however, second life is different in that my avatar becomes "me" in this "reality".  it has never occurred to me, until now, to be anyone aside from myself.  at present my avatar is a cool ass japaneses woman.  i do not know on what grounds i will construct reality.  on all the sites i mentioned before the object for most people was to try and uncover, meet, become intimate with the "real" person on the other end of the encounter.  those who engaged a "fictional" performance of self did so with the threat of recrimination and ostracism if they were discovered.
2. secondlife is familiar to me only in that i will be sitting in front of a computer, interacting with others who are somehow interfacing with a computer.  none of the social norms i became use to in the other "virtual realities" may be useful here (will my blackness matter, as a japanese avatar?  will my maleness matter, as a female avatar?  will my primary sexual attractions matter, at all?  my socio-economic background?  spirituality?, etc.)  i do not anticipate  evacuating myself, after all i will be performing an interpretation of a japanese woman (primarily based on my love for anime, and my 4th generation japanese-american male(!) roommate).  i raise this observation because i would like to make some effort to be aware and document what tropes i will be using as i create an identity for my avatar, and be mindful of how those in secondlife respond to these tropes. 
   
3. i am intensely interested in how does one's secondlife "life" relate to one's lived daily material reality?  similar to observation #2, what will be imported from this reality and find itself embedded in one's performance of their secondlife self (or other as the case may be), as well as what is exported from secondlife into one's material reality?  what are the consequences of this bi-directional interaction?  how is schisms negotiated?  how are priorities established?