[Air-L] avatar research ethics

[David Toews]

hello r and sj, and everyone,

i think the puppet/avatar analogy may very well serve the urgent  
purpose of applied ethical analysis from the pragmatic point of view  
of dealing with IRBs today, and i may well use it myself :) at some  
point.  however, there is another consideration for the long term  
which I think will eventually undermine the analogy.  consider this:

puppets are controlled by puppeteer(s), and can be considered within  
the world of the direct representations of the puppeteer:  with this  
expressionistic model of the pup/pup'teer relationship the ethical  
considerations would be similar to anyone studying RL social  
interactions in a dramaturgical theoretical framework

however, puppets don't interact with other puppets

avatars do interact with other avatars, and because of this process  
and 'extra' layer of social meaning, the human operater of the avatar  
ceases to be analogous to a puppeteer.  the puppeteer has to deal with  
the ethical demands of her audience and other puppeteers.  the avatar  
operator has to deal with the ethical demands of those same  
constituents (except in this case not a RL-public audience but only  
other avatar operators in SL since human beings in RL don't interact  
in SL except via the medium of avatars).  But ALSO the avatar operator  
has to deal with the ethical demands of avatars that he or she is not  
controlling (ie. controlled by a different avatar operator).

here there could be two divergent directions in which one could  
interpret the consequences of this added ethical dimension:  a)  
interpret avatar-to-avatar interaction as human-operator-to-human- 
operator interaction, but since the consequences of these interactions  
have no ethically-portentous bearing on the human operators in their  
RL-public-domain context (ie. insofar as what happens in SL stays in  
SL - i know this is not always the case but it very often is a norm  
for SL users), which would lead us to b) interpret avatar-to-avatar  
interaction as a process that constructs a sui generis kind of  
subjectivity that can potentially involve harm from one avatar to  
another avatar; the problem with this approach (b) is that IRBs truly  
are not ready for it, I would presume, but I think we need to educate  
the public and eventually IRBs about this emergent reality

David Toews, PhD
Assistant Professor
Department of Sociology and Anthropology
University of Windsor, Ontario