Menu Driven Identity Workshop Response

After spending all day organising the Cameron Hall Charity Vigil, I suddenly realised that I hadn't posted my workshop response. So here it is, a few hours late. (If anyone's interested, so far we've raised over $2600 tonight and we still have til 8am tomorrow morning.)

1. Which categories are available for users to choose from when signing up for Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail or in order to use the Second Life gameworld? What presumptions do these categories make about users, and what does the absence of certain categories of identity say?

Hotmail requires country/state/name/DOB/gender(choice of male/female).
Yahoo also requires country/state/name/DOB/gender(choice of male/female), and you have the option of enterring your occupation/industry as well.
Second Life requires country/name/DOB/gender(choice of male/female). You also have a choice of avatar when you signup, catering to most racial profiles bar black people (there are darkskinned avatars, but they're not very dark).

These are fairly standard categories for signing up for online services. The 'gender' choice is restricted to the standard 'male/female' choices only, and all three services offered it in either a drop-down menu or radio buttons with no option to type in your own answer - a new user is forced to select one of those two options. There isn't a category for race, but I have yet to see any online service such as email or games require users to do such - being an online service, it's just not relevant. In addition, requiring users to select a race may paint the service provider as racist, whereas by not offering a choice in this category the service provider might be hoping to be seen as welcoming and non-discriminatory.

2. What sort of 'identities' are visible in the profiles on Lavalife? How are they displayed? What presumptions does this display make about both the people reading these profiles and those users who made them?

Profile details on Lavalife were only basic details - appearance (gender/age/height/body type/ethnic background), location, and very basic social things (religion, zodiac sign, smoking and drinking habits). Some of these details appear to be optional, as not all profiles contained all of them. The site itself seems very superficial in its profiles - the one-line comments the users make and the details the site asks for in profile creation are mostly about appearance and very basic social interactions. You could get a more specific idea of someone by walking into a bar. There are no options for interests or likes/dislikes, or anything more personal - the profiles we filled in to create our Blogger accounts were more detailed, with options for interests, music and movies!

I believe Lavalife, and the users of Lavalife, are therefore very visually oriented and looking for matches based on appearance first and interests second. (I could go on a bit of a rant here about relationships and such but I'll spare you in the interests of space :P Suffice to say that in my opinion the best and most lasting relationships are those that started out as friendships.)