When assigned in class that we needed to join a virtual world, and on top of that create a blog, I thought, oh great, I have never had any desire to do either of theses activities in my life. At first I was still pretty skeptical when opening my blog and Barbie girl account, but after getting the hang of it, my perspective started to change.
Barbie girl world was nothing I ever experienced before and at first I was pretty uncertain of what to do in a virtual world. After exploring it I was able to see different activities and started to see the appeal it would provide for young girls. There were a lot of games to play, with little educational value, and the over all atmosphere of a girly world, where girls can be girls. This was my over all first impression and had I not had to dig deeper for my blog posts I probably would not have given it much more thought. Looking at identity, gender, race and sexuality I was able to see how these thoughts and attitudes were seen through my interactions.
After truly analyzing theses topics, I was very surprised at the results I found. My over all conclusion is that Barbie girls is not the most appropriate place for girls to interact in. The ideas and values this virtual world are representing are not positive for young girls to be seeing. The complete one sided identity, where all the characters look the same, along with very limited race identifications to choose from and the overly sexed avatars are not good values to be teaching our youth.
When assessing other people's experience in their virtual worlds, which were quite different from mine, I feel my experience was very sheltered and limited in comparison. Since my virtual world was geared mostly for younger girls, while the others were mostly for anyone from teenagers to adults. It seemed that my classmates were able to have a lot more interaction with other avatars than I was able to. This also allowed them to further develop their experience and get more out of the identity and sexuality themes that everyone addressed. Though conversation they could learn about the other people's involvement in the virtual world and and make judgments about their identities. Many people also talked about how sexuality was a major element seen in their world, with some people's intentions being very perverted. This was not as prevalent in my Barbie world, since the only gender available to pick was being a female.
Even though my experience was limited as a Barbie girl, I was still able to get a lot out of the assignment. I was able to identify many aspects I typically would have over looked or probably never considered. I think this was a very interesting and interactive assignment to address topics that are valuable to consider.
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