Since it’s beginning, the Internet has tended to be viewed in a very utopian manner. For many people, the Internet is a place where they can go to avoid any stereotyping based on race or sex. When creating a character in the first online MUD’s, people were offered limitless possibilities because there character would be portrayed as whatever screen name they picked and by whatever they wrote in their “about me” section. The advent of an ever-increasing number of ways to communicate and interact on the Internet has brought up the interesting question of whether people still have to ability to hide certain aspects of their physical selves when plugging into cyberspace. The ability of people to create a digital avatar that has no resemblance to their physical self also brings up the question of the feasibility of “identity tourism” i.e. people creating an avatar of some other sex or race so that they can experience some of the aspects of that lifestyle.

Personally I believe that it almost impossible to exclude distinctions such as sex and race from the online world. The utopian dream of everyone being a sexless and raceless “voice” is no achievable. Too much of the outside world follows us into cyberspace when we use the Internet. Even if they are not true, certain attributes of digital avatars will always carry some kind of sex or race connotation. For example, something as simple as a screen name can have the ability to hold a large connotation about its user. Regardless of the how politically correct it may be, different words are often associated with different sexes. Someone with a screen name involving football or golf would probably usually be inferred to be a male while screen names involving shopping or flowers will be assumed to be a woman. People continually will make these assumptions even though there is always the possibly of someone with a football screen name to be a woman who may be incredible at playing online Madden Football.

In the real world there are also many things that a commonly associated with a race that spur racial connotation when used on the Internet. It is very easy to mindlessly assume that anyone with a screen name involving hockey is probably white. There are also many cars or characters in different games that could easily infer a certain race. The problem with trying to avoid being labeled as a certain race or sex online is that there is a great deal of stereotypes from the real world that follow us into cyberspace.

Lisa Nakamura brings up the question of what happens when people purposely create avatars that have connotations of a different sex or race. In her essay “The Race In/For Cyberspace”, Nakamura sates “performing alternate versions of self and race jams the ideological machine and facilitates the opening up of the difficult future terrain of community in cyberspace” (234). As more and more people join the online community it is going to become increasingly harder to label people. With more people online there will be a greater chance that the person you are labeling could actually be impersonating a different sex or race. There could be two effects from an increase in “identity tourism”. One could be that since people can no longer trust their stereotypes online, they will slowly begin to ignore any connotations of race or sex online. The other possibility is that people will become more skeptical of online relationships and create more online windows into the real world.