Ubiquitous Learning and Instructional Technologies MOOC’s Updates

Social and Cultural Challenges of Self-Representation in Online Spaces

" ...if you're choosing an Avatar, you have a choice of skin color, but every one of the women in this lineup looks fairly European in feature, just not to say that there isn't vast diversity in everyone's facial features across races, but simply that there's a very narrow choice for Avatars in many sites, and within those choices are a pretty clear indication of white and European bias. " - Cris Mayo
 

Through very interesting videos, I saw issues related to Self-Representation in online spaces. As a person who lives in Europe in a country (Croatia) where we actually rarely have contact with non-Europeans, I never really thought that this was actually a problem for a large number of people. I really liked that she talked about this topic because they should definitely introduce some changes in the creation of Avatars so that people can be described as similar as possible in the virtual world. 

Creating an Avatar is not only about skin color, but also about appearance. When creating my own Avatar, I encountered difficulties related to the appearance of the body, since it shows very unrealistic images of the body. The point would be that they have options to make an Avatar as similar as possible to themselves, but unfortunately very often this is not possible. I see this as a big problem for young people and children who still don't have enough self-confidence to not spoil their self-image.