Menu-Driven Identity Workshop Response

In the three signing up pages for Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail and the Second Life, they also require the users to provide some basic personal information of name, gender, and birthday. In the gender category, the three websites also provide only the options of either male or female, which is marginalizing other gender like the transsexual people.

In both sign up pages of the Yahoo! Mail and the Second Life, they require the user to enter the ZIP code in order to fill all the require information. However, ZIP code is mainly used in U.S. areas. Besides, we could observe from the security questions that these three websites are also aiming to provide services to the West affluent people other than Asians or lower class. The questions, for instance about the users’ favorite movie or TV drama, favorite vacation spot, pet’s name, high school’s mascot, and the user’s first car or bike, are assuming the users are living in affluent families mostly in the West, instead of from the poor area in Asia.

Furthermore, when registering the Second Life name, they provide limited choices of last name which are specialized for people in West, but not for the people in other (Asian) countries. These three websites show the fact that their services are mainly targeted to the white affluent people (male or female) instead a wide variety of people with different gender, race and class.

In the Lavalife, an individual’s profile like the gender, age, zodiac sign, ethnic background and body type are included in the search results. As the same case of the three websites of Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail and Second Life, gender category is limited to the choices of either male or female that other options are absence. Also, the website promotes the “youngness” of the members that the age of the member is emphasized in the search page and the search result pages.

Moreover, The result of ethnic background of the members are either in “white” or “other” that “other” is not stated clearly in the page, in which the website seems targeted also to the white instead of other ethnic groups. The absence of a option or category of ethnic background of the reader in the initial search page also shows that they assume the readers are white too. Thus, we would understand that the Lavalife is racist in a way that they mainly promote their service to white male or female to search for white male or female for further relationships in the websites.