Final Presentation description

My group did a two part performance that happened in and out of class. We all took on anonymous virtual personas and created a chat group about sex robots. Then we posted the resulting chat on this forum and asked the class to read it. In class we had everyone try to figure out which group member was each virtual character. The idea was that we could all be a totally different person online and class members would not be able to distinguish each of us. There were two flaws to this idea though. When given the option of who was behind the screen name, class members automatically looked to personal traits they saw in each of us to make the choice. They were generally wrong, which was the idea, but i think it would have been more interesting if they had to guess just by looking at pictures of random people and finding out later that we were actually the characters. The other flaw was that a few of us took on the persona of a teenage boy. This led the chat to get a bit off topic and kind of raunchy. I saw that a few class members were put off by the transcript of the discussion, which may have led them to not finish the whole thing and make quick decisions to get it over with.  Overall I think the performance worked out and I had fun doing it. It was pretty goofy, but it definitely displayed the ideas of gender, technology, information and science. We talked about sex robots in the chat hoping that this idea would start discussion about the intraction of gender, technology, and science. We were anonymous to display how witholding certain information could sway a decision. Lastly we all took on different personas to show the fluidity of the virtual world because you could even take on a different gender for a short period of time.