Voice chat insecurity
I have a love-hate (mostly hate) relationship with my voice. In my early RL adulthood I did do some voiceover work—if I concentrate very, very hard, as if I were singing, I can make my voice smooth out and become something else—but in actual, day-to-day life, I really hate my own voice’s rasp, going so far as to avoid even talking on the phone.
In spite of that, though, I took my avatar to a voice chat -enabled island and, infrequently, put on the mic to say something. But I was eventually asked to withdraw from the conversation. “Your voice is really irritating,” one person said. “That girl Zoey ran off because she couldn’t stand it.”
I generally feel like a Second Life outsider, but I’ve read enough to hear, repeatedly, that Second Life is powered almost entirely by “drama.” I’m starting to understand. There’s a lot of anonymous cruelty, but there’s also a lot of room for misinterpretation—“Why didn’t he accept my friend request, after all that conversation?” et cetera.
I guess this one particular experience was upsetting for me because, where people in SL generally might say “You’re fat” or “You have a huge ass,” they’re really only criticizing the avatar: if those criticisms bugged me, I’d change shapes and invest in cuter hair. But my voice comes with. It follows me in life; it isn’t a put-on. I can’t change it. In everyday life, I can’t not use my own speaking voice (unless I pretend to be mute, which might frankly work out great for me). Rather than letting the altercation escalate—it’s the sort of thing I’d ordinarily bait—I simply frowned and walked off. I think I might be meeker in Second Life than in Actual.
I wonder how much SL “drama” has to do with the unintended overlap between the “personal” (or “genuine”; “concealed”) and the “public” (or “artificial”; “displayed”). For instance: in December I initiated a confrontation with a user, and he proceeded to flip the fuck out. At the time, I’d thought the whole thing was laughable: his typing looked like an acute panic attack. He expressed that his earlier aggression was “in keeping with [his] RP character,” but my confronting him in IM about it was “personal, and bannable.” The reality was, he felt invulnerable until I crossed some weird, ephemeral personal boundary; in the meantime, I was calling him out because I felt he had already escalated his attacks into the personal and private.
3 years ago