The Wee Generation

This week I visited WeeWorld, an online make-your-own-avatar community that seems to be targeted at female tweens, much like the more explicitly educationally oriented Whyville. In fact, just today, The Independent included WeeWorld in its list of potentially subversive sites that "are getting girls as young as six hooked on social networking." As someone who considers herself a relatively responsible digital parent, I must say I'm tired of the rhetoric of the mainstream media that continues to use the language of addiction to characterize social networking sites. In the interest of full disclosure, I should also say that the CEO of WeeWorld is Celia Francis, pictured above, who at one time was my next-door neighbor in the Harvard dorms and is now a Facebook friend.

WeeWorld has two obvious advantages over Whyville: 1) It is designed for a fluid user experience in connecting to pre-existing social networking sites like MySpace or Facebook and 2) Your avatar appearance immediately presents a more polished, organic whole, which might also reflect a particularly popular contemporary Internet aesthetic that I would argue is also seen in the Nintendo Mii application for the Wii game system. Visitors to WeeWorld can play games as their avatars, such as their simplified version of Dance Dance Revolution as a non-exergame, Disco Fever.

WeeWorld certainly appeals to the same part of the Zeitgeist for modular makeovers with an aesthetic that is simultaneously cartoonish and faithfully representational. As someone who follows intellectual property issues, I was interested to learn about the company's copyright battle with Nintendo, which Francis explains from her company's perspective here.

(For those who missed it, the Mii craze swept blogs and YouTube videos a little while ago. Homages to fan culture were particularly popular, with armies of mini-Mii s assembled from copies of reality TV-type celebrities minted from shows like American Idol and Lost. There are several Mii-making tutorials now available online, like this Mii How-To Guide, just as there are tons of online videos with stages of Photoshop retouching, like "playboy evolution made by photoshop" or the "Photoshopped to kill" video from Argentina.)

Although I liked the fact that I could inhabit WeeWorld as a bearded lady dressed only in fig leaves, I still must admit that I found WeeWorld a little constraining, even if as Francis points out there are more potential avatar permutations available than there are people on the planet. Michele White has argued in The Body and the Screen that when more user-generated content is permitted in avatar creation, there are also more interesting conflicts possible over property, ownership, artistic license, and the social contract itself. Even if WeeWorld attempts to respond to current events with items like their possibly crass virtual Virginia Tech t-shirt, it's not really participatory culture at the level of digital design. Of course, some people prefer having a more limited number of choices in creating their virtual character and more instructions for facilitating social networking. Nonetheless, I thought that there were more kinds of emergent behavior possible in Whyville than there were in WeeWorld, as the strange commerce in avatar face parts in Whyville shows.


Despite some androgynous models, there were certainly forms of gender regulation in play. After an odd experience with the "belly" feature, which only allows for skeletal and beer belly extremes, I was reminded of the observations of One Jewish Dyke about her issues with "plus-sized" Yahoo avatars. It felt like the ideology of marketers was still shaping the online discourse.

In contrast, Whyville feels much more like a true virtual world in which strangers might either go by on the street or offer themselves for orientation services. Even if WeeWorld supports chat features in Skype and IM, it still lacks what Alison McMahan calls "perceptual realism" and "social realism." For me, the in-your-face existence of strangers is an important and under-written-about component of virtual worlds that gets at how people regulate behavior when they must interact with people who aren't part of any kinship structure. I would also claim that it is a critical part of ultimately creating legal, social, and political realities there. Even if, in places like Second Life, it creates interactive awkwardness while parties figure out the rules for social and physical interaction, as this YouTube video satirizes.