A (very) belated workshop 4 response

Like many of you, I have had a Hotmail account for some years, but I went back to the Windows Live sign-up page to refresh my memory of the process. Most of the things I noticed were already brought up by Emily in her post - assumption of a Western middle-class background, for example, but I did notice that the default "Country/Region" box was set to United States, and the section for "account information" included State, Zip code and Time Zone - the states were American states, and the time zones were American time zones, as well as the fact that the "zip code" is a USA method. So, the site assumes that, as an Internet user and a subscriber to Windows Live, you are probably American with a middle-class and probably Western background. Also that you are either male or female, or identify as such. The site claims that these details can be used to reactivate your account should you forget your password...to me it seems slightly more intrusive than necessary, but I'm guessing most new users will fill out the required sections on the form without a second thought.

Yahoo! was slightly different, in that it detected that I was accessing the sign-up page from Australia and offered me the option to switch to the Australian version of Yahoo! to set up my account - the email address of which would end differently to one set up on the default US version. This could conceivably be an incentive for some Australian users to stick with the US version to avoid problems when giving others their new email address.
I switched to the Australian version, where the secret questions assumed that you were: in a stable relationship, grew up knowing your father, had been privileged enough to own a car, bike or pet, went to at least two schools, and that your high school had had a "mascot" - more of an American tradition, but still included in the Australian version...
The Marketing Preferences box was automatically ticked to be sent ads for special offers and the like, but this I think was more of a marketing ploy.

On to Second Life, where, yes, your gender was male or female, and you were also by default a young person with a slim physique. Possibly customisation options are available later in the game? Though both Caucasian and dark-skinned races were represented, it was difficult to tell whether avatars with Asian characteristics were represented in Second Life or not. There were options for avatars with dark hair and slightly darker skin tone, but their facial characteristics didn't seem any different to those of the Caucasian avatars. There was also nothing for Arabic, Indian, Polynesian, American Indian, Australian Aboriginal, Hispanic, or a myriad of other "races" - though this could be excused by the fact that it is the sign-up page, and giving the user a limited set of options to start with encourages them to customise more once they enter the game.
Your first name was your choice, but your last name had to be selected from a list of available last names - probably to prevent avatars with the same first and last names, as well as reducing the incidence of "joke" names. The names ran the gamut of foreign backgrounds, but strangely there were very few Asian-sounding last names. Whether this was due to them all being used or because of a bias against identifiably Asian avatars is unclear.
Like the last two sites, Second Life also assumes a privileged background, with questions such as "What city were you born in?", "What street did you grow up on?" and "What is your favourite vacation spot?" Since users will be spending money on the site this is quite possibly a fair assumption - someone with enough spare cash to spend it on Second Life has a high probability of being at least middle-class.

Lastly, Lavalife. As suggested on the workshop sheet, the default search assumes you are a single, straight female, seeking a 25-34 year old male for casual dating - a reflection of the most common type of Lavalife user. It is interesting that, even on a dating site for people unable to otherwise find romantic relationships, the only genders available for selection are male and female - the site does not appear to cater for transgender, polygender, transvestites or others, though you do have the option of searching for the same gender as yourself.

In conclusion, most of the sites seemed as if they were catering to what they perceived to be the demographic most likely to use their services. It seemed to me to be more of a tool to maximise efficiency and make the site more user-friendly to the majority of users, thus attracting more traffic. The "menu-driven identities" seen in these high-traffic sites are thus less a product of Western society's ingrained expectations of the "normal" Internet user, and more a result of marketing strategy - making the sites easier to use for the type of user most likely to access them, increasing traffic and therefore increasing profit for the site's owners.