Avatars in Second Life Creating a Persona in a Virtual World Researcher like Donna J. Haraway or Sherry Turkle have highlighted the possibility of fluid and flexible online identities, identities that provide opportunities to explore and expand the real world self-empowering, destabilizing and exhilarating. I intend to look at how the residents in Second Life present themselves, how they build their online persona to create an identity of their liking. I will look at their online presentations in order to investigate to what extent they use keywords or pictures to signal their online or offline preferences or perhaps their belonging to an online subculture. Additionally, I will interview a few of the residents in an attempt to find out their reasons for creating the character they have invented.