Personally I find this rather disgusting. I’m already opposed largely to the concept of strict dress codes and think we live in a society where not only is image based discrimination acceptable and institutionalised, but anyone who challenges it is automatically immature.

It’s all about control. Whether you have pink hair or brown hair has zero effect on how well you can do your job – especially if you work in a factory or office where you do not deal with the public(and if you do, it’s just reaffirming the idea that people who look “normal” are to be trusted, which is largely what got us into this economic mess, trusting well dressed bankers).

The idea that even your online presence is somehow controlled by this goes beyond this into the level of cartoon villainy(pardon the pun).

We spend so much of our lives working and so much of our freedom is restricted because of this, not to mention you can’t take off tattoos or hair colours when you go to work. We need to move in the exact opposite direction, not towards it. People such as transsexuals who cannot control that they at some point look different suffer heavily because of the sheer malice of social conservatism, and in general it misleads people as to what professionalism really means.

We need to rely less on “image” given the vast majority of organisations and business do not have notably different image to begin with – it’s what strikes me as especially hypocritical. Having a recognisable brand is imporant, but you’re not going to recognise a company from their dress code, since they’re largely quite similar – with one main thing in common, conservatism. Unless you want to work in Hot Topic or are self employed(and even then you’ll have difficulty since you’ll ultimately have to deal with bigots from other organisations – will people who largely uphold these ideas do business with people with funny hair? Probably not), you are essentially force to be “unexceptional”.

Much like the military forcing men and not women to cut their hair – it was never about professionalism, only about enforcing social conservatism. People need to start to recognise how many loopholes there are in modern society, that are essentially there purely so assholes can make people feel miserable and have a good chuckle about it.

Way to drive out any employee sufficiently skilled to get a job at any less psychotic company, imesho…
.-= Dale Innis´s last blog ..Viewer 2.0: Another reason to love Imprudence? =-.

I love the idea of individuals expressing the corporate brand through their personalised non-realistic avatars, though it would take some thinking through in practice. (How would I show ‘me representing Corporate Eye’ if I didn’t use an image of me?) I really like the idea of discovering more about the brand by doing so, even if only as an internal exercise.

However, my first thought was discomfort at the idea that an organisation might impose an inappropriate ‘look code’ – think of those call centres where non-British staff are given a brief training module in the mores of British culture and assigned a false Western name. This is far from authentic, and patronises both caller and called. How much worse if the company insisted that all avatars were (say) blond and fair-skinned because the corporate headquarters were based in a Nordic country? Or young and beautiful because the company dealt in beauty products?

We do need to be able to distinguish between individuals online, as we do in real life, and at the moment we’ve translated our millennia of face-to-face contact into the virtual world as our best way of understanding this. But it may not be this way in the future, and we need to work out a way of managing this – and of conveying the additional meaning of brand.

It would be interesting to know if there’ve been any studies of how people who meet in real life having first met in Second Life (or WoW, I suppose) manage the connection/disconnection between avatar and reality.
.-= Lucy´s last blog ..Successful Investor Relations Communications on Twitter =-.