| Abstract: | The rapid and tumultuous growth of e-commerce has impacted nearly every aspect of the internet, including the construction, representation, and performance of online identity. Such developments invite us to rethink some of our key assumptions about this technological medium in light of contextual influences. Toward this end, this essay offers a critical analysis of virtual body models available in online shopping contexts. I critique the way in which virtual body models are used to address the online shopper and their body image, how web stores promote identification between the shopper and their virtual model, and the implications of virtual modeling technology for how bodies and identity are brought together in e-commerce situations. I argue that web stores articulate rhetorics of computational precision and user interactivity to declare a null margin between shopper and virtual model while simultaneously manufacturing and exploiting such a margin for their own commercial gain. The result is that even though online shoppers are instructed to create models that will precisely reflect their offline bodies, web stores' commercial motives effectively guarantee that the resulting model will be a misleading, but more commercially viable, image of the shopper's body. I conclude by discussing some of the implications of this strategically manufactured distortion with respect to user participation in e-commerce activities. |
