This will be a rather ironic, comical talk about a recent trip to Walt Disney World and how I came to understand the true nature (and failure) of the avatar in a world where the self and its basic needs are supplanted.
http://www.hyperreal.org/~mpesce/dromo.html

Biographical Information for Mark D. Pesce:

Mark Pesce is an Internet visionary and co-creator of VRML. What started as a vision of 3D information on the Internet has blossomed into the reality of a true Cyberspace under his guidance. He has presented his vision of VRML on numerous occasions to the international World Wide Web community. Pesce is the co-recipient of Meckleršs Market Impact Award for Virtual Reality, and was recently named one of Network Computingšs Most Influential People in Networking.

In his efforts to create a comprehensive framework for the inventory of affect in cyberspace, Pesce has consistently critiqued the medium he helped to create. "Final Amputation: Pathogenic Ontology in Cyberspace", delivered at CYBERCONF3, laid out a model - perceptual cybernetics - useful in understanding the psychological consequences of communicative mediation. Tying this foundation to Post-Modernist theory on one hand and esoteric magick on the other, Pesce outraged/delighted the audience at ISEA 1995, with "Ontos, Eros, Noos, Logos", uniting the Deleuzian discourse of assemblage with the ancient forms of ritual and witchcraft. In "Proximal and Distal Unities", presented at CYBERCONF5, Pesce argued that Peirre Teilhard de Chardinšs Noosphere had arrived, and seemed to be using human agency to invoke itself into greater being.

During their 1996 competition, Mr. Pesce received an Honorable Mention from the Ars Electronica Foundation for WebEarth, which creates a fully-interactive real-time model of the planet from space, on the desktop. Mr. Pesce is the author of three books, "VRML: Browsing and Building Cyberspace", "VRML: Flying Through the Web", and "Learning VRML: Design for Cyberspace", all published by New Riders Publishing. Most recently, Mr. Pesce was selected as one of the "ID 40" for 1997 by International Design magazine, and as one of the Microtimes 100 for 1996. In 1996, Mr. Pesce co-founded blitcom, Llc., a Web entertainment start-up based in Santa Monica, California, and has recently been appointed Visiting Professor of Interactive Media at the School of Cinema-Television, University of Southern California.