Trope-a-Day: Digital Avatar/Myself My Avatar

Digital Avatar/Myself My Avatar: Ubiquitous in the Empire and other noetic societies; as mentioned under Body Surf, people fairly regularly swap bodies for work, for visiting hostile environments, or just for the hell of it; or issue them to forked copies or fragments of themselves.  Of course, that may well not count for the purposes of this trope, since it’s a body-swap rather than remote control, but equally, the same bodies can be and are teleoperated remotely by people – especially infomorphs – when the communications lag is not a problem.  Also, of course, avatar instantiations are common in virtualities used for everything from work through commerce to entertainment, and in those cases, equally, one’s mind is not in the virtual body in any sort of meaningful way.

(It’s really quite hard to tell, in general, without checking the public identity tag for the long version of their name-identifier, even though it is a custom for teleoperators of physical bodies to refer to themselves through them as “this extension” rather than “me”.)