Welcome to The Unlimited Dream Company!
Please lie on the couch and relax: Dr Khoisan Fisher wants to ask you a few questions
“I wonder if I’ve been changed in the night? Let me think: was I the same when I got up this morning? I almost think I can remember feeling a little different. But if I’m not the same, the next question is, Who in the world am I? Ah, THAT’S the great puzzle!”
(Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland)
Launched at last, after four months of participant-observation in Second Life and much thinking about what I’ve seen and the conversations I’ve had, this blog (and the in-world group of the same name) addresses the deceptively simple question: “When you present yourself in a virtual world such as Second Life, who are you?”
There’s no easy answer. For my own part (but each of you will have your own answers), I might tell you that I am Khoisan Fisher, lecturer, content creator, manager of two teaching sims, and yet I have absolutely no idea who I am, who I really am, when I present myself in-world.
I will probably blithely tell you that I’m exactly the same person in-world as I am in ‘real life’, that there is no discontinuity between my real-life self and my self-presentation in-world. (My Second Life profile will tell you that “SL is an extension of my RL, as much as is a telephone or a videoconference. I don’t chat with pixels–I chat with people.”) That would be somewhat disingenuous: there clearly is a difference between the lives we lead, the Self we express, in and out of Second Life. Let me see if I can explain what I mean …
We might for example go further by acknowledging that, solely within ‘real life’, we live a plurality of lives: our family lives and relationships, our professional lives, our recreational lives and friendships, are likely to situate us in different roles (‘wife’/'husband’, ‘father’/'mother’, ‘colleague’, ‘neighbour’, ‘best friend’, ‘teacher’/'student’, ‘doctor’/'patient’, ‘customer’, ‘manager’, …), thus require of us subtly different behaviours, and place us in dynamic reciprocally interpretative relations with different sets of people and consequently different constructions by others of who we ‘really’ are. And such roles will, as we live them with others, characteristically have personal histories, will carry expectations in others engendered by memories of their prior encounters with us. Thus who I am (lecturer, mentor, tutor, subject expert) for my students is not who I am for my parents; who I am for my old school friends is not who I am for my son. In novel, unpredictable, situations, in moments of crisis or unexpected opportunity for example, our unrehearsed responses to circumstances are likely to reveal to others–and perhaps to even surprise ourselves with–yet other selves. If social and environmental context is, in our real lives, determinative of how we dynamically construct ourselves and are constructed by others, so much more so will it be in virtual environments where the choices (of appearance, for example), the affordances (teleports and flight, for example), and the constraints (the expressiveness as well as the rigidities of pose balls, for example) are significantly different from the choices and constraints we confront in the actual (material) world.
So who am I? who is Khoisan Fisher? Let’s begin with appearance: he doesn’t resemble me, nor I him. I might tell you, as I’ve told myself, that my choice of shape and skin of avatar is no more nor less consequential than choice of wearing jeans or suit in real life. And yet I, like millions of other users, have created a representation of myself in-world that is flatteringly younger than my actual self. Vanity? yes, undoubtedly. It’s a choice I am able to make in Second Life that is not available to me in my real life. And yet the choice was well considered: I chose a skin and shape that I felt more authentically expressed my ideal self-perception in an alternative world than the skin and shape that nature and the passage of years have given me in the actual world. Should I then say that Khoisan is, in appearance, more authentically me than is the man at the keyboard? What, then, does my in-world appearance say about me? about Khoisan? about the relationship between the two?
How is Khoisan’s identity, not only in the eyes of others but also as understood by myself, shaped by his (my) immersive experience of Second Life? Process more than state, who I am, and who I am perceived to be, is fluidly and perpetually renegotiated in response to where I am, what I do, how I engage with my environment both material and social, both in the actual world and arguably in virtual worlds. I am and am only my material self, embodied and cognitively conditioned by my embodiment: as a human being, the forms that my apprehension (i.e. “the faculty or act of apprehending, esp. intuitive understanding; perception on a direct and immediate level; acceptance of or receptivity to information without passing judgment on its validity, often without complete comprehension”) of the world can take will be in some degree constrained by the manner of my sensori-motor interaction with the physical properties of the external world in consequence of the way in which I are physiologically constituted as a being with a front-back orientation, bilateral symmetry, prehensile limbs, upright posture, forward-looking eyes, and so on; a male, I experience the world through a male body, buy clothing in men’s shops, get my hair cut at a barber’s where the conversation is men’s conversation; at 6’1″ (1.87m) in real life my apprehension of the world is subtly different from someone 5’1″ (1.57m); I could continue, but I think you get the point. How then does my ‘virtual embodiment’ determine what it means to be Khoisan? Let’s consider just a couple of examples, one with regard to constraints specific to Second Life, the other with regard to its freedoms:
- when I sit in real life, I am likely to shift my sitting position frequently, in subtle small movements, and without exact repetition; in Second Life I am constrained by the generic (motion-capture) poses and animations contained within the Content tab of the Edit window for the object I am sitting on;
- my Second Life ‘eye’ (the “camera”) is, by default, behind and above my head, without peripheral vision; and can ‘cam’ with Alt-zoom and Ctrl-Alt-zoom to views not available to me as an embodied agent in real life.
Consequently Khoisan, although the vehicle through which I express myself in Second Life, will not experience his ‘second world’ in the same manner in which I as an embodied being experience the material world.
I could continue; but I think you probably get the point.
Now tell me: Who are you? We should love to hear your own reflections and views on who you think you are.
For a more detailed account of what you’ll find in this blog in the coming months, please read the more extensive description in the About page.
It seems to me that the argument ‘“SL is an extension of my RL, as much as is a telephone or a videoconference’, is not quite right, necessarily.
The reason why not is that, unlike telephony or videoconferencing, SL shows you someone else who is somewhere else. You do not get that with a telephone conversation. You do not pick up the receiver and get an image of someone who may not look like you, in an environment that may not look anything like the one your physical self currently finds itself in.
But because online worlds can do this, I think it lends itself to character creation far more than the telephone does. I don’t suppose you yourself are arguing this, but I have met people who say ‘I am not a different person on the phone, so therefore I am not a different person in SL’. I dare say they sincerely believe this, but they wrongly assume this argument must extend to everyone. But this is not the case at all. I don’t believe anyone can create and sustain a character that is completely seperate and different to the RL self- aspects of the ‘real’ surely leak into any performance, particularly one sustained for a period of years. But the ability of online worlds to show you ‘someone else’ who is ‘somewhere else’ can be amplified so that one feels like they are observing some other person going about their life, even while it is obviously their imagination responsible for what that person thinks and feels.
Thanks for the comment, Extropia! You very rightly raise important and controversial issues that deserve and demand wider debate. From what I assume to be an immersionist perspective, I’ll concede that “SL shows you someone else who is somewhere else”; from my personal augmentationist standpoint I would wish to claim that my avatar, Khoisan Fisher, stands in much the same relationship to me as does my disembodied telephone voice or my passport photograph: respectively aural and graphical representations of myself (sc. my Self), authentically me and yet disengaged from the flesh-and-blood reality. And yet I recognise that such a claim is problematic: that “somewhere else”, however soberly one tells oneself that it exists nowhere other than as bits and bytes on a server in California, becomes an imaginary arena in which, to the eyes of others, Khoisan Fisher as avatar, as digital being engages in social intercourse with others quite independently of the guy sitting at the keyboard. That is, the situated action is more deeply embedded in the imaginary ‘place’ than it is in the keyboard and mouse.
For my own part, I hang out (when not working in SL) on a sim where voice is effectively de rigueur, where real-life identities of participants are generally known to the entire community, and where real-life meeting is not only encouraged but also frequently happens. On my teaching sims, of course, I am known in real-life to the 400+ students who have passed through the classes I teach there. This entails that my personal take on SL is very much conditioned by the augmentationist way in which for 5+ years I have used SL. And yet I am also very much aware that my personal reasons for being in SL, my personal experiences in SL, and my modus vivendi in SL, are atypical of those of the majority of residents; and consequently I’m really not qualified to pronounce on the experiences of others.
I’d much look forward to (and have long intended to organise) a series of in-world debates on some of the issues raised here.