About

“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)

We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.
(Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night)

Why yet another Second Life blog?

Why on earth, when there are hundreds, possibly now thousands, of blogs devoted to MUVEs (multi-user virtual environments), and primarily to Second Life, should one want to launch yet another? Personal diaries of residents’ adventures in Second Life, education-related blogs (I, for example, own one such), blogs tied to Second Life groups or sims, fashion and lifestyle blogs, tutorial and content creation blogs, news and event blogs, entertainment and machinima blogs, and many others, proliferate on the web. None however — at least so far as I’ve been able to ascertain — focus uniquely on serious critical debate around the deceptively simple question: “When you present yourself in a virtual world such as Second Life, who are you?”

Why is this an interesting question?

It seems to me that there are two compelling reasons for devoting a blog specifically to this issue.

In the first place, we need to work out how we’re to effectively manage our virtual lives in a MUVE-rich near future. There is wide consensus that the number of adult MUVE users will increase dramatically over the next few years. Phenomenally, 61% of all virtual world users are today (late 2010) between the ages of 8 and 13; and an extraordinary 84% between the ages of 8 and 20 (source: KZero). As these younger users reach adulthood there will increasingly be an expectation that MUVEs will figure prominently in their professional, public, and leisure lives much as the 90s generation held the same expectations for the Web.

Just as in an earlier age television would supplant radio as the primary broadcast medium, persistent online multi-user virtual environments as exemplified by Second Life, Kaneva, Twinity, and Prototerra, will become core to the future of computer-mediated communication (CMC), computer-supported co-operative work (CSCW), and computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL). This doesn’t mean that text-only and asynchronous forms of CMC (email, instant messaging, etc) will eventually disappear, any more than radio disappeared with the advent of television, though I do expect that virtual environments will, as they mature, become the primary medium for communication and collaboration in the mid-term future.

In The Age of Spiritual Machines (1999), inventor and futurologist Ray Kurzweil goes so far as to predict that by mid-century the majority of interpersonal interactions will occur in virtual environments, with face-to-face conversations a rarity. In a 2008 interview with the online science journal EarthSky, Kurzweil opines that

We’re going to be spending more of our time in virtual reality environments. We’re ultimately going to be able to inhabit these full-immersion, very realistic, visual-auditory virtual reality environments including tactile communication. And that’s going to merge with phenomena of virtual worlds like Second Life, but they’re going to become very realistic.
(http://earthsky.org/human-world/ray-kurzweils-vision-of-the-future)

If Kurzweil is correct–and his prediction is echoed by many other scientists–that we’re to live increasingly in virtual worlds, the issue of who we are in such worlds and of how we manage our identities as well as our personal, social and professional relationships in such worlds turns out to be of more than mere academic interest.

The second compelling reason–and perhaps the primary motivator–for launching this blog is that the question “Who am I?” (and the “Who are you?”) is as intrinsically interesting in its own right with respect to virtual worlds as it is in the actual world. The understanding of identity, personhood, persona, selfness has preoccupied philosophers, psychologists, and social scientists since classical times; ‘second selves’ raise exactly the same kinds of questions, with additional layers of complexity arising from the nature of the relationship of the primary (real world) self to its in-world correlate.

The question become especially interesting the moment one endeavours to understand how active engagement in virtual world can transform lives.

Transforming lives

Khoisan on the couch

Like any significant technology–the mechanical loom, the steam engine, the motor car, the airplane, the telephone, radio and television, the computer–the Internet has profoundly changed the way we personally live as much as it has the society in which we live. Two decades on from the invention of the World Wide Web, it is still hard to fully measure the social and cultural impact of the Internet in general and, from the early years of the present century, of social networking platforms in particular. What is clear, however, and what therefore demands rigorous study, is that our lives may be significantly transformed in two distinct senses by our participation in digital social spaces and virtual worlds:

1. computer-mediated social networks have not only had an enormous impact on how we spend our leisure time–in part thanks to the near ubiquity of broadband, we spend far more hours online today than we did a decade ago, and a very significant part of that time in synchronous or near-synchronous social environments (Facebook, chat rooms, Skype, online games, social 3D worlds such as Second Life)–but also on how we meet and make new friends, and manage our social relationships;
2. more profound, and potentially more radically life-changing than shifts towards greater use of the computer in the maintenance and management of one’s social and professional relationships, is the reflexive inner transformation that may be wrought through computer-mediated engagement with others. Many Second Life users have reported, for example, that meeting others in-world has helped them in overcoming real-world shyness; users whose real-world activities have been restricted by illness or disability (Tim Guest, in Second Lives, reports on the active in-world life of wheelchair-bound cerebral palsy sufferers, for example) have been able to dance, fly, hang-glide, and otherwise lead lives unimaginable within the framework of their real-world circumstances; those with Aspergers syndrome have, in-world, found community and acceptance that may have eluded them in the actual world; while some at the most severe end of the autism spectrum have for the first time found a medium for powerfully and very eloquently asserting that they are differently-abled, not disabled.

The content of this blog will focus primarily, although not exclusively, on the second form of self-transformation. For many users, virtual worlds have become, whether wittingly or accidentally, a radical ‘experimentarium’ (Freud would have loved SL!) for trying out alternatives to their real lives, whether this take the form of virtual romances, gender-switching, species-switching, or socially marginalised (and perhaps, in many real world societies, criminalised) activities unavailable to them in their real lives.

“80% of the people in SL are there for the sex”, opined Maylea.  I agreed that sex possibly pipped even shopping to the post as the primary activity in Second Life.  And yet my intuition was that the sex in itself might turn out to be, for many, a tangible emblematic expression of something less tangible, “an elusive quest” in the words of my friend SlinkiJay Sugarplum (a psychiatrist in real life) who, on reading the draft of this page, very eloquently wrote:

transformation is such a profound issue
in mexico i was struck by all the altars, the shrines the people on their knees
with flowers, photographs
begging for, longing for aching for
offering everything for
this elusive transformation
from what to what?
what is this transubstantiation we try and do etherically?
and why?
what is missing?
what is it we so seek that we will offer our very souls in its pursuit?
it is an elusive quest, but it burns in us so deeply

Finally, we’ll so often have heard others in Second Life tell us that the virtual world offers the opportunity of escape from the real world; sometimes an escape from a troubled or unhappy real life. Yet, as my good friend Spartacus shrewdly observed, more characteristically the personalities such users bring into Second Life are those very same troubled selves that they persuade themselves they are escaping from; thus the social dynamics of Second Life will likely be shaped to some degree by our real-life preoccupations and concerns.

Who are you, then?

There’s no straightforward answer to the question, nor will there ever–for reasons that I assume must be obvious–be agreement on any one single answer, though it’s probably safe to say that who you are in a virtual world will, fairly obviously, be determined to a very great extent by who you are (or were) in the real world and yet, as in real life, be significantly shaped by your social encounters and environmental experiences within Second Life itself.

Short of an easy answer, it may at least be possible to sketch out some of the parameters along which answers may be sought. For example,

• what, if you are a long-term resident, has prompted you to maintain a ‘second life’?
• do you feel that, beyond obvious and trivial acts such as flying and teleporting, Second Life empowers you to engage in activities unavailable to you in your real life?
• what is your characteristic real-life stance towards your presence in SL? are you primarily a role-player? an immersionist? an augmentationist?
• do you insist on maintaining a strict separation between your ‘second life’ and your ‘real life’?
• have you ever felt that the anonymity afforded by Second Life has made you feel less inhibited than you are or would be in real life?
• to what extent do you feel your avatar, at least in speech and behaviour, is a reasonably faithful representation of the ‘real you’?
• are there ever moments when your Second Life feels more real to you, more representative of the person you truly are or of the life you truly wish to lead, than your offline life?

These and other questions will be explored in the pages of this blog.

The Unlimited Dream Company? the SL group

In the Wikipedia entry for novelist J.G. Ballard one reads that:

The literary distinctiveness of his work has given rise to the adjective “Ballardian”, defined by the Collins English Dictionary as “resembling or suggestive of the conditions described in J. G. Ballard’s novels and stories, especially dystopian modernity, bleak man-made landscapes and the psychological effects of technological, social or environmental developments.” (My emphases)

Taking its title as well as much of its ethos from J.G. Ballard’s 1979 novel of that name, the Unlimited Dream Company is an in-world research and discussion group for those who believe that Second Life, as a social technology, has become a medium par excellence for thought experiment and inner transformation, whether consciously so on the part of the SL user or not.  Even if ever so subtly different, and despite a user’s insistence that the in-world persona is a bona fide expression of the real person, one’s ‘Self’ in Second Life will, in consequence of one’s ‘virtually embodied’ presence in non-real environments and thus of the technology itself as much as for reasons of personal choice in how one customises one’s avatar and fills out one’s profile, become quite distinct from the real-world Self at the keyboard.  The very fact of a second self thus throws into focus and problematises the issue of personal identity.  Who am I? who are you? the Unlimited Dream Company seeks to explore all aspects and ramifications of this question.

Why Ballard? Is Second Life in actuality, then, a dystopia?  The answer will always be, I suppose: It depends on what you make of it. I was struck, some time ago, by the following text from a Second Life avatar profile (adapted from Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones):

Inside the snow globe on my father’s desk, there was a penguin wearing a scarf. The penguin was alone in there and I worried for him, but my father said “Don’t worry, Ishtar, he has a nice life. He’s trapped in a perfect world.”

Whoever we may become in Second Life (or in any other multi-user virtual world), one thing appears to me inevitable: we become ineluctably someone else, somewhere else, trapped in a perfect world.  Slinki again makes a pertinent observation:

you say we are “trapped in a perfect world” – i think in the end, the perfect is the illusion, for me, it has been about seeing it, like a child would, looking into a sweet shop, hungrily longing and never really able to taste it
for me, in many ways, it holds out the promise, but maybe betrays it, as it cant deliver really
for me, perhaps, the answer is to take it back and use the transformation in our rl, and not remain stuck in the snowglobe if we can…but the snowglobe is so delicious, it is so addictive……it is so safe……

But the main issue seems to me, consistent with Ballard’s dark narrative studies in the social psychological impacts of new technologies and architectures, not primarily about whether the in-world experience is in itself dystopic but rather about the implications of a human future in which perhaps (as Kurzweil predicts) 80% of all personal and social contact will be mediated through multi-user virtual environments.

"Trapped in a perfect world"

Recorded in this blog will be logs of discussions, interviews, occasional short articles, documentary videos, and even more occasional drafts of conference and journal papers. Your own contributions are welcome (all scholarly articles will be peer-reviewed, so draft conference papers and pre-publication journal papers are also invited); and you are invited to contact Khoisan Fisher either in-world or by email if you would wish to become either a writer or an editor for this blog.

A note on terminology

1. Lives

There has been occasional discussion, both on the Web and in academic papers, regarding the best descriptive terms to use to name the worlds we inhabit, the lives we live, and selves (identities, personae) we (re)present to ourselves and others in Second Life and in ‘Real life’. The most commonly used terms for the latter, ‘Real Life’ and ‘First Life’, are also frequently flagged as the most contentious: for many SL users, it is argued, Second Life is experienced as at least as real as our corporeal lives, the friendships as real, the feeling of presence as real as in the material world.  In a similar vein, many spend so much of their time in Second Life that in significant ways it takes precedence for them over their corporeal lives, and must therefore count as “First”. My personal feeling is that the debate–at least as much as I’ve read of the discussions–has been on the whole mis-focused and so largely missed the point. I’d suggest that:

1. fretting over terminology and the semantics of nomenclature is a pointless distraction from the core business of trying to understand who we are and what we believe we are doing in virtual worlds. Juliet’s “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet” is just commonsense. I much prefer to see the terms ‘Real Life’, ‘First Life’, and such like, as purely naming conventions for concepts clear enough in our minds for us to feel reasonably confident that we are all talking about the same things.
2. not fine-grained enough [to be continued … please bear with me]

My own value-neutral naming preference would be online or in-world life (and in-world self) for Second Life (and other MUVEs) and offline or out-world life (and out-world self) for what we do and who we are in our non-SL lives. Rather than pedantically insisting on the use of new terms consistently (and possibly confusingly), however, I shall often in these pages speak of ‘1st Life’ and ‘2nd Life’ (rather than ‘Second Life’, since we may also inhabit other MUVEs).

2. Worlds

The terms “social virtual world” and “virtual social world” are often seen used promiscuously as effective synonyms.  I feel it rhetorically useful in many contexts to draw a distinction between a “virtual world” that just happens to be “social” and a “social world” that just happens to be “virtual”.  Seasoned grid-hopper as I am, I’m also aware not only that there are virtual social worlds other than Second Life, but also that years down the line we may be participating in yet other multi-user virtual environments that have still to be invented.  As often as not I’ll, be using the name Second Life therefore simply as a totemic metonym for virtual social worlds in general.

We should love to have your own views on this and other essays in this blog. Please feel free to give feedback via the comments box.

The Editor

Khoisan Fisher has lived and worked as an educator in Second Life since 13th January 2006.

Christopher Hutchison, the man behind the Khoisan mask, is a lecturer in computer science at a UK university, which he’s always rated as a better way of paying the mortgage than getting a real job.  He’s been reading and enjoying J.G. Ballard’s novels and short stories since 1970.

See also …

Ballardian — a web journal, edited and published by Simon Sellars, exploring tropes and motifs found in the work of J.G. Ballard.
» http://www.ballardian.com

Zoapod 7: Dreams Unlimited – J. G. Ballard and Blake
» http://zoamorphosis.com/2010/03/zoapod-7-dreams-unlimited-j-g-ballard-and-blake/

Stephenson, N.  (1992). Snow Crash.  New York: Bantam Books.

J. F. Lopátegui, Digital Dystopia (e-book)
» http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/14986