“Life is not a dating site”

I’d blogged on dating in social virtual worlds back in March 2010 in an article Extending the real world: the case of virtual dating, at that time with little thought or insight: it had been to my mind an application of MUVEs much like any other.  A dear friend of mine, far more cynical than I am with regard to Second Life, wrote to me in an email yesterday:

I suppose in the end [SL] is no different from a normal internet dating site and nothing much comes from those either, from what I hear from RL girlfriends. SL as a dating site does have some differences as it can be such a sexually charged medium. I do believe that there are quite a few residents who are in SL with the express desire to make RL meetings. I have met some who have said that directly, and I have difficulty in understanding that goal when there are plenty of conventional sites that deal in this function on a serious basis.

I shared this email with my real-life partner.  “Second Life”, she insightfully observed (and here I paraphrase),

is really no different from real life–in both cases, it’s what you make of it, what you want it to be.  Real life itself is not a ‘dating site’.
On the strictly one-to-one web-based dating site potential partners may exaggerate, may lie, may present an idealised and hence somewhat dishonest image of themselves, and one has generally no way of knowing who they really are.
But what for me made Second Life a more telling and more honest platform than a traditional dating site, much closer to real life, was that I was able to observe how you interacted with others, you unaware that I was watching you and listening to you.  That told me a lot about you, far more about you than I’d have learned from traditional internet dating.

I’ve no doubt at all that my email friend is perfectly correct in her assertion that “there are quite a few residents who are in SL with the express desire to make RL meetings”.  Perhaps my partner’s observations will have made a good case for dating in a multi-user social virtual world.  Life, whether real or Second, is not inherently a dating site; and both have the advantage over conventional Internet dating of allowing one to observe a potential partner in a social context with others.

As a post-script I suppose I might add that my partner and I never did date in Second Life, it having been simply the context within which we first came to know each other, became just friends. I have always been, and I remain, sceptical about Second Life romances; even with the best of intentions, the very environment itself, another world, a place apart, carries the risk that the amorous declarations exchanged between Mr Avatar and Ms Avatar may not carry over easily into a real-life relationship between Ms Primary and Mr Primary.

And this, of course, catapults us back to the core concern of this blog, identity.  The more autonomous the felt identity of the avatar, the more problematic the transition into real life.

I’d be interested to hear your own views, your own stories, dear Readers.

MANY ME

MANY ME.

During a Thinkers discussion on Google+’s stance on psuedonymity, Laborious Aftermath raised an interesting point several times. “You end up with the same problem of others ending up trying to use the same psuedo”.

In real life nobody has exclusive rights to a name. If your surname is Jackson, there is no law forbidding you from calling your son Michael (although if your son wanted to get into show business, then I expect he would have to adopt a psuedonym. The actor Michael Keaton, for example, is actually called Michael Douglas). When signing up for an online account, though, the rule is usually that only one person can have a name like ‘Laborious Aftermath’ and everyone else wanting that name must settle for variations like ‘Laborious_Aftermath’ or ‘LaboriousAftermath221’.

Of course, this rule applies only to individual online accounts. When it comes to signing up for other accounts somebody else might register an account under the name ‘Laborious Aftermath’ and I do not think SL’s ‘Laborious’ can do much about it (maybe if the name was a registered copyright belonging to SL’s ‘Laborious’ then he could prevent others using it, but other than that I do not think so).

Anyway, lots to say on this subject but really I want to comment on how this has lead me to a new principle of radical digital personhood. Laborious Aftermath asked me directly, “what happens if one day 100 or 1,000 people want to have ‘Extropia DaSilva’”?

This lead me to the realization that when my primary is googling my name to check out instances of my presence on the Web, the question uppermost in ver mind should not be ‘did I post this?’ but rather ‘Is this something Extropia DaSilva would have posted, given my understanding of her beliefs/opinions/ personality now and in the past’. If what is posted is roughly consistent with who I am and what I am like, then why not suppose the post was contributed by me? Maybe I should call this the ‘Duck Principle’ after that saying ‘if it walks and quacks like a duck, it is a duck’.

That is not to say I am comfortable with anyone using my identity in any old fashion. It is not like I would sit back and allow a griefer to go around being an annoyance using the name ‘Extropia DaSilva’. That would, in fact, violate one of the postulates of the ‘Duck’ principle: Whatever is done and said under my name must be reasonably consistent with who I am, what I am like and what I believe. If any of those conditions are broken, I would do my utmost to prevent this person from abusing my identity. But, if these conditions are met, then I would suppose at least part of my ‘patterns’ have installed themselves in that person’s brain, turning their mind partially ‘Extropialike’. It is just another instance of me on the Web, not qualitatively different to another account registered by my primary.

The Myth of Sisyphus

This morning I had a chat with one of my oldest and dearest SL friends, a well educated, highly intelligent, and deeply insightful woman, a friend whom I love dearly and respect immensely.

Briefly and uneasily back in SL after my two week break, I told her I felt little urge to return, felt almost reluctant to re-immerse myself in a world that, I realised, had consumed so much of my time for little reward.  But she and I have had such a conversation before, both of us recognising the meagre returns and yet both ensnared like flies in a web.  She confessed:

i wish i could get out of here
every day i feel pain here
and i need to address the holes in my rl, i guess
not escape to a place of broken empty promises
in my rl i am on an endless treadmill of tasks
and i wonder where i am in my life
taking care of so many other people
i think i come here to feel beautiful
get attention, love, intensity
time out
also, i never buy things for myself in rl
i always think, i have enough
here, i can come here and be frivolous
shop a little
i shold do it in rl, but
honestly i cant
i am at a crossroads here
i am thinking to myself
i kow where this road ends
the place it always ends in sl
maybe rl, i dont know
at least in rl
you have seen the person
held them
had coffee with them
touched them
here, its ghosts
i should walk away..
set me free
do what you have to do and then live your life, my dear
if you can, do it
i think sl has a place
you certainly have explored that and know that
with your work, building etc
and with the friends you made
but, i dont know, its easy to hide problematic personalities under the pixels here far too easily

Yes, a depressing perspective on Second Life, one I have myself succumbed to many times, one I’ve many terms heard in some form or another from so many people.  Admittedly I’ve made some good friends there, people I truly care about; and, workwise, I’ve achieved so much; and yet I cannot help feeling uncomfortable about Second Life, that insidiously it’s eroding not only the quality of my real life but also–more damagingly, perhaps–my very ability to recognise the futility of spending long hours in a world of pixelated fantasies.

Albert Camus’ Le Mythe de Sisyphe sprang to mind as I conversed with my friend.  The meaninglessness and absurdity of life, real as much as virtual, prompts us to use our freedoms to create our own meanings.  Yet Second Life, it often seems to me, to the contrary becomes for many an illusory escape from the meaninglessness and absurdity of real life, an “escape to a place of broken empty promises” as my friend so eloquently put it, the inmates eternally condemned to a vacuous joy in re-papering the asylum walls, rearranging the prim furniture, but–like the dinner guests in Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel–never finding, since never truly seeking, the way out.

It’s not a design flaw of the medium per se: I remain committed to the belief that Second Life, as do social virtual worlds in general, offers unprecedented opportunities for communication, collaboration, and cultural and personal transformation.  I know I’m now going to sound a bit of a snob in saying this, but my biggest worry is that social virtual worlds will, for many, become the new “opium of the masses”, a form of escapism more insidious than has been daytime TV and “reality TV”, an immersive and interactive Oprah Winfrey and Jerry Springer with bells and whistles.  And, like television, ultimately just as compulsive and just as unfulfilling.

So now I throw it open to you, dear Readers.  (You might first want to revisit the poll I posted on 22nd July.)  What, for you, makes SL a qualitatively rich experience? have you ever felt you’d want to quit SL forever? what, more than anything else, motivates you to remain in SL? or are you simply (as I observed elsewhere in this blog) “trapped in a perfect world”?

My avatar, my ‘imaginary friend’: the importance of play in social virtual worlds

“Imaginary friends”, writes Suzanne Hall,

are a happy, if mysterious, part of childhood. You may have trouble remembering the names of your grandchildren’s imaginary pals, or exactly what species they are, but you needn’t worry that their existence is a sign of a problem. Despite what you may have heard, imaginary friends are a normal, even positive part of growing up.

She references the research findings of Dr Marjorie Taylor, professor of psychology at the University of Oregon and the author of Imaginary Companions and the Children who Create Them (Oxford University Press, 2001):

“Imaginary friends bolster confidence,” Taylor points out. “If you have an imaginary tiger by your side, you don’t have to be afraid to walk down the street or get up alone in the dark.” These friends also allow children to explore misbehavior and its consequences. “About one-third of all imaginary companions do not behave well,” Taylor says.

She goes on to suggest that “many adults create and interact with imaginary friends (and adversaries), as part of online role-playing games or”–and I here insert a dramatic pause in anticipation at the gasps of horror and indignation–“in virtual communities like Second Life” (my emphasis).

Please bear with me as (with possibly an occasional hint of mischievous relish) I explore two avenues that, I strongly suspect, will turn out to deliver interesting insights into the developmental and transformational value of play in social virtual worlds.  The first is generically with respect to academic and vocational learning; the second focused on social learning through experimenting with alternative behaviours.

The Third-Person Learner

In Second Life, OpenSim grids, and by default in most other social virtual worlds such as ActiveWorlds, Onverse, and 3DXplorer, the ‘camera’ views one’s avatar from a little way above and behind, extruding as it were a third-person character that is neither decisively Self nor not-Self, an ambivalent agent and persona whose agency and personhood may at moments seem to escape the controlling hand of the puppeteer.

Karl Kapp and Tony O’Driscoll, arguing in their excellent Learning in 3D (2010) the paedagogic case for avatar-based immersive virtual learning environments, cite experiments conducted by psychologists Lisa Libby (Ohio State University), Richard Eibach (Yale University), and Thomas Gilovich (Cornell University), that would seem to provide support for the authors’ contention that “the third-person perspective, the most common view in VIEs [virtual immersive environments], has some educational benefits over a first-person perspective typically experienced in a classroom or during an online virtual classroom session” (p.93).  Libby and her co-researchers had found of their subjects (students), being asked to “recall one of their most embarrassing moments … half of the students to re-imagine the humiliation in the first person, and the other half to re-imagine it in the third person”, that

Students who imagined acting in third person rated themselves as having changed significantly since the incident first occurred, while those who re-imagined in first person did not indicate that they had changed significantly.  It appears that the third-person perspective allowed the students to reflect on the meaning of their social miscues and then actually grow and change psychologically, while the first-person perspective did not cause a similar change.  (Kapp and O’Driscoll, op.cit., p.93)

The ability to imagine, consider, and weigh alternatives, to visualise and plan as yet imaginary future actions, to compare the possible with the real, as evidenced in language by its “what ifs”, “suppose that”, “might have”, “could”, “were it not for”, its conditional and future tenses, its modal verbs, its capacity to express hypothetical and counter-factual propositions, is arguably what most clearly distinguishes human beings from other animals.  (Cf. the concept of displacement in Charles Hockett’s Design Features of Language.)  Free-form social virtual worlds such as Second Life, whatever else they may represent to us, are congruent with our uniquely human ability to contemplate alternatives to the actual world.  A visual separation of oneself from one’s avatar, as with Libby’s first-person/third-person remembering, facilitates the separation of Who-I-am from an observable Who-I-might be.

The advantages offered by virtual immersive environments for learning and teaching are consequently akin to, and yet extend beyond, the value of more traditional role-play in classroom scenarios.  I was last year commissioned, for example, as part of the re-build of Kingston University’s Second Life presence, to create the 3D infrastructure for interviewing practice in the context of organisational behaviour (Kingston Business School), courtroom practice (School of Law), and professional practice (School of Architecture), in each case simulations entailing role-play.  In the area of language teaching, J.E. Buckingham, a graduate student at the School for International training in Vermont, draws heavily on Moran’s (2008) contention that “In many ways, learning a second language is about learning to play new roles in a second culture, even creating a second identity”:

As we know, immersion in the target culture/language is the optimal way to learn a language, and simulated realities aim to offer a more modest version of that experience.  (Godwin-Jones, 2009)
The concept is not so different from that of creating an avatar by overlaying the features of an already-known character.  We simply then place that avatar’s life into a Spanish-speaking country.  In this day and age when avatars represent us in all sorts of environments, from on-screen computer help to internet dating, the use of a virtual friendship to explore another culture is not a difficult concept for today’s student to grasp.  In fact, for those students who already have an avatar “living” in a Second Life community or a similar parallel environment it is rather the norm, and the concept of creating an imaginary character fits right in.
(Buckingham, 2009, p.14)

As Kapp and O’Driscoll point out, “The in-world role-play archetype provides a realistic environment in which two or more people act out a scenario” (p.95)

Avatar as ‘imaginary friend’: learning to live

As results from the recent poll in this blog will have confirmed, Second Life means different things to different users.  For some it is preeminently an engaging educational medium, a place to learn; for others it is “simply just fun for fun’s sake”, pure entertainment; for yet others “a great place to meet and socialise”; and for some, a spotlight on the future of human society, perhaps of the human condition.  Whatever one’s declared feelings about the platform, and however vehemently one might wish to deny one is a ‘role-player’, it’s impossible to get away from the fact that social virtual worlds such as Second Life are nevertheless fundamentally about play.  At every level of activity, from customising one’s avatar’s appearance (let’s call this the ‘Barbie and Ken Syndrome’), through behaviours and animations such as dancing and flying, to building one’s dream home, one is in essence playing, enjoying the pretence that jiggling pixel prims one way is actually donning a skirt, in another way is actually driving a car or dancing a tango, in yet another way is actually building a house or furnishing a room.

The pretence is inescapable: in the very act of logging in one is entering and acknowledging a make-believe world that, as the occasional outage over the years has reminded us, exists essentially only as data stored on servers in California.  (Real life, by contrast, is of course at no risk of such outages, has no ‘Grid Status’ web site nor busy battalion of deus-ex-machina engineers endeavouring to get the real world up and running again; and whatever other pretences we might go through in real life, a skirt really is a skirt, a car really is a car, and in sharp contrast to my Fred Astaire performances in Second Life I really do have two left feet when I dance.)  We recognise play as crucially important for the verbal, social, moral, ratiocinative, and conceptual development of the child (Isenberg & Jalongo, 2006):

Make-believe play is an increasing preoccupation for a child as he grows from about two to about five.  It is a kind of play in which his construction or representation of the world might be said to take over from reality: in other words, the process of constructing what happens (and perhaps, as we have just seen, playfully exploiting the gap) gives place in this form of activity to a process of virtually making things happen, at his own choice and in accordance with his own desires.  It is an enactment of his own construction of events.  He selects from the whole of his past experience: in fact it would not be a gross distortion to assign to such play, at this stage, the role of maintaining a child’s view of the world in a condition in which he is happy to live with it.
(Britton, 1970, pp.87-88)

What we perhaps find difficult to recognise, and in adulthood far harder to acknowledge, is that imaginative play in just the way in which children engage in play, and for much the same reasons, may remain a psychological imperative throughout our entire lives.  For many this may take the form of watching movies and television dramas, or of reading novels, vicariously living out in our imaginations the challenges, dilemmas, and conflicts faced by fictional characters.  We empathise with, slip into the minds of, perhaps partially identify with, characters; we feel their spectrum of emotions, cringe at their embarrassments, agonise at their disappointments, rejoice at their successes and empathetically share their failures.  Yes, of course we also do this in real life as well: we watch unfold the dramas of our families, our friends, our neighbours, our colleagues; and yet it may be argued that it is the lifelong rehearsal of appropriate emotional, moral, and social responses learned from engaging imaginatively and emotionally with the “what-ifs” of fictions that in a significant way equips us to respond with acquired confidence to real-life situations.

Social virtual worlds, however, enable a very special kind of fiction, more akin to the imaginative play of our childhoods than to the inflexibly scripted fictions of cinema and novel: it is we who are, as we were as children, the actors, the players, the dramatis personae, freed to negotiate our own dramas.  (In a later posting I shall examine in depth the ubiquity and importance of ‘drama’ as a cultural concept in Second Life.)  It’s at this point that I therefore return to the ambivalent nature of the avatar, visually third-person yet operationally first-person, unsettlingly poised between Avatar-as-Self (associated with a predominantly augmentationist stance) and Avatar-as-Other (a predominantly immersionist stance), the umbilical cord to the keyboard in the latter case severed to the extent that, engaged as a quasi-autonomous digital being in a graphical 3D environment to which the ‘primary’ (to use Extropia’s term) has no direct access, it becomes in effect one’s ‘imaginary friend’.  Let’s recapitulate Suzanne Hall’s synopsis of Marjorie Taylor’s studies:

These friends also allow children to explore misbehavior and its consequences. “About one-third of all imaginary companions do not behave well,” Taylor says.

The literature on reputation, trust, and the guarantee of impunity afforded by the anonymity (or ‘pseudonymity) of Second Life, is of course bestrewn with tales of irresponsible and socially disruptive behaviours by ‘griefers’, others, ‘that sort’, ‘not us, not me’.  And yet it’s likely that each and every one of us will at some time in our ‘second lives’ have displayed behaviours or engaged in activities in which we would, in real life, be far less likely to engage in our face-to-face encounters with others.  Some of it may seem so ludicrously petty and inconsequential–have you ever, Ms Reader, walked the digital thoroughfares of Second Life wearing a micro-skirt and skimpy translucent top? worn body tattoos and shoulder-length hair, Mr Reader? and have you ever done so in real life?–that we’d hesitate to recognise such behaviour as in any sense ‘experimental’ or ‘role-playful’; yet clearly the choices made with respect to the appearance and conduct of our avatars are the choices made by the human being playing at the keyboard.  And the more we are able to objectify our avatar as a distinct third-person ‘he’ or ‘she’, the more emotionally comfortable we will feel at allowing the avatar, as ‘imaginary friend’, to try out alternative behaviours.  As Lisa Libby has noted:

studies have shown that if you remember an incident in the first-person, you tend to re-experience the event, how everything unfolded. You’re wrapped up in the emotions, so you don’t reflect on the event and the overall meaning.
(Lisa Libby, quoted in Jeff Grabmeier, 2005)

whereas in the third-person view we are more able to detachedly and dispassionately play with such alternatives.

Envisioning worlds: a summing up

The poet W.H. Auden long ago gave explicit recognition to the truth that

“Every human being is interested in two kinds of worlds: the Primary, everyday world which he knows through his senses, and a Secondary world or worlds which he not only can create in his imagination, but which he cannot stop himself creating.”
(W.H. Auden, 1968)

At the very core of what it means to be human is not simply the ability to envisage alternative realities, but the necessity for doing so. Our “what ifs” liberate us from blindly submitting to the raw and relentless “what is” of life, to weigh one course of action against another, to conceptualise hypothetical futures, to replay, to critically review, and to learn from our pasts; while myths and stories help us to make sense of, give structure to, give meaning to our chaotic lives as they are. The prehistoric rock paintings (arguably the very earliest virtual realities) of Lascaux and the Tassili n’Ajjer mountains, of Ndedema Gorge and Altimera, the ancient myths of our forebears, the novels we read, the movies we watch, are the alternative realities, the crucial narratives, that allow us to vicariously experience alternative lives, alternative ways of being, to enter into dialogues that, as children, would have been our dialogues with imaginary friends.

Social virtual worlds, whatever else they may be, fall squarely within that human tradition of play and imagination out of which we, in a never-ending dialectic, remake our lives day by day.  Second Life may turn out to be truly life-changing in ways we cannot yet even imagine.

References

Auden, W.H.  (1968).  Secondary Worlds.  London: Faber and Faber.

Britton, J.  (1970).  Language and Learning.  Harmondworth: Penguin Books.

Buckingham, J.E.  (2009).  ‘Imaginary Friends: Using Guided Imagery, Line Drawings and Webquests to Incorporate Culture into the Foreign Language Curriculum’.  School for International Training Graduate Institute, IPP Collection, Paper 480.  Accessed 25th July 2011 at:
» http://digitalcollections.sit.edu/ipp_collection/480

Carey, B.  (2007).  ‘This Is Your Life (and How You Tell It)’.  The New York Times, 22nd May, 2007.  Accessed 25th July 2011 at:
» http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/23/health/23iht-22narr.5840886.html?scp=2&sq=benedict%20carey%20this%20is%20your%20life&st=cse

Grabmeier, J.  (2005).  ‘See Yourself As Outsiders Do To Measure Progress Toward Goals, Study Says’.  Ohio State University: Research News.  Accessed 25th July 2011 at:
» http://researchnews.osu.edu/archive/mempers.htm

Hockett, C. F. and Altmann, S.  (1968).  ‘A note on design features’, in Sebeok, T. A., (ed), Animal communication; techniques of study and results of research. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

Isenberg, J.P. & Jalongo, M.R.  (2005).  Creative Thinking and Arts-Based Learning Preschool Through Fourth Grade.  Columbus, Ohio : Merrill Publishing Company.

Kapp, K.M. & and O’Driscoll, A.  (2010).  Learning in 3D.  San Francisco: Pfeiffer.

Libby, L.K., Eibach, R.P. & Gilovich, T.  (2005).  ‘Here’s Looking at Me: The Effect of Memory Perspective on Assessments of Personal Change.’  Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 88, No.1, pp.50-62.

Moran, P. R. (2008).  Faces: Characters in Search of Authors.  Brattleboro, VT:
Pro Lingua Associates.

Taylor, M.  (2001).  Imaginary Companions and the Children who Create Them.  Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Poll: How do you feel about your Second Life experience?

In this first of several polls we’ll post to this blog over the coming months, we’d like to sound you out on a very simple question: How do you feel about Second Life? about your experience of being there?

Note that it’s not about what you do, how you spend your time, in SL (we’ll ask that question in a future poll), but rather about your raw feelings.  If you’ve had an account for some while the chances are that you’ll by now have a variety of perhaps quite mixed feelings about the environment, represented by maybe more than one of the statements in the poll below.  Yet perhaps one of the statements resonates with you more than any other: that’s the one we want to hear from you!

So please take your time to read the statements, maybe spend a little reflective time in Second Life before you respond to the poll, then select the statement that seems to you to best capture your most fundamental gut feeling about your SL experience.  And, if your deepest feelings are not represented by any of the statements given, please feel free to add your own at the bottom of the poll.  If you feel you need more space to express your views, please also use the Comments.

Thanks for participating!  The results of the poll and analysis of those results will be published in this blog on Saturday, 20th August.

‘Trapped in a perfect world’

I remember one day–I’ll never forget–I was about four years old and I was playing one day and I saw the cellar door open, just a crack. Now my folks had always warned me “Emo, whatever you do, don’t go near the cellar door!” But I had to see what was on the other side, if it killed me; and I went to the cellar door, and I pushed it and walked through and I saw strange wonderful things, things I had never seen before … like trees, grass, clouds, flowers, the sun–that was nice! (Emo Philips, 1990)

I’m taking a couple of weeks vacation from SL.  Yes, that’s right: I’ve pushed open the cellar door and am now rediscovering Real Life, the world of trees, grass, clouds, flowers, and what, here in rainy Britain, counts as sporadic glimpses of sun.

I’ve been a fan of Emo Philips’ surreal brand of humour since I first saw him in, I guess, the early 1990s.  His narratives will, with a wonderful economy of words, mischievously paint recognisable scenarios, elicit the concomitant expectations in the mind of the listener, that will then be almost brutally subverted by an abrupt and sometimes shocking dénouement.  We initially visualise–are quietly lulled into visualising–the four year old child on the outside of the cellar, reminded perhaps of the curiosity we might ourselves have had as children as to what might have lain behind a locked door; so almost archetypal is that image generically, the stuff of childhood stories (remember Alice’s curiosity?), that little need be said to conjure in our minds anticipations of the fantastical things one might discover beyond the door.  The shocking end of the narrative unsettles us not merely by its unexpectedness but, more grotesquely, in compelling us without warning to confront the horrific thought of a child condemned to a cellar throughout the earliest years of his life.

More disquieting than that–and one perhaps best appreciates this by listening to the giggly whiny innocence in Emo’s extraordinary voice in live performance–one understands that confinement to a cellar had been so normalised for the child, knowing no other life, that life beyond the cellar is seen as a curious novelty, not as a natural right he has been denied.

Luis Buñuel’s 1962 film, El ángel exterminador (The Exterminating Angel), just as deliciously surreal, tells the disquieting tale of dinner guests at a wealthy home finding themselves inexplicably unable to leave the house at the end of the party.  Days pass–seemingly interminable days of anxiety, hunger, panic, death, suicide–before a young foreign guest, Letitia, finds she is able to break the spell and to then lead the surviving guests back out of the building.

It is the insanity (whatever that turns out to mean clinically) of Second Life that we can find ourselves, though at any time free to leave, immured there by our own addiction to the environment, ‘trapped in a perfect world’, as I read in an avatar’s profile:

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, ******, he has a nice life. He’s trapped in a perfect world.”
(From a Second Life avatar profile, adapted from Alice Sebold, The Lovely Bones)

The fact of the matter is that so many Second Life users are ‘trapped’ in what is nevertheless no more ‘a perfect world’ than is Emo’s cellar or Buñuel’s house party.  Outside in the real world there are flowers, trees, birds, the sun and moon and stars, our families, our generously tolerant friends; and yet curiously we’ll eschew the magnificent richness of the real world for the sensorially impoverished world of Second Life.  Why, I wonder, should that be?

I had a chat with my very dear friend Slinki on Sunday, my final day in SL for a while.  I should perhaps point out to those who’ve not read other posts to this blog that Slinki, quite apart from being one of the sexiest women I have ever had the delicious pleasure of flirting with in SL (gggrrrraaaooo!!! down, boy!), is a real-life psychologist with a brilliantly incisive and insightful mind, with whom I’ve had such discussions in the past.

[2011/07/17 03:11]  Khoisan Fisher: but I’m finding that my own addiction is now turning sour, and I’m now almost repelled at the thought of immersing myself in SL.
[2011/07/17 03:11]  SlinkiJay Sugarplum: and you know what, that is fantastic|!!!
[2011/07/17 03:11]  SlinkiJay Sugarplum: live your real life if you can
[2011/07/17 03:11]  SlinkiJay Sugarplum: use your senses
[2011/07/17 03:11]  SlinkiJay Sugarplum: take the break!!
[2011/07/17 03:11]  SlinkiJay Sugarplum: its better out than in
[2011/07/17 03:11]  SlinkiJay Sugarplum: this is a wound which never heals
[2011/07/17 03:11]  SlinkiJay Sugarplum: a promise which never delivers
[2011/07/17 03:11]  SlinkiJay Sugarplum: we are ghosts here
[2011/07/17 03:12]  Khoisan Fisher: woo … more spontaneous poetry from your eloquent lips 😉
[2011/07/17 03:12]  Khoisan Fisher: And you are, of course, absolutely right
[2011/07/17 03:12]  SlinkiJay Sugarplum: sadly as ever, born of pain and experience…
[2011/07/17 03:12]  SlinkiJay Sugarplum: you are missing nothing here really
[2011/07/17 03:12]  SlinkiJay Sugarplum: we stay here hoping to be full
[2011/07/17 03:13]  SlinkiJay Sugarplum: but it never fills us, nourishes
[2011/07/17 03:13]  SlinkiJay Sugarplum: just holds out that deceptive illusory promise
[2011/07/17 03:13]  SlinkiJay Sugarplum: and soothes us by distracting us from rl and its angsts

On another occasion, reflecting on Second Life as a vehicle, comparable in significant ways to a religion, for pursuing “an elusive quest” for meaning, Slinki asks “What is it we so seek that we will offer our very souls in its pursuit?”

Addictive immersion in Second Life, I’m inclined to believe, is quite unlike addictions to alcohol, drugs, gambling, or smoking, a spiritual rather than a physical or purely psychological dependency.  So I want to throw out to you, Dear Reader, the following questions and I much look forward to reading your own views in the comments to this piece: what is this elusive Mephistophelean quest? and, on your own experience, what is it that makes Second Life appear a viable, if perhaps ultimately an illusory, vehicle for the pursuit of that quest?  What is that alchemy of the soul that, even if it were never a motive for first creating an account, we come to be persuaded may be satisfied through Second Life?

Oh, and by the way, if you’re interested, no, I’m not much missing SL 🙂

BOTGIRL: (UN)REAL

BOTGIRL: (UN)REAL.

Botgirl Questi has a post on her blog called “For Those Who Say Avatar Identity Isn’t Real”. What could possibly be meant by a statement like ‘Botgirl isn’t real’?

If we equate reality with existence, then the statement seems to be saying ‘Botgirl does not exist’, but is this statement expressing a truth? If Botgirl is a sort of fiction we can ask if fictional characters exist. In some sense, yes they do. Take Harry Potter, for example. He definitely exists as part of our collective consciousness. He is as much a part of our culture as Paris, or the Brandenburg Concerto, or the Statue Of Liberty, or the Bible. All of these exist only because humans created them. If, when people say ‘Botgirl is not real’ they mean she was dreamed up by some human, then hardly anything in our real lives is, well, ‘real’. Ours is a world of the artificial; the imagination made physical.

Sticking with this concept of something or someone existing in the collective consciousness, you could argue that Harry Potter’s existence is more definite than that of my fellow blogger, Christopher Hutchison. The reason why has to do with the remarkable success of the Potter franchise, which has familiarised Harry to millions of people. You could ask people “Is the name Harry Potter familiar to you? Can you tell me what he is like?”. Many more people would say ‘yes’ to your first question and provide a psychological profile that was consistent with other people’s description of him, compared to the number of people who can honestly say they have heard of Christopher and know what he is like. In fact, as far as most of the world is concerned, Christopher does not exist at all.

But there is another way of looking at this, one which emphasises Christopher’s existence over Harry and, I would argue, Botgirl. Everything artificial requires humans to exist, but not everything artificial requires humans to persist, once created. Take Stonehenge, for example. The society that built this monument has long since disappeared from the Earth, but the stones still stand. If the entire human race were to just disappear, this megalith would still exist. But, at the same time, there are some aspects of Stonehenge that do not persist to this day, not least of which is the reason why this monument was built at all. What was it for? What rituals, what customs, what myths and legends did its original creators build up around it? We can guess, but we will probably never know for sure. Such intangible aspects of the monument are lost, along with the people who built it.

If the human race were to vanish from the Earth, some of what they created would disappear with them. Not gradually, as the pyramids will gradually succumb to erosion, but immediately. Churches would persist, but Christianity would not. Books would exist; stories would not. Cds, MP3s, Vinyl records, sheets of music would exist; music would not. In short, anything existing exclusively in our minds would necessarily vanish along with the human race. I suppose you could argue it all still exists in principle, only awaiting the reappearance of minds capable of interpreting the information locked away in physical media. But, barring that eventuality, our virtual cultural artifacts cannot persist for even an instant without minds being aware of them.

Imagine the entire human race- except Christopher- were to disappear. Does he still exist? Of course! Maybe not for long because, after all, a human being is a highly social animal. Being the last person left alive may be a fate nobody would wish to endure for long. But Christopher could persist for a while, all by himself. 

Could Botgirl Questi be the last female left alive? No, because she is one of those virtual parts of our culture. She cannot persist for any length of time after human imagination ceases to be. Neither, for that matter, could I. 

When thinking about the question “is avatar identity real”? many people answer “yes, because I am real”. No! It is not entirely correct to attribute Botgirl’s continued existence to one specific human being. One specific human being should be given credit for having created her in the first place (assuming she is not the product of some team effort) but, in principle at least, why should she need to rely on just this individual to persist? Stories can be ghost-written so why can’t there be ghost bloggers? Characters can persist through a succession of actors, so why can’t an avatar persist through a succession of users? If we assume Botgirl is a kind of fiction, why differentiate between her primary pretending to be her and anyone else pretending to be her? So long as Botgirl’s social network evolves in a way which is roughly consistent with our mental model of ‘what she is like; what she is likely to do’ there is scope for her existence to persist through a succession of primaries. 

This is where Botgirl exists; this is the source of her reality: She is a pattern existing in the abstract space between the social networks and the minds connected via the Internet. She can, in principle at least, outlive any individual. It’s just a matter of her patterns being interesting enough to be worth maintaining by anyone capable of evolving them in a consistent manner. But without the collective imagination, her existence is nothing. She is dependent on us believing she exists in a way that Christopher is not. Dependent, that is, until artificial intelligence is creative and imaginative enough to run her patterns in a convincing manner. Until that day,

BOTGIRL: (UN)LEASHED.

LOVEGAME PART 3

In the previous instalment we began with a cliché from science fiction dramas. The most famous cliché of all may well be the one that comes at the end of most fairytales: ‘And they lived happily ever after’. Such an ending is based around the concept of the ‘one true love’ and this is clearly not something we consider just the stuff of fairytales. After all, when two people swap wedding vows declaring they will ‘forsake all others so long as you both shall live’, that is a clear expression of a belief that this person is ‘the one’.

YOU’RE THE ONE THAT I WANT

Now, marriages can last a lifetime so such sentiments are not necessarily unfounded, but neither are they entirely rational. Simple statistics make it unlikely that your sweetheart really is the best of all possible mates, because there are billions of potential partners and out of that multitude an individual meets only a few hundred or thousand. According to Steven Pinker, social scientists theorise that love is irrational because being rational about one’s mate choice would mean never settling down to a stable relationship. Why not? Well, the rational thing to do would be to settle only for the absolute best person who will accept you as a partner. Unfortunately, given the vast numbers of potential partners you will probably die single while waiting for this person to show up. The next best thing is to settle for the best mate you have found so far. But such a relationship is vulnerable if you both do the rational thing of pursuing the best you can get. One day, one of you might meet someone with more objective mate-value than your partner, in which case the rational thing to do would be to end your current relationship in favour of starting a new one with this superior mate. But, if this really is your attitude and assuming your partner is not the most desirable person in the world (in which case there is no chance of you encountering anyone better) it would be foolish to enter into a relationship with you.

What is the answer to this dilemma? According to Steven Pinker, “one answer is, don’t accept a partner who wanted you for rational reasons to begin with. Look for a partner who is committed to you by… an emotion that this person did not decide to have and so cannot decide not to have. An emotion that was not triggered by your objective mate-value and so will not be alienated by someone with greater mate-value”. This emotion is, of course, romantic love.

Now, romantic love is not triggered by just anyone. Anthropologist Helen Fisher believes each person’s life experiences builds up what she calls a ‘love map’, or a template of the sort of person we think might suit us. Such people tend to be those with similar ethnic and socio-economic backgrounds, education, intelligence and attractiveness to oneself. “When you’re looking around and find someone who fits within your love map”, says Fisher, “you’re primed to fall in love”. We don’t set absolute standards of perfection, but we do set minimal standards for candidates on the dating market place. Nevertheless, there is some truth to Douglas Gates’ observation ‘people who are sensible about love are incapable of it’. This was demonstrated in a study conducted by the social psychologist Glenn Geher. When asked to fill in a questionnaire about current and previous partners, a vast majority (95%) believe their current partner to be above average. Says Geher, “people tend to paint their current partner as a ‘winner’- open-minded, outgoing, confident”. As for previous partners, they tended to be portrayed in a less flattering way. Former partners were rated as being “losers- closed-minded, emotionally unstable, disagreeable”. Objectively-speaking, it can hardly be the case that former partners are as bad as all that, or they would have not had much chance of getting a date to begin with. Neither are current partners necessarily as good as all that. When we are in love, something seems to affect our ability to make rational judgements about people’s qualities and drawbacks.

IF SHE IS BAD, HE CAN’T SEE IT

When you are in love, the brain’s neural reward system overwhelms the cortex with dopamine, and this creates powerful links between pleasure and one’s love interest. The dopamine high is rivalled only by addictive drugs. Brain scans of newly-in-loves reveal activity switches off in brain areas controlling social judgements. “As a result, says Helen Fisher, “although we can list what we don’t like about our sweetheart, we sweep those facts aside and focus on what we adore”. Love, it seems, really is blind. ‘My perfect partner’ is not an entirely rational appraisal, but an idealised persona from some drug-induced fantasy of the mind.

It is not just when we are in romantic relationships that our minds tend toward the irrational. There are unconscious biases affecting us while we are single. Men and women differ in their biases, and evolutionary psychologist Martie Heselton explained that these differences can be attributed to evolved error-management strategies. Men have a tendency to overestimate the sexual interest conveyed by a woman. Such a bias can be attributed to evolution working to reduce the worst kind of judgement error. Broadly speaking, such errors come in two types. There are false positives, when we think something is there when, in fact, it is not. And there are false negatives, when something is there but we fail to see it. Consider the consequences of these errors of judgement. A false positive (believing the female is interested when she really is not) could result in some embarrassment. But, from an evolutionary perspective a false negative (failing to notice a female’s interest) is much worse because that results in lost reproductive opportunities. Heselton explained, “you cannot simultaneously minimize the risk of both these errors, so it makes sense for systems to be biased towards the less costly error”.

As for women, they tend to see men as manipulative, and are more sceptical than men with regards to the meaning of gift-giving. For women, evolutionary pressure worked to reduce the chances of ending up pregnant by a man who is not truly committed to the relationship. Women make a greater investment in reproduction. They are, after all, the ones who get pregnant, give birth and, in many cases, make the greatest investment in parenting. Women’s biases reflect these facts.

While Heselton’s work showed the sexes differ in their biases, psychologist Maureen O’ Sullivan’s studies show how men and women tell different sorts of lies to potential romantic partners. Men are more likely to lie about how committed to the relationship they are, whether they are really in love, and how wealthy they are. Women are more likely to lie about their partners sexual prowess. This is not particularly surprising, given that everybody knows people lie to one another in order to increase their chances in the dating marketplace. However, O’ Sullivan’s study also revealed how we are prone to a flattering self-delusion. It seems that, while everyone readily admits people lie to potential partners, when asked about how much they themselves lie, individuals tend to rate their own honesty as being greater than that of other members of their own sex. Women are particularly prone to such delusional thinking.

LYING? OR IMAGE PROJECTION?

As any augmentationist will tell you, human beings don’t separate from themselves when socialising online. That being the case, we should expect to find rhetorical spin, misleading half-truths and barefaced lies in online dating and online romances. In ’Alone Together’, Sherry Turkle wrote, “a college senior warned me not to be fooled by anyone who tells you that his Facebook page is ’the real me’”. The reason why not is because of the common theme underlying the seemingly different platforms of online games, online worlds and online social networks. What is common to all of these is that they ask participants to project an identity. And, as Turkle said, “whenever there is time to write, edit and delete, there is room for performance”. Online, we have more scope to control what aspects of ourselves become public knowledge. We choose what facts we will reveal about ourselves, which images we permit others to see. In some cases, people don’t just abridge and edit personal information, but also deliberately alter it, often to cast themselves in a more flattering light. The same college senior who warned Turkle not to believe anyone on Facebook is ’really me’ pointed out that the background in some girls’ portraits are distorted in just the way you would expect if photo manipulation had been carried out in order to make someone seem slimmer than he or she really is. And, lest we forget that men are also prone to flattering self-delusions, a study conducted by Jeffrey Hancock (which involved examining people’s profiles on a popular dating site and comparing self-descriptions to the actual person) revealed how men tend to make out they are taller than they really are. Other studies have shown how a man who is 5 feet 6 inches tall needs an additional $15,000 income to be as desirable as a man who is approximately 6 foot and makes $62,000 per year. Both cases (men portraying themselves as ideally tall and women wanting to seem ideally slim) are all to do with maximizing one’s chances in the dating marketplace.

It is accepted that people lie about themselves, but what kind of lies are acceptable? To what extent should a person be allowed to re-invent oneself online? Rhiannon Dragoone made an interesting comment at a Thinkers discussion: “There is roleplaying, image projection, being other than your first-life self, and then there are lies”. The implication is that we should draw a line separating lies from projecting an identity that differs from one’s own. But, as is the case with any abstract boundary, different attitudes and beliefs lead to disagreements over where the lines should be drawn. This much is obvious from the conflicting beliefs put forward by people at Thinkers. On the subject of fidelity, for example, Scarp Godenot said, “I would consider a romantic relationship in SL to be cheating on my RL partner”. On the other hand, Rhiannon Dragoone pointed out that “there are people who have relationships here, even though they are married in first life. It’s like they are single in SL and married in first life. Don’t see a problem with it, nor do their partners”. Clearly, trouble lies in store for any relationship in which a couple fundamentally disagree on whether or not online affairs count as being unfaithful. One such case made it into news headlines back in 2008. David Pollard had met Amy Taylor via their avatars in Second Life and they subsequently got married in real life. David never committed adultery in real life, but engaged in sexual relationships in SL. To him, this was not cheating because cybersex was merely a fantasy and it involved his avatar, not himself. Amy, though, considered this an act of betrayal serious enough to end the marriage.

One wonders if this couple ever sat down and talked their different attitudes. It’s obvious that no one drawing of the boundaries can accommodate all  beliefs. People embarking on online romances have to negotiate the terms and conditions of their own relationships, or decide whether it is better to compromise on one’s own convictions or walk away. One way to distinguish a lie from roleplaying may be ’any act that is contrary to agreed boundaries’. For instance, one couple in SL made a rule that extramarital affairs were permissible so long as it was done using an alt. Some might wonder what difference this makes. It’s like saying ’phone sex with somebody else is fine, but only if you use a different cellular phone”. But, whatever, it was their rule and it worked for them. Had one of them broken this rule, I would consider that lying to their partner. 

Talking to other residents about the subject of what is, and what is not, permissible in roleplay, one attitude that seems to come up a lot is the belief that the harder it is to identify a projection as being ’other than oneself’, the more problematic it is. Scarp Godenot commented, “ I suspect playing an opposite sex seems more deviant because others know for sure that you are not [a furry] whereas they don’t know about an opposite sex”. Several others agreed with the sentiment that gender swapping is particularly deviant (but others disagreed, saying ’it is not deviant, an avatar is only an avatar’). By the same token, posting somebody else’s RL photograph in your profile is more deviant than posting an avatar’s portrait. While both are, strictly speaking, not representative of the actual person, a prospective partner can see this is the case with an avatar, but one might not realise the photograph of a real-life person is not a true representation of someone’s actual appearance.  

Another belief that gets expressed quite a lot is the idea that if you intend to take an online relationship into the real world, then you need to conform your avatar to your RL identity. When, Lem Skall asked, “what does it matter what the RL person is like, even whether it’s a man or a woman?” Ivy Sunkiller replied, “it obviously does matter if you want to transfer the relationship to real life. Otherwise, personally, I don’t care”.

THE LIFE-MIX

I wonder, though, if it really is true that anybody ‘really doesn’t care’ what the RL person is like? It is certainly the case that some people have quite fulfilling relationships within SL and other online spaces, knowing full-well their feelings are being projected onto what is essentially a fantasy figure. But I suspect that even the most ardent immersionist counts on the person behind the avatar being, in some sense, just like the persona they project. I suspect we all like to believe that there are some aspects to a person which simply cannot be faked and it is these qualities that we form loving relationships around.

I want to get around to that via a rather roundabout route that begins with an observation of the dissolving of another boundary that has long served to separate the real from the virtual. Up until quite recently, if one wanted to enter virtual spaces, one had to sit in front of a computer screen. As Sherry Turkle said, “the passage through the looking glass was deliberate and bounded by the time you could spend in front of a computer”. Nowadays we have much more access to portable devices like smart phones. Although we still look at a screen when using such devices, the very act of always having them on our person and being able to get online anytime, anyplace makes the boundary between offline and online much more fluid. Turkle called this “the mashup of what you have on and offline. We have moved from multitasking to multilifing”.

To illustrate ‘multilifing’ Turkle referenced ‘Pete’ (not his real name) who was in a disappointing marriage. Pete’s avatar, Rollo, is partnered to an avatar called Jade. “Pete has never met the woman behind the avatar Jade and does not wish to. Pete says ‘SL gives me a better relationship than I have in real life. This is where I feel most myself. Jade accepts who I am. My relationship with Jade makes it possible for me to stay in my marriage with my family’”. ‘Multilifing’ enters the picture when Turkle observes Pete spending time with his son while simultaneously accessing his iPhone to be with Jade. “Something is familiar: a man finding a relationship outside his marriage gives him something he wants. But something is unfamiliar: the simultaneity of lives…Pete says his online marriage is an essential part of his ‘life mix’’.

This case raises many questions. How can it be that an affair conducted exclusively online makes for a better relationship than a marriage in physical space? One explanation might be the observation made by sex therapist Kim Myung Gun: “People have been saying for a long time that men have lost their desire for real women. Rather than have sex with a woman who doesn’t fulfil their expectations, they would rather play with something that corresponds to their fantasy, even if she’s not real”. Gun was commenting about a brothel that rented out sex dolls rather than online worlds like Second Life, but the idea of preferring something that corresponds to a fantasy might still apply. An online identity is constructed by choosing which private details to reveal (and, in some cases, which details to invent). The very act of editing leaves out details and perhaps this encourages the mind to fill in the gaps. Current technology also places limits on how fully a human life can be portrayed through an avatar. Again, perhaps this is encourages active imaginations to fill in missing details. The temptation might be to project what one wants. As Sherry Turkle said, “at the screen, you have a chance to write yourself into the person you want to be and to imagine others as you want them to be”. 

Something else that Pete said demands examination. ‘This (SL) is where I feel most myself. Jade accepts who I am’. Pete has never met- nor wants to meet- the person behind the Jade avatar. And whoever she is, her mental image of Pete is ‘Rollo’, his avatar which looks nothing like him. Given all that, how can Jade be the one who gets closest to the real Pete?

This brings us back to the point I raised earlier, about wanting to believe there are some things that cannot be faked. Should we believe such a thing, given that there are roleplayers in SL? In a study of the kinds of roleplay that go on in SL, Sounya Jain noted that relatively few residents (32%) wanted to reproduce their physical appearance through their avatars. The study also found that the more an avatar’s physical appearance differed (in an idealized way) from one’s actual appearance, the more attached to that avatar the user becomes. When it came to personality, though, the study found the opposite applies. On average, it is residents with the smallest psychological difference between RL and SL identities that are most satisfied and most attached to their avatars. Jain wrote, “we saw that users tend to see their avatar as having an idealized version of their own personality”. This corresponds with Turkle’s point about online identities being  oneself written into the person you want to be. But Jain’s study also determined that there is a correspondence between personality difference and time spent in SL. The more time a person spends inworld, the less their online/offline personalities diverge. In the conclusion to the study, Sounya Jain commented, “overall, our data suggests that avatars might be a better vehicle to explore new forms of physical embodiment rather than exploring facets of one’s personality”.

At a Thinkers meeting, Halo Evermore commented, “the chances of the two meeting and being compatible in RL are very slim”. It is certainly true to say that close relationships have formed inworld between people who probably would not have exchanged a second glance had they first encountered one another in real life. It is also true to say that some relationships that moved offline have not survived the realization that the fantasy and reality do not match up. But, if it is true that personality differences get smaller the more time one spends inworld, maybe that means a longterm inworld relationship actually has a fairly decent chance of succeeding in real life?

“I’m there at Heathrow”, recalled one person whose SL relationship made such a transition. “When I saw her come out I knew immediately it was her. I felt like she had been on a business trip but that we had been together our whole life”. 

Coming up in the next installment: ‘Romancing The Machine’.

VEHICLEISTS VERSUS ARCHITECTURALISTS: AN ALLEGORY

‘VEHICLEISTS VERSUS ARCHITECTURALISTS’: AN ALLEGORY.

When I read Henrick Bennetson’s essay ‘augmentation versus immersion’, I started playing around in my mind with an allegorical tale, involving two schools of thought developing around Legos.

Imagine there was a group of people and they consider making vehicles out of Legos to be the right thing to do. You can make trains, planes, automobiles, bicycles… anything, so long as it is a vehicle of some kind. Those subscribing to this school of thought are known as ‘Vehicleists’.

Opposing them, are the ‘Architecturalists’. As the name suggests, they believe Legos aught to be used for constructing houses, churches, skyscrapers… whatever can be labelled ‘architecture’.

Now, the classic Legos set is flexible enough for neither group to be wrong. Making vehicles out of Legos is a perfectly legitimate use of the toyset, and so is constructing various forms of architecture.

But, imagine that one group’s voice becomes powerful enough to influence the Legos company. The Vehicleists, say (it make no difference to the argument which group exerts the greater influence). Bowing to pressure from this group, the company make a series of modifications to the Legos playset which, bit by bit, makes it easier to construct more impressive vehicles, but at the same time makes it increasingly difficult to make anything that is not a vehicle of some kind. You can imagine that, if the Vehicleists’ influential voice is sustained long enough, eventually Legos would morph into a construction kit perfectly designed for vehicle creation… and which is absolutely useless for anything else.

If you happen to subscribe to the ‘vehicleist’ school of thought, the day when Legos shall be the perfect vehicle construction kit cannot come soon enough. From your point of view, any Legos playset which can accommodate anything other than vehicles is just wasting its resources on improper use of the plastic prims.

But for anyone not subscribing to this school of thought, maybe this metamorphosis of Lego would seem like no good thing at all. The counterargument might go something like ‘Ok, yes, these changes may increase Lego’s user base as the ‘vehicleists’ insist it will, but you know what? It takes away the magic of Lego, which was its original flexibility. And yes, in its original form it could only do any one thing reasonably well, rather than terrifically. A toyset whose purpose is to enable one to create a broad range of physical things can never be as good at making a particular something as something devoting all its resources into producing that particular something. I guess so long as you want ‘that particular something’ you would be better off with the specialized product rather than mucking around trying to create it out of classic Lego bricks. But what happens when you tire of ‘that particular something’? The specialized product become worthless to you! But the classic Lego playset? It never got old!”

As an alternative to the vision in which one group becomes influential enough to convince the company to support its use of the playset at the expense of anything else, imagine if both groups recognized the possibility of co-operation. I mean, why not? The architecturalists could construct  buildings, amassing enough to form towns and cities that the vehicleists could ‘drive’ their cars around. There definitely seems to be a possibility for mutual enjoyment.

The point of the allegory (as I am sure readers have guessed) is to highlight the same kind of benefit/drawback that would befall Second Life if one side of this supposed ‘immersion versus augmentation’ divide should become the influential voice exerting a pressure on Linden Labs. And the alternate question is just as important: How can these two schools of thought be brought together, cooperating for mutual gain?

FACEBOOK FAKE? OR FACEBOOK FICTION?

According to Wagner James Au, Facebook has deleted hundreds of his friends’ accounts. What all these deleted accounts have in common, apparently, is that they are Facebook accounts of avatars, rather than human beings. I say ‘apparently’ because Au wrote ‘I lost about a hundred friends on my own Facebook network, presumably avatars’, which sounds like he does not know for certain these deleted accounts were all avatars.

Au highlights one such deleted account. It belonged to Angie Mornington who, according to Au, is ‘a well-known personality in SL’. I find it rather bizarre that Facebook should have targeted her for deletion. It seems to me to be a case of mistaking a ‘fake’ Facebook account for a ‘fictional’ one.

What do I mean by ‘fake Facebook account’? Well, it can have several meanings. Here is one example. Suppose I set up an account calling myself Lady Gaga. Subsequently, Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta files a complaint saying “no, I am Lady Gaga and I own the copyright to my stage name. Please delete this account”. Another example would be the oft-told story of the account that is supposedly of a teenage girl but which is actually a dirty old man out to lure children so he can rape and murder them, or less dramatic than that an account set up deliberately to fool others in some humiliating way.

I would imagine anyone can see why Facebook would seek to block accounts whose sole purpose is to humiliate others, lure innocents to their doom, or infringe on some mega-star’s intellectual property, but I cannot imagine that any of this applied to Angie Mornington. Speaking for myself, I make it abundantly clear that my Facebook page is of a fictional character. My profile picture is of a cartoony-looking woman, and under ‘Basic Information’ it says “I am a digital person, which means I a) do not really exist or b) I do exist if you believe I do or c) I do not exist yet but might do in the future depending on certain technological advances. Choose your own options”. So, anybody ought to know when they choose to ‘friend’ me that what they are ‘friending’ is a kind of fictional character who is not meant to represent any ‘real’ flesh-and-blood human. If anyone does not want to ‘friend’ a fictional character they can simply choose not to send me a friend request.

Getting back to Angie Mornington, she told Wagner James Au that Facebook sent her an email saying her account had been disabled, an email which included a link which she followed.  “”I wound up at a page that said that in order to restore my account, I have to scan and upload a government ID showing my real name and photo, with everything else blacked out (social security number, address, etc.)”. Now, this brings up an interesting question which is ‘how do we know the Angie Mornington on Facebook really is the Angie Mornington? It could be like the Lady Gaga example I referred to earlier: Somebody other than the primary of Angie Mornington set up the ‘Angie Mornington’ Facebook account.

Actually, there is zero evidence to support such a theory. It is, however, possible in principle. It raises the question ‘to whom should it matter whether or not the person behind the avatar is always the same individual’? I guess it depends on the purpose of that avatar. Consider ‘Hamlet Au’. This is the avatar of Wagner James Au and, like his telephone number, email address and other means of contacting him it is a way to communicate with that particular person. You speak to Wagner James Au through his avatar. You do not want to speak to anybody else. Imagine ringing his mobile phone, but you unknowingly dialled the wrong number. The person you speak to pretends to be Wagner James Au. Would you appreciate being fooled in such a way? Probably not. Neither would anyone appreciate somebody pretending to be Wagner James Au on Facebook. Particularly not Wagner himself.

But now consider me. Since I am a obviously a kind of fiction, there is always somebody pretending to be me. A character requires an actor, a puppet needs its puppeteer. Anybody interacting with me is interested in interacting with the digital person ‘Extropia DaSilva’. In that case, what would it matter if the avatar bearing my name in SL, the account bearing my name on Facebook and the blogs posted under my name are not all the same person, but rather two or more people who manage to maintain a style consistent enough for ‘Extropia DaSilva’ to seem like the same person, wherever you may meet me?

Another thing to bare in mind when it comes to ‘Fake Facebook accounts’ is that all Facebook accounts are fictional. How so? Well it is an inevitable result of filtering ones own information. You choose what aspects of your biography you will share with the world, and what you will keep to yourself. You upload certain photographs but not others. Invariably, this results in a kind of avatar that is not really ‘you’ but a kind of idealised version of ‘you’. It is all a performance. Of course, some performances are based on a real life person. The film ‘The Social Network’ was about Mark Zuckerberg. Its director, David Fischer was very careful to say the protagonist of his film is the character of Mark Zuckerberg. We are not supposed to think the person portrayed in the film is a 100% accurate representation. I argue that we should likewise not suppose Zuckerberg’s (or anyone’s)  Facebook account is a 100% accurate representation. It is a character based on that person.

But what if the Facebook account is not meant to represent any real life person? What if it is an account of a digital person? By what measure should we judge the authenticity of the performance? It would have to be based on how well the performance holds up when compared to past interactions on other social networks/ online world. The more you know a digital person, the more prior information you have about its beliefs, dreams, hopes and fears based on past interactions across a variety of communications platforms, the harder it would be for somebody else to pretend to be that person and convince you that you are communicating with ‘the same person’. But, if somehow somebody did convince you they are really ‘me’, and the performance remains consistent with what you know about my character, remember this: It is not a fake. It is a terrific work of fiction.