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Thanks all for your insightful and thankfully skeptical takes on Second
Life! While SL should never be intended to replace real life (some
people actually criticize it for try to do so) people are finding that
it offers us empathic e<br>
xperiences previously only found when people occupy the same physical
space. <br>
<br>
Scott Kildall hit on what I've been trying to articulate for a while --
that SL "offers re-spatialization of activity and a
feeling of presentness... unique experiences that make people laugh and
form deeper bonds -- this is where Second Life can excel." This
ability to help people have deeper experiences that mimic physical
closeness gives us the opportunity to connect in unforeseen ways. The
first time I went into SL I had an experience that I think others of
have had -- I couldn't stop laughing. I wanted a new shirt and asked
the first avatar I found to help me find one, and she did. The
naturalness of the interaction, the embodied nature of it, the seeming
closeness -- it all felt so <i>weird. <br>
<br>
</i>In response to Trebor's question about "inconvenient youth" and
whether or not this fantasy world can "fertilize politics" in the real
world, Brian Holmes reminds us that art in general often creates
fantasies that enable us to "suss out all the connections to or
disjunctions from the rest of lived experience." Fantasies have always
served a purpose as spaces in which we can look out real life from a
distance, or model life as we'd like to live it. <br>
<br>
Andreas Schiffler points out the frustrating reality of it all -- SL
requires so much bandwidth and CPU as to make it completely impractical
for the kind of daylong use we associate with IM. He says that "if we
are looking at it as a medium to disseminate information, the
shortcomings outweigh the benefits," but I wonder if we aren't
misguided to think of it as a "medium to disseminate information,"
which suggests a mass medium; many users already understand the true
value of SL is in the quality of interactions it enables among small
groups, not in its ability (or inability) to help people spread a
message far and wide. <br>
<br>
I've noticed that whenever I try to tell someone about my work in SL
their thoughts quickly turn to money. "People are making money there,
aren't they?" they always ask. Steven Shaviro extends this
capitalistic obsession to networked media and the explosion of
"user-generated content." "I fear that the call or incitement to
participate, to get involved, to be creative, largely means that we are
being asked to be entrepreneurs of ourselves, and thus work ever harder
to facilitate our own exploitation." That's assuming that
entrepreneurship equals exploitation, of course... <br>
<br>
A few people brought up the fact that SL environments are often
simulacra of real-world environments. Many of our computer interfaces
also suffer from this lack of transcending their origins; it's struck
me as strange that, for example, among the tools in Final Cut Pro are a
"razor" and "reels." As Josephine Dorado points out, the real fun
happens when real life imitates SL. I agree; like Josephine, I too
want to fly and wear high-heel boots all the time! (Maybe not all the
time...)<br>
<br>
But Charlie Gere gets to the point; let's quote him a bit here: <br>
<br>
"It would seem to me obvious that trying to make some sense of and find
ways of mitigating the violence and unjustice in the complex world and
culture we already necessarily inhabit, not least bodily, is far more
pressing and considerably more worth defending than any supposed
capacity to 'design and inhabit our on worlds and construct our own
culture'. This seems to me to be at best a license for mass solipsism
and at worse something like the kind of thinking that undergirds much
totalitarianism, as well as an evasion of our responsibilities to the
world as we find it." <br>
<br>
Patrick Lichty is interested in the phenomenology of SL, as am I: the
unique <i>experience </i>you get in SL that, while possibly
solipsistic, gives us the chance to experience our world from a
distance. But take Gere's critique that the real world contains
problems far more pressing and dangerous than anything that could be
happening in SL. Is there a place for this kind of mass solipsism --
can it connect it us to the pressing issues of our time -- or by
laboring over building an island with orcas and moose living in the
same space, or worrying about what shirt our avatar is wearing, or
bombing a Reebok store and vandalizing John Edwards' SL space, are we
evading our responsibility to fix a seriously broken world? <br>
<br>
-Josh <br>
<br>
<br>
<div class="moz-signature">-- <br>
Joshua Levy <br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="http://www.personaldemocracy.com">www.personaldemocracy.com</a> <br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="http://www.levjoy.com">www.levjoy.com</a> </div>
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