Fictions

“Virtual reality is no longer an exception: today, it is everywhere and everything.” (Shaviro 88)

“The actual and the virtual are mutually dependent. Neither is meaningful without the other.” (Shaviro 113)

I am visible, therefore I am: Appearances and surfaces. What Andy Warhol came to terms with. What make up our Myspace profiles. What we accept as real, and what we construct so that we ourselves can be real. In Dancing with the Virtual Dervish, Gromala makes her body visible as a simulated environment (107-109) – a virtual instantiation of a real body. As Shaviro attests, she reclaims her body in the process of abstracting it. At the same time her constructed hyperreality attests to the interplay between body and embodiment, virtual and real.

I am perceived, therefore I am: There is no “real,” only virtual. And nobody ever inhabits the same virtuality. What does a pear taste like…to you? As in cognitive science, as Shaviro points out, “the ‘real world’ of our perception is in fact largely a construction of our own inner cognitive processes…what matters is only its effect within my mind” (83-84). Simulation is all that we have. Second life is a hyperreality, but no more than the hyperreality of first life, and perhaps that is why the two do not seem that different. We navigate both lives through the windows of our perception, a consciousness metaphorically distilled from a fragmentary chaos, “discontinuous, contingent, and continually creative” (122). There is the event (a “singularity”), and the recollection of the event with all its verities. The same parts of the brain are activated for perception as for imagination. The more you think about something, the stronger those neural connections (networks!) become, the easier that thought is to recall (and can be triggered), and the more “real” it seems. Shaviro’s discussion of cognitive science, neuroscience and psychedelic drugs extends the framework of forces that act upon us, from the technologies that reorganize our senses on a macroscopic level to the chemicals that do it on a microscopic level (185). So then psych patients suffering from disorders like depression are given a combination of chemical and cognitive therapy (this combinatory treatment is statistically the most successful). I immediately think of other psychiatric disorders that layer our understanding of human subjectivity. There is schizophrenia, characterized by a fragmentary and depersonalized subjectivity, often associated with A.I.; and autism, often characterized by “impaired” communication and social interaction. Social constructs play just as much a role in the formation of identity as do hormones and neurotransmitters, an interplay between culture and biology, body and embodiment, consciousness and unconsciousness, ad infinitum the network.

I am in debt, therefore I am: The global network is defined by capital. Shaviro says, “money at once grounds and volatizes virtual reality” (128), where virtual reality is a “space of flows” in which space has subordinated time (and time has become timeless – Castells). Money is by and large virtual, bits of information that form the fabric of flows. Work is play, the “new leisure” (137), hence, a culture of commodity is what makes a virtual playground engaging, indeed, a playground at all. In the network society a person is no longer enslaved, but indebted, “where every human transaction is instantly monetized and commodified, indebtedness is what makes it all work. You are only as good as your line of credit” (159). Financial assets are the essence of power. To contribute to the network society is to be economically productive.

I am connected, therefore I am: From a practical standpoint, being disconnected from the network has a multitude of consequences. The growth of economies, education, technology, etc. depend on the network, and those that are disconnected are invisible, “lost to the world where information is power” (176). The free market/network is a self-organized system that in many ways follows the laws of natural selection. It has no empathy or ultimate goal, and is in a perpetual state of transformation. Being disconnected from the network does not mean you reside outside of its influential reach, only that you do not profit from it.

I am what I am: Ellis and Bochner’s overview of autoethnography was most interesting to me because of my background as both a fiction and non-fiction writer. The methods of autoethnographers are essentially the methods of any writer. In particular, it reminds me of new journalism and the literary genres of creative non-fiction and memoir. They employ the same methods for the same purposes, and come across the same ethical issues; writing is always an introspective as well as a cultural study, composed both subjectively and analytically, “displaying multiple layers of consciousness, connecting the personal to the cultural” (739) – to me, it seems, writing and autoethnography are one in the same– both are studies and both are fictions. We construct and consume stories to help explain and relate to the world around us, and ultimately, to create meaning for ourselves. Both autoethnography and writing (especially creative non-fiction) employ literary devices and conventions in order to tell a story, where the writer is the voice and the gatekeeper, the one who takes the fragments of experience and pieces them together. Some selected things about autoethnography that Ellis/Bochner point out, which echo the things I have repeatedly learned in writing courses:

 

- “it’s not a project you’ll ever complete or get completely right; instead, you strive to get it ‘differently contoured and nuanced’ in a meaningful way” (752) – writing is a perpetual process, revisions upon revisions, where the final piece (even after it is published) is always subject to more revisions

- “it’s good to write about an event while your feelings are still intense, and then to go back to it when you’re emotionally distant” (752) – many writers keep journals to record their immediate thoughts and reflections, where later on they begin to analyze; same goes with drafts – several writers advise you put a draft away for a couple of months and then return to it, with a fresh perspective for revision

- “relying on memory, editing, and selecting verbatim prose out of context and then surrounding it with their own constructed analytic contexts” (753) – the very process of writing, in particular, new journalism and creative non-fiction; you organize the thoughts, feelings, events, memories, etc. into a narrative that reveals some sort of insight

- “you’ll essentially have to learn how to write by reading novels, and by writing and rewriting and getting feedback” (757) – this was the first thing I was ever taught about writing – you learn how to write not only by writing, but by reading – and the revision/feedback process is crucial

 

In a way, it was strange reading about autoethnography – seeing creative (or reflexive) writing within a scientific framework, although it makes complete sense within a social science framework – it’s just normally framed in the context of new journalism (I think of Joan Didion’s “Slouching Toward Bethlehem” and how those stories were essentially social studies). I wrote a creative non-fiction piece years ago (naked observations) in an attempt to tell both a personal story and to analyze the subject of sex/sexuality; I never looked at it through a social-scientific lens, but after reading Ellis and Bochner, I see the essay as both creative non-fiction and autoethnography. I think the qualitative methods of autoethnography are really important and the opportunities for learning, both internally and externally, are enormous, where again, writing is essentially a method of learning. Positivist models fail in their negation of narrative, for “life and narrative are inextricably connected” (745). In the crisis of representation, positivist truth is as flimsy as the transcendental self; “the self is indistinguishable from the life story it constructs for itself out of what is inherited, what is experienced, and what is desired” (746). We can gain a much deeper insight of the human subject by recognizing the fiction of experience and reading our own stories.

 

Another good point they made was about the usefulness of narratives and the limits of institutional approaches toward studying subjects such as illness (an often overlooked “Other”). Narratives bridge the gap between researcher and subject: “Most of these stories are written by people who don’t want to surrender to the victimization and marginal identities promoted by the canonical narrative of medicine” (749). The autism youtube link above (under the “I am perceived, therefore I am” section) is a good example of such a constructed narrative, with activist uses. Phoebe Sengers in her article “Schizophrenia and Narrative in Artificial Agents,” argues against institutional psychiatry (where “the patient is formalized, reduced to a set of somewhat arbitrarily connected symptoms…no longer a living, unique, complex individual but fragmented into a pile of signs”) in favor of narrative psychology. She says: “Narrative psychology shows that, whereas people tend to understand inanimate objects in terms of cause-effect rules and by using logical reasoning, intentional behavior is made comprehensible by structuring it into narrative or ‘stories.’ Narrative psychology suggests that this process of creating narrative is the fundamental difference between the way people understand intentional beings and mechanical artifacts.” Sengers, like Ellis and Bochner, prioritizes holistic and operant frameworks of analysis over “accuracy” and clean “categorization,” where the issues are “what narratives do, what consequences they have, to what uses they can be put” (746). Autoethnography calls for involvement and agency.

Notes and Reflections

Some notes:

- Thus far, in RL I have always been in my room, at my desk while engaging with SL. I don’t normally multi-task, but I do leave the screen from time to time for food or a cigarette, maybe my cell phone will ring, things like that. As engaged as I am in SL, I am never fully absent from RL – not just my physical body, but my thoughts as well.

- I think of my avatar as an extension of myself. It’s a spatial indicator I use to see my virtual location in a virtual space, and a visual representation that I use to interact with others and engage in simulated activities. I would say my facebook profile is more a representation of myself than my SL avatar, and I would say my SL avatar is closer to “myself.” What I mean by that is: when it exists I am always behind it, its behavior and decisions are mine. It is not just an abstract listing of attributes and empty photos (verifications of my own existence, as Shaviro might put it); rather, it is an active version of myself in space and time.

- My preconceived notions of SL from articles I’ve read and things I’ve heard become more obvious as time goes on. It’s more fun, less populated, and just as commodified as I thought it would be. It is not as “free” as I thought it would be, although I’m not sure I can articulate the “freedom” that I expected. Perhaps people doing off the wall stuff – “ludic play”? Social dynamics are very similar to RL, except I would say people are more social/outgoing. Relationships seem short term however, and the idea of building a solid, close and long-term virtual relationship with someone seems like it would be very difficult, and would definitely depend on one’s own social constructs in RL, I think.

- About having an SL significant other, I have a lot of questions about this. Can you have an RL and an SL significant other? Okay, of course you can…but if so, how do the RL/SL counterparts feel about that? What exactly are the dynamics of a purely virtual romantic relationship? Does it operate under the condition that it will eventually become actualized in RL at some point in the future? If it stays purely virtual, how deep is the investment and intimacy? Is the relationship based on a virtual persona, or an RL persona? Again, it’s dependent upon the social inclinations of the person involved – and I don’t think an SL relationship is necessarily lesser than an RL one – but as in the simulated sex question, I wonder how many people would choose an SL relationship over an RL one? Perhaps a purely virtual, SL romantic relationship can be likened to Shaviro’s “postmodern, or posthuman, equivalent of love…in which the subject and the object never meet; even connected by a glance or a stare, they remain apart…such love is a cool, aesthetic contemplation” (Connected 73).

- I pretty much learn as I go in SL. I recently figured out how to stay in third-person view but still use my mouse to navigate, rather than the keys. I like the third-person view better because I can see my position and movement, a luxury unavailable in RL. As for where I choose to go, I normally just click on a random location on the map. I think this is both fun and liberating – there are no physical constraints requiring me to have a destination in mind, nor a plan how to get there and back out again.

- The physical environs are nice, although nowhere as beautiful as some of the video game imagery I’ve seen. Still, really impressive, especially when I think of what simulated graphics used to look like just a few years ago.

- SL is not an escape for me really. I want to play, but I’m not sure how. The only things that come to mind is creating myself/my avatar into a character, that is, lying and story telling and perhaps even being a social miscreant, but I think this type of play would still be a scripted type of play. I mainly think of SL as a hyperreality, in Baudrillard’s sense of the notion. Is SL a “deterrent machine set up in order to rejuvenate the fiction of the real in the opposite camp,” as Baudrillard says of Disneyland? Perhaps, but SL seems less a part of the opposite camp than the same.

Presence, Engagement and Simulation

I met up with Albacore again in SL. Since the last time we met up, Albacore had been exploring SL a lot on his own and was able to show me some interesting places. For one, he showed me a place (HippiePay) where I could make some Linden cash, by either taking surveys at “atms” or “camping” which is essentially dancing on a designated spot. Five minutes of camping gets you L$2. It’s an extremely easy way of making money, if not a bit time consuming and boring. Camping requires both a virtual and physical presence, so you can’t just stick your avatar there and leave, as it checks up on you. If you’re not there every 5 minutes for the “security check,” you don’t get paid. The surveys pay out more, but require more attention of course and are used for advertising and marketing purposes. While a lot of places in SL seem pretty deserted, HippiePay island was considerably populated. The dance floors (or camp floors) were active and full.

After earning my L$2, we teleported over to Venice Beach, since I missed the class meeting there and wanted to check it out. Albacore, who has been to Venice Beach in RL, said that it did resemble the RL location a lot. We visited the art gallery which was nice and wandered around on the beach. It was pretty deserted except for some realtors whom I’m assuming were doing real estate business; I assumed this because all of them had realtor labels and they were standing around in a circle. Oddly, it struck me as a private conversation and I steered away. Having worked in an RL real estate office before and thinking of all the social interaction and paperwork involved, I wondered how SL real estate transactions differ – do you “show” property the way you would in RL? How is property value determined? Location and physical condition have everything to do with property value in RL, but in SL I don’t see how those kinds of things would transfer. What are the concerns of virtual property owners? As I flew away from the realtors there was a motorcycle floating in the air and I got excited, hoping I could ride it, but when I tried to mount it I was thrown off. Private property.

We got bored of Venice Beach and decided to go to a club. The club didn’t look like a club really. The dance floor was situated outside, and looked more like an outdoor stage. There were some people dancing and a few sitting around the dancefloor camping…I noticed they were making much less money than at HippiePay, around L$1 for every 10 minutes of camping. I wondered if there were places where you could make more/faster money than HippiePay. I “heard” someone say, “be kind and tip your waitress well,” and wondered if SL servers rely on tips the way they do in RL.

Albacore and I were talking about how boring it was to just dance on the dance floor, and again, about the shelf life of SL. He mentioned how most of what he’d seen so far kind of revolved around sex and commodity, and I said I had noticed the commodity part but not the sex. He told me he had seen some virtual prostitutes the other day, which peaked my interest. Virtual prostitutes?? So I asked him if he could show me where he saw them, and he teleported me to none other than a virtual sex den. This turned out to be a far more interesting place than the club.

The sex den was a large, 2 story indoor place – also much more populated than a lot of other places I’d been in SL. In fact, it was so populated that there was a lot of lag time – I’m not sure if this was the SL server or my computer, but I hadn’t experienced it on Venice Beach or at the club. All the walls were covered with either advertisements or extremely graphic pictures. Many of the avatars were very developed body-wise, with embellished and detailed genitals…some were clothed, some naked, some half-naked. No private rooms, so everything was out in the open. There were different types of sexual play devices everywhere, such as bondage contraptions – engaging with the devices would put your avatar into different sexual positions and/or cause it to do some sort of sexual motion i.e. gyrating. One avatar was giving another one oral sex and I wasn’t sure how this was done – do you have to buy that gesture somewhere? Another avatar (Prince of Dark Pleasure, or something like that) was watching a nude avatar chained in submission; both avatars were extremely attractive and I couldn’t help wondering about their RL counterparts and just the strange dynamic of such specific types of sexual preferences played out in a virtual world (for instance, as I understand it, in an RL S&M context, the act of submission means that the person in submission is not allowed to make eye contact with anyone – the avatar was certainly carrying this out in SL, but in RL she – or he – had to be looking at the screen, and if so, doesn’t that change the whole nature of the sex act?)

When I first arrived at the sex den, I came across a woman shackled in chair, and there were balls lying on the floor around the chair with the word “torment” above them. Engaging with the balls gave you different choices of how to torment the person in the chair, such as “laugh at them” and “tickle their feet,” among others. So…I did, not really sure if the person in the chair was an avatar or dummy. The woman in the chair didn’t do anything in response, so I took a picture. A little later I asked Albacore what he thought, and he told me that of course it was an avatar, and I immediately became embarrassed…less so for participating in the act, and more because I had taken a picture. If it bothered her however, she didn’t say anything.

There were plenty of opportunities to buy sex products, most like what you would find in RL. I was beginning to think you had to spend money to really do anything other than engage with the sex devices available, but then I came across a free sex kit, complete with all sorts of RL equivalents (cuffs, whip, ball gag) as well as some purely SL stuff (unless there is an RL equivalent to a “penis shooter”). I had a lot of fun trying on the different objects to mine and Albacore’s amusement, and in the midst of trying out the whip, some avatar came out of nowhere and right into the line of my whip. So…I whipped him. It made a loud whip sound and I couldn’t help but be amused by the whole novelty of the situation. It wasn’t until later when another completely nude avatar, with extremely exaggerated body parts addressed me by name, sat down in front of me, and asked if he could serve me that it became a little strange for me. Non-verbal participation allowed me to remain detached, however the verbal communication (when he said my avatar’s name, especially) made the interaction much more real for me. At this point, I felt guilty for being there, like I was disturbing the environment by being a curious observer and not a “real” participant. It was confusing though – on the one hand, I did technically participate despite the fact I wasn’t engaged in it the way the context of the environment suggested I should be. I was participating virtually through the actions of my avatar, and realistically by clicking with my mouse. Was I violating some sort of code of ethics? Could other avatars tell I was just a curious tourist? When the avatar came up to me to be whipped, Albacore was right there watching. The avatar’s virtual reality had every reason to pin Albacore down as a voyeuristic sexual participant; meanwhile, in RL, Albacore and I are laughing about the situation over our cell phones (me, one second after pulling out the whip: well he came right up here, and out of nowhere, didn’t he? Albacore: yes he did! Haha…).

The dynamics of virtual sex/sexual simulation brings Hayles’ dialectics into play – embodiment/body, presence/absence. A spatial, virtual presence seems to differentiate an SL sexual engagement from say, textual cybersex where the presence of a sexual participant cannot be gauged as well. Since a visual avatar gives a more immediate sense of presence, it would seem that an SL sexual activity could be more engaging than other types of simulated sex. How important is ‘presence’ of an RL counterpart to virtual sex? Simulation of the physical activity is of course completely acceptable, but simulation of the participant’s agency seems less so. Plus, a virtual presence does not necessarily constitute an engagement in the activity (although that seems irrelevant, as long as an illusion of engagement is maintained). As much as sex and sexuality are abstracted (and as much as they have to do with mental processes), to what extent can they be separated from the corporeal body? How many people would actually choose virtual sex over real sex? Finally, is there a difference between this particular virtual/real tension as opposed to others (i.e. simulated dancing vs. real dancing)?

I felt somewhat like Tom Cruise’s character in Eyes Wide Shut, like I had access to seeing something people normally don’t have access to seeing– the dynamics of virtual/real presence and my own mobile avatar navigating/interacting in a spatial environment had everything to do with the novelty for me.

From Real Friendship to Virtual Friendship

My second time in SL, I met up with a good friend of mine who was trying it out for the first time. He lives in Baltimore and I don’t get to see him much, so I thought it would be interesting to “hang out” with him in SL…wondering how it would be different and the same as in RL. I transported him to where I was still located on Help Island, and when he arrived I was surprised how glad I was to see his avatar, despite the fact it looked nothing like him. Having a visual representation of him constituted a virtual presence that was surprisingly similar to a real presence – I think the feeling of his “presence” was considerably augmented by my ability to interact with him in a virtual-physical way with my own avatar. I wanted to hug him, but found that physical interaction is pretty much limited to movement and gestures (what is the reason for that?), so I settled for pushing him around a little bit. He told me to cut it out. I felt bad afterward for pushing him around – it is just as annoying (or almost just as annoying) in SL as in RL – but my urge for physical contact was what prompted me to do it in the first place.

I gave him the basic run-down, so that he could skip over Orientation Island; after getting used to the menus and controls (not difficult for him, being a video game player), he spent a considerable amount of time creating his avatar/editing his appearance, which influenced me to do the same. I had already been thinking about it – was interesting to note that in the cultural context of SL, being plain or looking anything like the original “girl next door” avatar made me stand out, or at least self-conscious of standing out – again, the cross-over of RL social dynamics into SL is interesting, and frankly, kind of annoys me. Anyhow, I didn’t want to look like a “newbie” or a “tourist” so I decided to invest some time in my avatar. (This, after I was finally able to get my dad to bring my desktop up to NY, with a suitable graphics card – beforehand, I had had some problems going into SL on my laptop – images were flickering, making it frustrating to explore and pretty much hit and miss in terms of editing my appearance). The more I got into it, the more I cared about my avatar’s appearance. Was it because I wanted my avatar to correspond in some way to my real self? Or was it the same as any other creative project, where my time and effort spent (involvement) automatically made it personal for me? Albacore (referring to both my friend and his avatar) made it a point to be both race-less and androgynous which is, in the context for those who know him, very representational of who he is.

Albacore got bored with Help Island pretty quickly and teleported somewhere else, while I stayed behind and checked out the freebies available there. Some of the ones I especially liked were the kung-fu scripts and the script that allows you to burst into flames. As fun as it was to run the scripts, I wondered how long the novelty of such things would last for me. Then, feeling Albacore’s absence – even though I was still on the phone with him – I transported to where he was and we explored together. It was a lot of fun to fly around with him, and share the experience of being new to SL. I was fascinated by how real it felt to follow him around when he was walking – again, having this spatial representation combined with the real-time interaction really gave the virtual experience an RL dynamic. We ended up in a gaming area – Medieval Crusade being the game – which is essentially an RPG fantasy type game where you gain experience/points by exploring, killing monsters, and acquiring skills (i.e. magic). Because you are playing the game within SL and using your SL avatar, I wondered if death in the game translated to death in SL. However, the game cost money to play, and I had zero Linden dollars to expend on finding out. I thought the “game within a game” layer was pretty interesting, and then found myself wondering how game-like SL really is…and then, after that, what constitutes a “game.”

My experience in SL with Albacore was a really positive one – I had fun with him and was surprised how engaging it was to hang out with him in a virtual world. Sometimes it was difficult; unlike hanging out in RL, it was quite easy to lose sight or get separated from each other, which was an interesting dynamic – if we lost sight of each other or got separated, we’d either work it out over the phone (similar to what we’d do in RL), but of course the easiest thing to do was just to transport each other to where the other was. Later we figured out how to highlight each other on the map so that a red beam would indicate where the other happened to be – teleporting and red spotlights from the sky were extremely conducive to exploring “together” while not having RL limits such as having to stay by each other’s side the whole time. It was also nice to discuss the things we thought were novel or interesting about SL, and the doubts both of us had about all the hype (what are the retention rates of SL members? How long will this hold interest for us? If it is as much like RL as we’ve seen so far, what about it will make it as engaging as RL in the long-term?). While it couldn’t take the place of spending RL time together, in the end, it did seem like we had spent time together – more so than if we had been instant messaging each other, for instance. When I think of the difference between hanging out in SL and something like video conferencing, I think of how we were engaged in an activity together, as opposed to just a conversation. Before parting ways in SL, we made plans in RL to hang out in SL again.

Mobile networks, Ubiquitous Computing, and Capitalism

Through Rheingold, we understand the emergent posthuman as mobile, networked, and more fully integrated with (immersed in?) responsive environments of intelligent and “invisible” (pervasive) media technologies. With ubiquitous and intelligent computing, the boundaries between physical and virtual worlds are further blurred, resulting in less physical constraints as the physical world itself “becomes browsable and clickable” (Sentient Things 95).

 

The posthuman is empowered because of the community building and collective intelligence/action, made possible by the networking capabilities of new media technologies. Rheingold makes some interesting observations about the manifestations of this “decentralized self-organization,” which he compares to flocks of birds; individuals in the group enter into a symbiotic interaction with each other, in which the group functions as a single entity, i.e. in a musical performance, where communication between members of the group is “continuous and two-way, and it does not involve symbolic mediation” (Smart Mobs 178). Not quite the posthuman (or superhuman?) disembodied, collective consciousness portrayed in many sci fi narratives, but similar to Hayles’ notion of an interplay between body and embodiment, “dynamic partnerships between humans and intelligent machines” (Hayles 288). Rheingold points out that many believe “networks constitute the newest major social organizational form, after tribes, hierarchies, and markets” (Smart Mobs 163).

The democratic potentialities of wireless networks/mobile smart mobs, and the increased intelligence and efficiency afforded by wearable computers portend good things for the future. But of course, there is the proverbial fork in the road in terms of which direction we will choose to take, with and through these technologies. Public and private spaces are collapsing into one another; as in the Internet Research Ethics article where a delineation between public and private space on the net is technically impossible, the phenomenon is carrying over from virtual space to real space. GPS and location services have large Big Brother implications, although I think it’s naïve to think that surveillance hasn’t already become a large part of our electronic infrastructure – data mining, for instance, and MySpace as a voluntary virtual panopticon.

 

Will increased mobility and the continual erosion of physical constraints (both spatial and temporal) lead to a deterritorialization of institutionalized culture, or will we simply reinscribe dominant cultural paradigms onto the new technologies as we have been doing thus far (the overwhelming power of capital and the culture industry never ceases to amaze me)? What will we do with our posthuman intelligence and efficiency? Are we making it easier to be human, or are we making it easier to work and consume? Or has being human and work/consumption become one in the same?

 

I am reminded of an article I read by Steven Shaviro in which he discusses the development of MUDS, early text-based virtual worlds which eventually came to simulate the “free-market” economy. He points out that “any market economy, mercantile or capitalist, presupposes an underlying condition of scarcity,” (Money For Nothing 10) and questions why the community would develop an artificial scarcity in an abundant and “endlessly replicable” virtual environment. One attitude was that a risk-reward structure, gives a sense of meaning and purpose to people’s lives, just as a set of rules gives a game its objective. Shaviro makes a more interesting observation, drawing on Deleuze’s concepts of the “real,” the “virtual,” and the “actual” (which rely on a conception of time in which the past and present are contemporaneous: since the present is in constant motion, it is always becoming the past at the same time it is present – the virtual needs only to be actualized to become real – so, if actualization occurs in the present from a virtual past, and the two temporal planes are contemporaneous, then the virtual takes on essential properties of the real). The “real” and the “virtual” are both real, just as “real” and “virtual” economies are both real. Shaviro points out that RL trade in financial derivatives “exceeds many times over the buying and selling of actual commodities” (13) and has real economic effects, yet it is virtual capital in that it is immaterial. Shaviro calls the phenomenon “ludocapitalism” in which real life has taken on the conditions of game space, work is play, and this type of play is productive in generating profit. Through their respective economies, we can see the real and the virtual overlap through SL and RL.

 

The growing economy of Second Life and the “attentive billboards” (responsive, intelligent advertisements) Rheingold talks about support the idea of ludocapitalism. The market has already transformed the internet into a data mining vehicle (facebook, gmail, etc.) for which to generate profits through increasingly intrusive target advertising. The mobile platform is on its way, with Google’s new advertising network developed for cell phones launching just this week. As for SL, creating a commodified virtual world was always part of the plan. When asked how value is realized in SL, CEO and founder Philip Rosedale said:

“One of the things that’s been underscored is the degree to which we value objects to the extent of seeing the amount of creative energies that have gone into them. A Mercedes is valued because of intangibles, not the number of screws and the technology used to put it together. It’s its service record. If things have that associated with them, they are real. They don’t need to be physically tangible to be real.

Scarcity is another way of creating value, but brand, lifestyle and meaning are important as well. Clothing from [in-game clothing designer] Nephilaine Protagonist is highly valued because it’s her stuff. I talked with a head guy at Vercace who said to me, “I sell jeans for $5,000. There’s no reason for that, but people will pay that much for the pleasure of wearing the brand.”

Should virtual property be treated as real? It’s moot; what’s happened in common law is that it’s been determined to be real. Case closed.”

Rosedale is dedicated to the fostering of ludic play in SL, as he contends in the interview, as long as it remains within the parameters of a capitalist infrastructure.

In this commodified context of new media technologies, the positive, as Rheingold points out, is more consumer awareness and control over products through the increased information provided by things like penny tags.

Between Humans and Technology

- “When the self is envisioned as grounded in presence, identified with originary guarantees and teleological trajectories, associated with solid foundations and logical coherence, the posthuman is likely to be seen as antihuman because it envisions the conscious mind as a small subsystem running its program of self-construction and self-assurance while remaining ignorant of the actual dynamics of complex systems” (Hayles 266).

- “The polarities defining the end points of the axes acknowledge the historical importance of dichotomies, but the field itself is generated by the interplay between these endpoints” (Hayles 196).

 

The posthuman is not a disembodied, informational entity that is no longer subject to human conditions (ones and zeroes traversing computerized networks and utilizing bodily prosthesis when required) nor the transformation of humans to machine-like, consciousless entities, no longer possessing any individual autonomy. Nor does it adhere to any of the sci-fi narratives that Hayles deconstructs, which seem to preserve a liberal humanist view in face of a threat that’s neither here nor there. Hayles suggests an inclusive conception of the posthuman that recognizes and focuses on the dynamic and emergent interactions between humans and technology, as they continue to evolve and affect each other. She uses the dialectics of presence/absence, inscription/incorporation, body/embodiment, and pattern/randomness as a theoretical framework for exploring this conception of the posthuman.

Despite the current dominant cultural logic of disembodied information (post-modern and poststructural), Hayles reminds us that an abstract, immaterial ideology such as “the body as cultural construct” is produced out of material conditions. Overlooking such a factor is like overlooking the fact that abstraction requires a system of representation. Hayles sees embodiment – a “mode of learning, and hence of intellection, different from that deriving from cogitation alone” (201) – as a chief element of an individual’s experience/understanding of the “body.” Kinesthetic intelligence, cultivation of habits, and motor responses all attest to a bodily understanding that is separate from cognition. The mind and body never split; the cerebral cortex was an evolutionary response to environmental factors, and remains connected to its predecessor, the instinctual, reptilian brainstem.

Hayles’ dialectics of body/embodiment and inscription/incorporation, where body/inscription is discursive and embodiment/incorporation is material and/or contextual, seem almost painfully obvious; is it really possible to deny the corporeal body? Yet, she confronts a principle issue in both postmodern ideology and a philosophy of the mind in general, not just the limits of deconstructionist and dualist arguments, but the limits of intellectual abstractions that exist in a vacuum. It’s important to understand that the cultural logics of liberal humanism and postmodernism are both conditional – “Just as the metaphysics of presence required an originary plenitude to articulate a stable self, deconstruction required a metaphysics of presence to articulate the destabilization of that self” (Hayles 285). The posthuman is not just the next step in a linear and static evolution of the human subject; rather, the posthuman must be understood at the intersection of a complex set of interactions that are continually mobile and dynamic. She echoes Mcluhan by seeing new media technologies as human extensions rather than replacements, where we become more intelligent by altering our environment and where thinking is done in tandem by “human and non-human actors”.

I thought Hayles’ discussion of “randomness” is especially pertinent to ethnographic methods of research, where randomness is not a deficit in control but a “creative ground from which pattern can emerge” (286). After all, control is merely an illusion we subscribe to in order to harness the chaos into something we can understand, if only through metaphor. In that sense, nonlinear, localized, specific and temporal methods of research seem much more conducive to understanding the fluid and emergent forms of cultural development related to humans and new media technologies (than, say, a positivist model of research). The ethnographic researcher is an observer and participant, with the full recognition that she or he is constantly acting and being acted upon.

First Impressions

Choosing an SL name and avatar took more time than I anticipated. I generally don’t put much time and thought into these things, perhaps because I don’t invest a lot in VR personas…it’s the same with video games. I never care what my avatar is called or looks like, I just want to start the game already. But I wanted to put a little thought into it this time, my particular objective being to choose a name with no RL equivalent. Why not? I found it interesting that the choice in last names is limited to the list provided…I looked for Talaj as a last name, didn’t see it, and wondered if they periodically change the choices. “Vita” was one of the choices, Latin and Italian for “life,” and thought about doing a cheesy first name/last name combo in Latin such as “Sweet Life,” “Strange Life” or even “Second Life,” but finally decided to go with an aesthetically pleasing (and less-cheesy) first/last name combo – a small RL desire that I might live out in SL – and stuck with the Latin for the first name. For my avatar, I was expecting there to be a lot of choices and was surprised to see the limited few to start with. After contemplating for a long time between the male animal character and the female girl next door, I went with the plain and simple one…thinking I’d worry more about what I looked like later…if ever. It’s a chore to worry about what one looks like in RL, for me anyhow, so it seems illogical to force that upon myself in SL. I thought being a different gender and/or species might add an interesting dimension to my experience, but ultimately decided that my first plunge into SL would be rife with enough interesting dimensions already…and I can always create another avatar later, should I want. It’s too early to tell what my relationship to my avatar will be – on the one hand, I’m one step closer to personalizing it by putting some decent thought into the name; on the other hand, as of right now, I’m primarily looking at the avatar in a functional capacity, as a virtual body needed to navigate a virtual space.

 

Skimming over the SL code of conduct, I found the paragraph about (essentially) respecting and protecting the privacy of others interesting, particularly in light of the ethics readings we did for class. If I remember correctly, it explicitly states that you are not allowed to share or post conversations with other people, without their permission. This struck me immediately as problematic, in terms of ethnographic research. Clearly the SL community is concerned with privacy issues much more than other online communities I’ve been exposed to; I think this is a good thing but doesn’t lend itself well to privately logging and publicly blogging about other SL people and their SL lives. Sure, you just have to ask permission…but how will this affect the interaction? Another rule I found interesting: refrain from any activity which slurs a real-world individual. Limits on free speech? Is this rule in place to keep RL separated from SL, or to solidify a connection between the two? Does this mean I can’t make derogatory references to a certain world leader, that people make derogatory references to in RL all the time? Or is it only referring to SL individuals who have an RL counterpart?

 

At first I had trouble plugging into SL, and then I realized I was signing in with my real name and not my newly created avatar’s name. This made me very conscious of having a separate SL identity…and one that is truly from scratch – as opposed to the usernames for online accounts that people tend to use over and over; in my case, there is one particular username I tend to use, which I suppose constitutes as my frequent online (textual) avatar. Once the mistake was corrected, I was catapulted into Kaizen Island. My avatar appeared on the screen naked, and I was surprised to find myself self-conscious about this, in front of the other clothed avatars in the vicinity; consequently I found myself a bit relieved when my clothes appeared. The physical environment was great, very Alice-Through-the-Looking Glass – I was standing on a “life-size” chessboard, with huge, floating chess pieces, set in the midst of some other white buildings and rolling, green landscape. I was almost immediately befriended by someone, a male avatar, whom I’ll call Crush. He could tell I was new to SL and told me he was new as well. Crush was in Bangalore – IT capitol of India – and I found myself wondering if that’s what he did for a living in RL. He wanted to know where I was located in RL, and I had to think for a minute whether I wanted to lie or tell the truth – not for security’s sake, but just because I could.

 

I decided to tell the truth, but this struck me as an interesting reaction…I don’t feel compelled to lie in different online environments, despite the fact that I can do it just as easily. I think: the urge to feel liberated through lying about my location has to do with some preconceptions I may have about SL (and perhaps some boxes I’ve put myself into, in other online environments) – namely, that it is an escapist environment. You can look, be and do whatever you want, and that’s a part of the concept, no? Then again, nothing I’ve read about SL has led me to that notion, other than the modes of transportation. In fact, what most interested me about the evolution of SL since I first heard about it, was how similar to RL it has and is becoming. What are people doing in SL? They’re advertising, they’re making money, they’re worrying about their appearance, socializing, and acquiring virtual-material possessions. And in my case, they’re submitting themselves to RL social codes that seem quite unnecessary within the social realm of SL. But it’s only my first venture into SL after all, so perhaps these are my expectations culled simply from what I’ve read.

 

My first instinct was to just look around and figure out how to move. I found navigation relatively easy just from my limited experience with video games, and immediately went into MouseLook in order to observe my surroundings. A lot of people were just standing around, some were walking/running, one or two were levitating. Crush was continuing conversation, wanting to know where the dance clubs were and I found it a bit difficult to converse with him while at the same time trying to get my bearings. I asked him what motivated him to try out Second Life, and he said it was referenced in a BBC article about another virtual world platform up for launch next spring called Metaface. I down-sized SL momentarily to scroogle Metaplace, a virtual world integrated with the web and which will allow users to build their own virtual worlds and network them. A bit difficult for me to fully visualize, but it seems pretty interesting – I wonder how people will use it differently from SL. Meanwhile, Crush is asking me why I haven’t moved at all…and I become aware of my completely observable, virtual body. I couldn’t multi-task invisibly the way I could with a textual avatar. I explained what I was doing, but Crush had already flown to a dance club and was asking me to join him. Having no idea how to do that, I began browsing the different interface and menu options. He told me the name of the club and to just fly north, and was of little help when I pressed for further instructions – “Isn’t it all about keys and mouse?” he said. I told him I was going to explore a bit further, and then after that, check out Orientation Island.

 

I walked over to one of the buildings in which there were display boards of different comics. On my way over I saw an avatar dancing in the middle of the grass, by herself. It might have been a novel sight in RL, but after seeing other avatars just standing around or levitating, it seemed a completely acceptable SL activity. I felt a disconnect with my virtual body nonetheless. What made her want to virtually dance? She didn’t seem like a newbie just figuring things out, since her avatar was well developed (here I could have checked her SL birthday and profile, but didn’t know how yet). I tried to think what might compel me to dance virtually (especially without a context i.e. a virtual dance hall) – and without coming up with any immediate answers, respected the dancing avatar for her playfulness, randomness, or whatever you might call it. Then I accepted the invitation to teleport to Orientation Island.

 

I went through Orientation Island – had some trouble with changing my appearance, perhaps a video card issue – the clothes and body features just weren’t showing up properly. Had a little trouble using the magnifying glass too. Everything else was easy. I saw a really interesting looking avatar and went up to get a better look when he startled me by saying hi. Here, I noticed two things. One – the interface being the same as a video game made it easy for me to forget that I was engaged in a virtual world integrated with the real world, that there were people in RL behind the other avatars, and that my own avatar and its behavior was visible to others in the same way as RL. My consciousness of my own avatar, especially in the Mouselook, went in and out. I thought nothing of going right up to another avatar and staring at him (just as I would think nothing of it in a video game with conscious-less characters) but once I realized there was a real person behind the avatar, I became embarrassed. I mean, I was literally right up in his face. Two – I wouldn’t classify myself as shy in RL, but something close to it (until I get to know people at least) and I noticed this carried over to SL. It seems both silly and sensible that social anxieties might cross the threshold from RL to SL, the same way concerns about appearance would (which is a social anxiety in itself, I suppose).

 

Fortunately the “froggie,” as he put it, who was wearing a huge, mad-hatter type hat, didn’t mind that I went right up in front of him to stare, without so much as saying hello; he was actually very friendly and said hi to everyone. I found it interesting how impressed one person was with Froggie’s avatar, approaching him with a high-five-like attitude; I heard others referring to it as a costume. In RL, such a costume would elicit a very different response I think – but maybe more interesting is the fact that everyone remained as removed from SL as I did, in that they recognized Froggie as an avatar and not as a virtual person. Perhaps it was because we were on Orientation Island, but I realized I had another expectation of SL – and that was that people within SL would be engaged to the point that an avatar would be perceived as an individual, and not just function as one; in other words, if someone looks like a frog in RL it seems appropriate to say – “hey, great costume!” – but in SL, I was perhaps expecting a different reaction. Finally, I was surprised to learn I could hear other people’s conversations and other people could hear mine. Wasn’t expecting that, and it definitely added an “RL” dimension to my interactions with people. Can you whisper in SL?

 

I spent several hours in SL for my first venture, and imagine subsequent ventures will last that long. It’s easy to get absorbed and there is certainly a lot to explore.

Internet Research Ethics and Considerations

The Culture Cat article on research ethics outlined important questions to consider in respect to research subjects/participants. Questions surrounding IRB guidelines, informed consent and the relationship between subject and researcher were all included in the outline.

“Ethical Guidelines for Research” expanded on the Culture Cat outline, emphasizing the importance of informed consent. Something that stood out to me was that subject pseudonyms function in the same way as real names, and should therefore be treated as such when considering the rights and privacy of the subject…a seemingly obvious point, but something that could be overlooked. The article elucidated the different levels of risk to subjects and appropriate corresponding levels of disguising (of the subjects’ identities); also, an archive is considered public if it is accessible without a password. Also emphasized in this particular article: the rights of subjects always come before the integrity of research.

The article on Netnography really elucidated the discipline of ethnography for me – comprised of field work, the study of distinctive meanings, practices and artifacts of particular social groups, and the representations based on the field work – “the construction of meaning is open-ended…grounded in the local, the particular, the specific.” The relationship between the researcher and subject must have a strong basis in trust in order to develop “streams of information” non-manufactured or constructed, casting the researcher in the role of participant and observer as well. Unlike the positivist approach, researchers acknowledge their own bias and background as an inevitable element in their interpretation of results. The objective of the research is a “particularized understanding” of the research material or “grounded theory,” which can be specific, temporal, contextualized, and not necessarily replicable, where the quality of data is evaluated through “trustworthiness” rather than “validity.” Trustworthiness is more concerned with quality of interpretation – appropriate research protocol and thoroughness, as opposed to stringent guidelines which produce a correct, universal or repeatable result.

“Internet Research Ethics” – The main argument of this article was to approach internet research through a hybrid model that considers textual and body considerations, as well as the ( already well established) spatial framework; the “safest” or most commonly used human subjects model has limited application in terms of investigating the cultural production of texts. I found this article really interesting – the spatial paradigm that guides both internet users and researchers overriding the more obvious textual elements inherent to virtual “spaces” and the cultural production that comes out of them, and the relation of this to a capitalist colonization of the internet and the private/commercial interests such a framework serves. It was interesting to note the importance of a suspension of disbelief in terms of creating intimate online communities with a high quality of engagement in users, despite the technically impossible delineation between public and private in virtual spaces. I think the argument for a hybrid model that does not limit virtual texts to “virtual selves nor objects completely distinct from those who write them” is well supported; as well, it complicates ethical issues for researchers focusing on “netnography.”