Is our emerging virtual world literacy facilitating freedom, or quasi-religious indoctrination? On the heels of my previous post about alts, and the insightful commentary that followed from others, I ran across an intriguing post (design note: one which would be far better if they’d change the background wallpaper that almost makes the site illegible) on the inter-subjectivity between real and virtual spaces.
First, the poster notes:
Virtual worlds thrive on the content of the communication that is crafted meaningfully through the imagery of friendship. It is crafted to deal with individual users through an inter-face of choice and freedom, as a world of possible friends and friendly voices. In other words, the world of communication technology is dominated by the culture of friendship.
This is however followed by the rather striking comment that:
For example – literacy was often represented as the magic wand of transforming the world. The nation state was built around the energy of literacy which allowed – in the words of Benedict Anderson – to produce new emotive political imaginaries. According to Anderson – nations were new emotive abstractions that were facilitated by a new technology – literacy.
(Some) took the gift of literacy, modernized it through technological extensions and produced new versions of political-religious indoctrination that didn’t do much to extend the slogans that they brandied about. They controlled knowledge systems – directly or indirectly – and produced highly literate people with ancient political prejudices.
Thus it makes the cautionary note for us not to be enamored with the technology itself:
Today – as we imagine a less nationalized and territorialized world (as a political ideal – however contested) where technologies of all kinds have actually made it possible to cut through many firewalls – it is tempting once again to rely a lot on the imagined anti-bodies that exist within new communication technologies to help change the world.
But what’s more intriguing to me is still the misconstrued notion that the technology itself isn’t designed and coded with a specific moral framework, whether conscious or not. The idea, or illusion, that technology gives us freedom of expression is, in my view, misguided in most cases. We need to at least be aware of, and make decisions based on the limitations that the code creates for our self-expression.
To simplify, there’s been a lot of talk about alts. Using alts for business reasons, to explore using a different identity. But we only NEED alts because the code doesn’t allow us to create zones of privacy for ourselves. For example, the “show online status” button on your friend’s list – a very simple example, but first, let’s face it, it doesn’t work. If you have one identity that you use for both business and personal reasons, you can’t “toggle” your friends list, there’s no ability to group it into types of friends, and there’s no ability other than ‘mute’, ’show online status’ or ’set to busy’ to prevent IMs during a live presentation or meeting. Thus, here comes a business alt.
I use this as the simplest example, but extending it, as discussed in my previous post, technology may have “opt in” and “opt out” but it usually doesn’t allow us to “get out”. Ugo Trade discussed the woman who wanted to leave mySpace because of feeling about an ex-boyfriend but social pressure and the inability to easily do a transfer of her photos and content to someone else created a situation where Even Moglen said “she wanted to leave town but couldn’t”.
And this doesn’t even touch on our ability to make informed choices about the environments we enter in 3D worlds. About as nuanced as it gets is whether a space is PG or Mature…and as we know, cameras hardly restrict our ability to view mature content from an adjoining PG sim.
i3D’s announcement of context-sensitive ads throughout SL starts to sound like information gathering and display where information is being moved around your avatar in ways that you might not be aware….and I don’t see why those ads wouldn’t start trolling your profile for keywords at some point as well.
(To quote from their site, they: “deliver highly relevant and targeted content throughout the 3D Internet by incorporating contextual information about the user’s specific location and activity in virtual space.” However, I do note that users can opt out, and actually think it’s a good service, so I’m not singling them out, it’s rather, perhaps, the organizations who follow who might not put this approach to such good use).
I suppose I’m starting to sound a bit doom and gloomy. My contention is that the code and its restrictions will always be there. But that unless we’re aware of the limitations of that code and its implications for notions of privacy, identity, trust, and social interaction that we risk creating a virtual world culture that might not be what we intended. I think there’s evidence that a tribal morality is common in some parts of SL, for example, where social norms and pressures discourage individual exploration because there’s a feeling that we need to stay “close to the tribe” in order to continually reaffirm trust because of its absence in the code.
Further food for thought, realizing that there are far deeper thinkers on the subject than myself.
Thanks so much for linking us to your response and thoughts. We couldn’t agree more that there is a need for bringing to surface the awareness that communication technology – like any other – is an extension of the choices we make. In particular there is no de-fault ethical setting encoded in virtual worlds. However – we do feel that the political imagination of emerging virtual generations will continue to make the most of the rhetoric of freedom of expression, creativity and friendship that circulates in that universe. This will, in turn, shape the direction of evolving technologies. The touchstone for this will of course always be that point of awareness. No escaping that. (By the way – we have never had a complaint so far about the the symbolic airoots background in our design. However thanks for your input!)
I’m glad I came across your blog and look forward to following your other thoughts and work. Must be my eyes – the text/background just made it a tough read…age, or too many hours in virtual spaces perhaps.
I know that my post sounded a bit gloomy but I think that since I’ve started to write this blog a few months ago I’ve been, and remain, optimistic about the opportunities for this technology. In fact, the previous sub-title of the blog was virtual worlds, creativity, and spirituality.
I agree that there are no default ethical ’settings’ to virtual worlds, but by virtue of being built they each have within them preconditions that may influence our ability to behave and to influence our ethical framework.
The issue of privacy, for example…on one platform, a surveillance society and on another anonymity to the exclusion of the ability to achieve identity trust. Either end of the spectrum colors our ability to make choices and I’m arguing that individuals (not ethicists, just ordinary ‘users’) begin to behave in specific virtual worlds within certain ethical frameworks because the platforms are built to encourage it.
On the one hand a lack of guarantees by platform owners that they’ll delete chat logs between users and on the other hand the New Yorker article this week (I don’t read or watch the news so I’m sure it isn’t newsworthy) of the girl who killed herself because a “boy” on mySpace harassed her. Anonymity allowed her next door neighbor to disguise herself as a boy.
In both cases, the coding of the platform leaves a different range of choices.
I am in complete agreement with your sentiment about “the political imagination of emerging virtual generations”. It’s not the emerging generations I’m worried about, frankly. It’s the political, corporate and societies who will be upending in their wake, a new age of collaborative creation in which hierarchies dissolve or reconfigure, and expression takes precedence over control.
Interesting times as they say, and I am optimistic because of the power these technologies bring towards furthering creativity and global friendships, and pessimistic that the response to change by the current ’stakeholders’ won’t bring with it new unforeseen risks to our liberty.
(Hey, anyone have a writ from the record companies I can post?)
Oh yes – no denying there is a whole nest of vested interests stalking the virtual world and making the most of what it can control. There is a flatness to the commercial exploitation of the culture of friendship (technological controls and the whole format of Facebook for example) – and all the other issues you list. There is not enough narrativizing to produce a counter-discourse. Not enough mythologies. We can’t depend entirely on the goodwill of the emerging generation either. There is a huge need to be proactive. Airoots will soon launch an inter-active cyber-novel dealing with some of these issues. Can you suggest any links of other narrative-based, creative critiques that may help us?
Wow….mythology….stay tuned, post to follow on that very topic. None jump to mind but I’ll check my delicious links
– there’s stuff on there I have forget I tagged. And keep us posted on the cyber-novel sounds wonderful.
I appreciate your attempt to get at some of the complexities involved in virtual worlds and I think it’s crucial that we try hard to not split VW/RW into distinct (or semi-distinct) boundaries that encourage value judgments and hierarchy-making. But I think this notion of “freedom” that’s being worried and debated is a difficult word and space to grapple with, especially on the terms presented above. Does anyone really believe that there is anywhere to “opt out” to? Where would that be? I’m not suggesting that we’re inhabiting a totalizing 1984 universe–but I find it confusing and at times silly that people still believe that utopias are to be found in cyberspace. If they are, they’re momentary, provisional, and perpetually prey to colonization. Power is always on the move and we really can see this explicitly in cyberspace. Most of all I’m troubled by this distinction between our “business” identities and our “private” identities. This notion of a “private” self is as historically constructed as Anderson’s “imagined” communities and carries similar sets of contradictions, pleasures, disappointments, and abuses. I appreciate any and all efforts to keep the internet “free,” but I also believe we need to discard any notions of fixed destinations and “outsides.” Why do we have to leave anyhow? Why not attempt to transform the “inside”?
I should have mentioned that what I found most troubling/confusing in the above posts was this sentence:
“It’s the political, corporate and societies who will be upending in their wake, a new age of collaborative creation in which hierarchies dissolve or reconfigure, and expression takes precedence over control.”
Do you really believe that expression can be extracted from control and vice versa? Are they opposites/contraries?
Curious…
Eric:
Thanks for your insightful reply….I’ve opened up these notions mostly because I’m at the “know what I don’t know” stage…and as I’ve amply demonstrated, that usually means I’m not very coherent.
It’s my feeling that in virtual worlds, and in particular the growing availability of “open” worlds (like SL and as opposed to MMORPG), concepts of privacy and identity are often debated at a superficial level.
The reason this and my original posts were about alts was to highlight that we’re making value judgments about how we use our time and present ourselves in virtual worlds without thinking or articulating that these decisions are already constrained by the technology, the code, and the platform owners. Once we sign off on the TOS and the EULA, we are co-creating our in world presence with the platforms themselves, and by doing so accept but don’t always articulate that the restrictions on our choice have implications.
People talk about alts and use ideas like “different alts for different tasks” “business versus personal” and “needing some time for myself” and while all of these reasons can be perfectly valid, I stand by the idea that we only need to resort to these reasons because the code and the platform have constrained choice.
I’m sorry, but I work enough as it is, and I’d like the ability to turn off any work-related IMs after 9, say. But I can’t. So, it starts to look more and more attractive to have a separate avatar for the purposes of managing vendors and all the attendant IMs. This is as true in WoW as it is in SL – characters who act as banks, for example, help bypass the code which makes travel to markets a time investment, and act as sorting zones for group loot distribution.
But I’m trying very hard not confuse the issue here of identity with avatar expression. I’m making the argument that many are creating seemingly different versions of their ‘avatar identities’ in virtual worlds, which isn’t the same as saying that we HAVE different identities. They are doing so sometimes because the code leads them that way.
I am in full agreement and have argued in this blog on several occasions that there’s no split between real and virtual. Different expressions of our identity are parts of the whole, it’s just that the tools are different. Just as I might speak differently as a learner than a teacher, I might express myself in different ways in a virtual world through different presentations of my avatar and the spaces I interact with. However, my point about the separation of business/personal was again to highlight that the code leads us to behave in a way where it’s an incentive to start “splitting” our personas.
I’ve also argued previously that while it’s nice to think we’re fully integrated human beings, I’m not sure that the therapy business would be as successful as it is if it wasn’t for individual’s feelings that there’s “parts of themselves missing” or “things about themselves they need to explore”.
Your comment on the private self is interesting, however, and I’d like to understand that more, but whether it’s true or not that there’s no such thing as the private self, I can’t help thinking that people might confuse the desire for privacy with the need for a private self. The private self may be historically constructed…and if that’s true, then maybe my comments about the growing prevalence of a tribal morality in virtual worlds might also be a return to cultural norms in which social identity and identification dissolves the idea of the private?
I have a large number of friends who maintain separate online IDs….and not just for virtual worlds, but for mailing lists, Web-based forms, mySpace, etc. Whether their “private selves” are really illusions or not, I can’t say, these are all just intuitive ideas really…and the craving for protected private identity in an increasingly transparent and monitored world seems to be gaining rather than waning.
They would LIKE the ability to opt out of spaces within virtual worlds. I’m not saying opt out of worlds, but different spaces will have different levels of needs for what kind of information is collected, shared, and what levels of controls we have over our expression of ourselves and the information we share. I’m not arguing for an opt out/opt in for virtual worlds, but rather for the idea that it’s transparency rather than freedom that’s the end goal.
I may decide to attend a class in a virtual space, and when I sign up for the class I’d like to know whether I’m being graded, tracked, and whether my comments are being recorded. I may decide to attend a concert in a virtual space and I’d like to know the same thing. Transparency gives me the freedom to choose whether to participate and how – my decision is my own, but I don’t need to opt out and go “someplace else” – you’re right, there’s no “outside”, but there are rooms on the inside whose doors I may choose not to open.
Eben Moglen put it quite nicely when he said there should be two rules for virtual spaces:
One: Avatars ought to exist independent of any individual social contract put forward by any particular space. And two: Social contracts ought to be available in a machine readable form which allows the avatar projection intelligence to know exactly what the rules are and to allow you set effective guidelines about I don’t go to spaces where people don’t treat me in ways that I consider to be crucial in my treatment.
Finally…I take your point. Expression and control can not be extracted from each other. So I amend…
“It’s not the emerging generations I worry about. It’s the political, corporate and social groups (who have until now largely controlled the outlets of expression) that will be upending in their wake, a new age of collaborative creation in which hierarchies dissolve or reconfigure, and our right to have control over expression takes precedence over leaving it to others.”
Thanks for the lengthy and intelligent reply here, Dusan. I should admit right off the bat that I’m not much of a VW adept (by choice, I think) but I do own a computer and do use this computer for purposes where the RW elides with the VW (Myspace, Facebook, blogs, etc). But I have an ambivalent investment in most of these apps and typically integrate my RW identities as much as possible in to the VW ones (To illustrate your/my point about the difficulty in delineating a clear boundary line between VW/RW: What does one do with a Myspace profile that pretty accurately reflects the RW self, but at the same time, doesn’t?). The long and short of it: I have no serious investment in deliberate roleplaying within a controlled virtual environment. That being said, I am fascinated by subject-formation, especially within the context of this overarching public/private duality we tend to operate through. And I’m just now beginning to explore how subjectivity is built, remade, and often (to my disappointment) reinforced in VWs (the little I’ve seen of SL seems to simply reflect predictable RW lifestyles, though I have a feeling some deeper digging may complicate this observation–at least I hope so).
Your points about the limited terms of identity play are well-taken. If one goes into a VW with the hopes of articulating, exploring, and perhaps even embodying a multitude of identities or continuums along one vast identity path, one would be well-equipped in recognizing that one’s options are partially pre-determined by the world context entered (i.e. the program/app itself). This reinforces my point about freedom. Freedom is a useful formula if we’re constantly re-defining it. Constantly. If we leave off with half-baked feelgood rallying cries about the wide open future and re-configured hierarchies, emotions, relationships, etc. without recognizing how contradicted these things are from the getgo, I’m betting that the future will eventually look a lot like the present–and the past (I see parallels in the passionate rallying around Obama’s presidential run right now).
As for the public/private divide– again, your point about wanting a self at least tentatively free from the methodical eyes of the corporate/governmental realm makes absolute sense. However, as a somewhat inchoate closing suggestion–wouldn’t it be nice to begin to transform the business/official world so that the personal might operate and express itself more “freely” there? Utopic, I know. I know.
Yes, it would be nice. And utopic, perhaps….but at some point when I stumbled down whatever rabbit hole I’ve found myself in (and it’s as much about stuff in the ‘real’ as anywhere, but I won’t bore you with my personal life) I found myself adopting the following as a utopic vision for myself, although know I’ll never reach paradise:
We must become ignorant
Of all we’ve been taught,
And be, instead, bewildered.
Run from what’s profitable and comfortable
If you drink those liqueurs, you’ll spill
The spring waters of your real life.
Forget safety.
Live where you fear to live.
Destroy your reputation.
Be notorious.
I have tried prudent planning
Long enough, from now
On, I’ll live mad.
-Rumi
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