And yes, I did like it.

OK this is precious… reality and virtuality the same thing? Will Sterling be the next to mea cupla ala Lanier in the make believe world of the current internets…?

I wrote 3 years ago those who live by the blog will die by the blog.

boing!!!! boing!! looks like reality is hitting him in the nuts. Now i feel for him in realife empathetic ways, BUT….;)

lets see some balance occur…. but binary religious followers should know— heaven or hell is all they get;)

Is the machine is ready to eat one of its most vocal zealots?

BTW- did you like the Forster short story? I read it first in high school in 1980. kicks all CC doctorow, sterling ass;)

and it’s now FREE courtesy of copyright laws, not trendy attention meme bloggers efforts;).

Enjoy the Airship:)

*prints out em forster for transit ride home*

-the machine stops- em forster. 1909. better reading for this crowd:) 100 anniversary, so i guess we can call tish’s guest’s mostly old media thinkers..lol

http://brighton.ncsa.uiuc.edu/~prajlich/forster.html

I think Prok is sort of echoing my comments about the real/virtual connection. While I agree Tish that geo-positioning and the ‘untethered Web’ is important, my concerns are around a few things, which isn’t to say that these technologies or trends aren’t useful:

- I’m a strong believer that the concept of the avatar, disconnected or loosely connected to the actual self and identity, is a repository for insights and change that is critical as we grapple with issues of self, society, privacy, and creativity. I tend to resist paradigms that seem, on the surface at least, as if they don’t respect the fundamental value of the avatar.

- I’m also a believer that virtual worlds are a space in which these same issues can be examined, discussed, studied, and a new language can result. Some of the language – immersionist versus augmentationist, or ‘real’/actual versus virtual, or identity versus identification are inadequate to the task but are what we’ve got (this is why I applaud the work of people like Tom Boellstorff, because he represents those who are looking for the language to frame discourse, whether it’s the meaning of AFK or his theories of techne within techne).

- I think virtual worlds are an important exploration space BECAUSE I believe that we need to be exploring these issues of self and identity now. The shift towards the “always on” and “end-to-end Internet” are happening rapidly, and I believe are happening without being tethered to thoughtful discourse around privacy, identity, and surveillance. Sure, the iPhone’s great – but technology is rolling out and it will be hard to put the genie back in the bottle: “real connections, real people” all that stuff – well, first, I frankly don’t need my friends Google mapping me and finding out where I’m drinking coffee. But I may not really have a choice – this Web of information and spimes and appliances and GIS positioning creates challenges that will bite us, and sooner than we’d care to think.

I suppose I sound like a Luddite. But having WHO I am, WHERE I am, WHAT I’m doing, and WHAT’S around me spliced into technology and the end-to-end Internet…to have myself “Web-embedded” like that….well, a Luddite perhaps I shall be.

Regardless, I feel that the use of alternate identities and the metaphoric and literal power of the avatar, the creation of safe spaces that are beyond this “always on” GIS and spime-enabled Web, and a counter-notion to the idea that being continually connected is necessarily a good thing can partly be accomplished by dispelling the notion that immersionist or alternate reality is somehow on a lesser end of the value or adoption spectrum than “hey, it’s the real me, and you can track me because my phone connects me to information appliances embedded in the world around me, and thus the Web is me, and I am the Web”.

On one level it is very simple, being tied to sitting in front of a pc is very restricting and a drag. We are becoming liberated from this lock in to the pc screen in more and more interesting ways. The best of what we have learned sitting behind our pcs, e.g., Will Wright’s comments about where Second Life has been on the right track re user generated content, will influence are creation of new untethered virtual/real experiences.

The frames of augmentation versus immersion and the terms Augmented Reality and Virtual World are inadequate and misleading ways to describe the new untethered virtual/real experiences we can and will create.

Meh, get those spimes off my lawn. Virtual worlds do not *have* to connect to reality, and your connecting virtuality to reality may diminish reality as much as the escape to virtuality does.