Second Life

Philipisms #7 – Get Those Tiny Humans Out of Your Head

Philip Rosedale has a way with a phrase. Comes from being so, um, smart, or visiony. See the side bar on the right for other Philipisms such as his famous “SL is a terrarium” quote, or his claim that meetings in Second Life are better than real life because there’s no threatening eye contact.

In any case, the latest Philipism points to Second Life as better than a conference call because on the phone, we imagine little tiny humans in our heads:

“Think about when you are sitting at a meeting using a speaker phone, and you are staring at that speaker, and then after a while you become frustrated because you think; ‘Why am I looking at this stupid phone’, and you try to look at the other people but that feels really awkward, so you look at the ceiling. Then you kind of give up in frustration and maybe look back at the phone.”

Philip Rosedale then added that our brain localizes “the voices that it hears as being little tiny humans that are sitting somehow inside that phone… If there are multiple people at the end of your line your brain images them all as being trapped inside that little phone, and that’s really unpleasant because two people (or more) are right in the exact same space. When they are speaking to you from the same place… your brain has a hard time.” (Rosedale, 2009).

Why, just yesterday I was on a conference call and one of the participants freaked out, screaming “Get out of there! All you tiny people get out of that phone!” and then, it sounded like, smashed the phone with a blunt instrument while trying to free us, at which point the line went dead. His brain, I guess, had a hard time.

(Hat tip to Cyberloom).

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