At this week’s Metanomics Community Forum we’ll be talking about “Limits to Virtuality”. Following are a few thoughts ahead of the discussion.
What kinds of limits would you place on virtual worlds? Would you let your 4 year old play around in Warcraft? Would you let your 6 year old have an avatar? Should virtual worlds be rated like movies with gatekeepers at the door but otherwise letting the parents decide? I mean, maybe Bambi is too violent for some kids…it’s all up to the family or community, right?
I got to thinking about these things watching my nephew last week. He’s a few months shy of two years old. He watches maybe 30 minutes of television a day. There’s a laptop or two in his house but they aren’t used to teach him spelling or language or something. He plays in the park and has a seemingly endless fascination with the texture of sand. He moves it around, he pours it on his legs, he shovels it into a plastic dump truck.
I know it’s that uncle instinct or something, but around him I suddenly become a complete Luddite and start harboring fantasies of shielding him from technology and the Web and Wii Fit or whatever until he’s, well….18 maybe? That tactile experience is what I wish for him – that it not be replaced by jamming a mouse in his fingers or letting him use one of those Fisher Price kid’s keyboards or whatever. He can get to prims later – I want to make sure he know how to use real building blocks first before his experiences are mediated by a screen.
False Dichotomies
It’s clear that there’s no dividing line between childhood and being digital. There’s no magic age when suddenly you’re ready to pick up technology.
My nephew is intensely curious about the sound the microwave makes – he watches the digital clock count down and gets this look of delight when it beeps ready. He likes playing around with cell phones – I don’t think he’s planning to make calls anytime soon, but the buttons fascinate him, and the way the phone opens and closes – the same fascination he has with toy trucks where the doors work.
Growing up digital means that digital just sort of creeps in. In our rush to categorize and draw dividing lines we can neglect individuality: your 13 year old might be mature enough to go to a PG-13 movie, but your neighbor’s kid might have nightmares for the next three weeks.
But I’m struck by how easily, as adults, we create these false dichotomies, and as virtual worlds evolve and join the mainstream I’m increasingly frustrated with how quickly we’re trying to ‘normalize’ virtual worlds – to make them conform to our received notions of morality and governance and identity.
Immersionists vs. augmentationists. Real names vs. virtual identity. Games and worlds vs. reality. The singularity vs., well, NOT the singularity.
It frustrates me because I would expect that people who are in virtual worlds NOW, who are experiencing them, understand that they are a rich field for exploration, they are predictors of trends, they give hints of what’s coming tomorrow – and yet they seem to ignore all that and there’s a move to somehow slot virtuality into the received norms of the rest of our lives.
I suppose I can’t help thinking, when I’m feeling particularly apocalyptic, that this trend towards normalizing virtuality will either lead to new forms of tyranny, or those people doing the normalizing will be swept away not realizing that they were in the middle of a change that they refused to accept.
Games vs. Real Life
One of the godfathers of false dichotomies is Edward Castranova. His first book, Synthetic Worlds, was a landmark – it demonstrated that virtual worlds weren’t just about fantasy, but rather contained real value, real economies, and therefore shouldn’t be dismissed.
His follow-up book, however, Exodus to the Virtual World, which was an extended application form to hire Castranova as a consultant, proposed the following:
- Because use of virtual worlds is increasing, more and more economic value will shift to them
- This will create a “threat” to reality – your productive citizens of today will all be wasting time in Warcraft tomorrow, depleting the GDP of nations and shifting entire economies to a global mirror economy held in virtuality
- As a result, governments, enterprise, and schools will need to re-craft reality to make it more appealing and game-like.
Castranova proposes (and, I’m sure, can be hired to help) that businesses, therefore, need to make work more like WoW. An employee clocks in, is provided a series of quests for the day, is paid based on how well they ‘farm’ those quests, and maybe levels up if they do things really well.
Now, aside from the terrifying idea of governments and companies using risk/reward systems to ‘program’ their employees and citizens via the immersive lessons of games and virtual worlds, Castranova fails to recognize the other ways in which “reality” responds to virtuality. He sets up a false dichotomy: virtual worlds don’t compete with a drab, non-gamelike reality, they compete with varied realities, just as virtual worlds have varied mechanics and levels of engagement.
Reality doesn’t compete with virtual worlds by becoming more game-like. It competes in all the ways that people respond to technology, change, and other macro forces: more people take up Yoga or spirituality, say; companies focus on being green or supporting sustainability as a value; parents spend more time with their kids, or teachers start to include curricula teaching about privacy on-line, or how to be careful what you post on Facebook.
Identity and Normalizing Culture
I’m kind of tired of beating this drum because it doesn’t seem to make a difference anyways, but there’s also a false dichotomy between ‘real-life names’ and ‘virtual identity’. I’ve posted about this before, and I suppose I’ll post about it again.
This week, it’s Valiant Westland who picks up the “we need to be real” mantle, claiming on 3DTLC.Net, in relation to a story on corporate policies related to avatar gender:
“Much of the experiential “data” (opinion) on gender switching in virtual world business settings, such as that collected by IBM, was collected during the bleeding-edge phase of virtual world adoption, when everyone involved was acutely aware of the socially avaunt garde nature of the virtual community. These days are over. Mainstream businesses utilizing virtual world tools will NOT tolerate behaviors that are going to distract or potentially offend their clients or partners.”
Um. OK. The frontier days are over, I guess he’s saying, and the lessons that the early adopters learned are worth – well, they’re worth nothing. Clean up your act, kids, switch to an avatar that looks like you, buy one of those vanity names so that you don’t have to hide behind avatar identity because mainstream business is coming and they have ZERO tolerance!
There’s a false dichotomy: the “avaunt” (sic) garde is fluid, organic, understands identity play, is immersive and virtual. The “real” world of business is hierarchical, stuffy, and will only adopt virtual worlds if all the, well, fun is taken out of it.
But beyond being a false dichotomy, this is part of a broader and often subtle trend to ‘normalize’ virtual worlds so that they conform to our received cultural standards and understanding of how business works, how we short hand identity, how we perceive other people. And this normalization is about one thing: control.
But I continue to propose that virtual worlds will not succeed because they make meetings cheaper or save the ozone layer or are even maybe a little more fun than your normal WebEx PowerPoint presentation: they will succeed because they are part of a broader trend in which the old models of corporate control and hierarchy are giving way to new organic organizational models: what I sometimes call the ‘feminization of the corporation’.
So when I hear people arguing that we need real names, in order to establish real trust, and we need to bring in the corporate dress codes and norms from the ‘real’ world – what I hear is: “this stuff, if we let it, can get out of control, it upsets our corporate models, and maybe if we make it seem more like what we’re used to we’ll be able to keep a grip on what we sense might be something a little threatening to our way of doing work”.
Sorry. Too late. And it’s not just virtual worlds that threaten your hegemony.
The Tribal vs. the Territorial
In a previous post I looked at the morality of ‘alts’ (secondary avatar identities) and proposed that in some ways they are perhaps a response to the growth of tribal morality as a trend facilitated by technology:
I’d also propose that this will open new pathways in discussions of morality, with virtual worlds as test beds for ethical theories. The response to whether alts are good or bad implies an ethical framework. If we presume that assuming an alt is a moral failing because it challenges the underpinnings of community, then it may imply that virtual worlds open the gate to an age in which morality is judged as pre-rational and tribal, rather than modern and territorial.
Whether this is for better or worse, it implies a return to “guild hall” days. It would imply that we would increasingly see small walled off communities within virtual worlds with deeply enmeshed codes of moral conduct in which the good of the collective is enforced at the expense of individual freedom. In MMORPGs, this collective conscience has been shown to be far more powerful than individual freedoms, and social norms are strictly enforced.
And maybe the tension between territorial (or perhaps a better word is individualistic) morality and tribal morality is the place that we will increasingly need to frame our decisions about how to react to technology, change, and shifts in where power and value is accrued.
Wikipedia gives a nice definition of the difference:
“Celia Green has made a distinction between tribal and territorial morality. She characterizes the latter as predominantly negative and proscriptive: it defines a person’s territory, including his or her property and dependants, which is not to be damaged or interfered with. Apart from these proscriptions, territorial morality is permissive, allowing the individual whatever behavior does not interfere with the territory of another. By contrast, tribal morality is prescriptive, imposing the norms of the collective on the individual. These norms will be arbitrary, culturally dependent and ‘flexible’, whereas territorial morality aims at rules which are universal and absolute, such as Kant’s ‘categorical imperative’. Green relates the development of territorial morality to the rise of the concept of private property, and the ascendancy of contract over status.”
It’s a false dichotomy to say we must choose one or the other. What matters is articulating that there ARE choices, and that those choices will put us somewhere on the spectrum between establishing our place in the world as individuals with property and boundaries and digital portfolios of our own…or establishing our membership in tribes, where we adopt the cultural norms and expectations of others in order to belong within a collective where the values and good of the group might trump that of the individual.
Virtual worlds, in this light, become an important site for exploring the issues of tribal versus territorial morality. Studies of MMOs have shown that new users are pushed into assuming the cultural norms of the collective, pressuring them to adopt the “habits of the realm”, with the idea of guilds being the most visible manifestation of the concept of tribes. In Second Life, I believe that the avatar and the concept of ‘ownership’ are important governance principles that allow an exploration of how territorial morality can intersect in a looser and less-structured way with the idea of tribes….and yet there are still tribes, whether the tribe of coders or the steampunks of Caledon.
On the broader Web, we are often confronted with transactional choices about territory and property: we are asked to give up information about who we are and what we’re interested in, and in exchange our Web-based experiences are more personal, more connected to things we value. These transactional choices are often obscured or invisible – something which I find a frightening loss of our individual power to choose. We give up data on ourselves and that ownership is passed on to a corporation in the vague hope that their motivations will somehow be narrow enough to shield us from an abuse of our personal data.
These tensions require that we ask questions and form our own framework from which to make decisions about how to engage with technology, with tribes, with informational transactions.
Yesterday, a movie rating was about as tough as it got when it came to framing decisions about how our kids interact with culture. Now, with culture on-line, the decisions are far more subtle and, perhaps, more profound, because technology asks us to make a series of choices in which over time we subscribe or opt-out, protect or relent, reveal or hide – and the payoffs are not always clear, and the tribes we join don’t always post their rules at the door.
In excerpts from an interview by Tish Shute a few years back, Eben Moglen of IBM commented:
“I see again and again the ways in which people now find themselves unable to make certain life choices easily because there digital self has acquired an inflexibility that constrains their non-digital self.
We don’t want that to happen to people. We understood when the Soviet Empire decayed that all over it were places where people felt trapped in webs of surveillance and betrayal and interaction that had a kind of sinister feeling even if there is no Gulag and there is no shooting…But we are aware that these webs of knowledge about us are beginning to control us because our digital persona is subject to leverage and to being interfered with in ways that matter.
(On-line environments) have got to tell you what the rules are of the space… it has to give you an opportunity to make an informed consent about what is going to happen given those rules. It has got to give you an opportunity to know those things in an automatic sort of way so I can set up my avatar to say, you know what, I don’t go to places where I am on video camera all the time. Self, if you are about to walk into a room where there are video cameras on all the time just don’t walk through that door. So I don’t have to sign up and click yes on 27 agreements, I have got an avatar that doesn’t go into places that aren’t clean and well lit.”
I may not entirely agree with the policies at ThinkBalm about ‘real identity’ but I respect the rules and deeply appreciate that they post them at the door.
It’s not a choice between games or no games: we need to decide for ourselves, or on behalf of our kids, whether an on-line space is asking us to give up information that we prefer to reserve, to understand the rules and cultural norms even if they aren’t clearly posted, to come to some kind of insight into what sort of tribes we’re joining and what we might be giving up or gaining if we belong.
Maybe in the end what I’d like for my nephew is what Eben Moglen described, and yet I despair that those places are increasingly rare: a clean and well lit space, even when he wanders far from home.
A little bit of Nietzsche to brighten your morning:
Logic is tied to the condition: *assuming identical cases exist*. Indeed, in order to think and conclude logically, the fulfilment of this condition must first be feigned. That is: the will to *logical truth* cannot realise itself until a fundamental *falsification* of all events has been undertaken. From which it follows that a drive rules here which is capable of both means, firstly of falsifying, then of implementing a single viewpoint: logic does not originate in the will to truth.
(Writings from the Late Notebooks)
I think you are correct about the nature of the “drive that rules here”; it’s about *control* and is more bound to desire than it is to science. Insofar as this passage functions as a critique of ideology, I find it very useful when thinking about most of what gets written about Second Life.
Oh my! one of my favorite subjects with regard Virtual world/space and whatever name we shall settle on at some future date.
My opinion is there is no dichotomy, and would have care in so far as what we term “normalize” we for instance do not comment on normalization’s such as politeness be it in virtual or real?
There is also a fear by many that yes the tyrannical norms of real world would invade this nice cosy place pioneered and guarded with fabled weapons, but would point out is there not a debate at the moment that the influence is also flowing the other way? are there not instances where VW, and I will include web space in general are also having their impact on the Physical world, and even on social/business political behavior “norms in that realm being eroded grin”
With regard companies such as ThinkBalm I would suspect it is because there is no separation of virtual over Real that they have taken the stance “lets start as we mean to go on” but I suspect if!! and a big if there had not been the situations in the past pioneering days, of fraud, and other such shenanigans they might have not come to that conclusion.
I would like to end with an analogy I sometimes draw on with regard identity .
As you drive walk down the road today you might note the avatar called a police person going about his duties, you know him as a policeman because of his dress, manner and other such visual stimuli, you do not know he/her civilian identity , where he/she lives, and all the other relevant human interest stories behind them, to your eye that is a police person end of, and you have expectations of that “person/avatar’
I suspect everyone reading this will know how serious a crime it is wherever you are to impersonate a member of the police force, and lucky for us this burden of doubt about who that avatar/person is has been taken away from us by laws and institutions so we feel safe dealing with this person.
This is not! the case in VW and as such some of us who do fear for our sanity in resolving who is who on this level of our reality do find comfort in transparency.
As such every-time my client is on and my five year old says “Daddy can I walk the man around” I say yes my dear but not on your own, or if i am too busy sorry no Brie Janick “region manager London” or any such person known to me is not around.
Just a personal opinion and thanks for the continued debate.
Julius Sowu virtually-Linked London
So well put. The elements of corporate control structures attempting to get a hold on this is a constant balance we have to strike.
In some respects we have to let the currents controllers feel its all under control in order for us to push things forward.
All of this get resolved into policy any technology choices, but people are the heart of it, and their willingness to work with, or against one another in all these mediums.
It is a fascinating subject, and one that many people maybe choose to avoid for simplicity. For me it brings new ideas and challenges to how things work everyday, and has for years.
I find this debate fascinating as well. In my first life I am a visual artist. When I came into second life I was interested in creating a internet only identity with the goal of one day bringing her as an artist from second life to first life. Recently this began to happen as Bryn Oh was shown in two first life art galleries. From what I understand everyone at the galleries accepted Bryn Oh as a “character”. They were caught up in the illusion and did not feel the need to know who the user was. In fact I think not knowing my real life identity plays a big part in making Bryn Oh interesting. Much like Banksy the British street artist. His art is absolutely stunning but the fact that nobody knows his identity adds to the mystique.
To me I see it much like a puppet show. If you go see someone like Ronnie Burkett perform with marionettes you will become immersed. You will forget that they are mere fabric creations and as you sit in the dark of the theatre you can forget all that is around you. If someone suddenly turns on the light and you see the puppets being manipulated, then the puppets themself cease to be a character and the immersion is gone. I personally prefer the lights out.
I realize that in business this approach does not work and I do divulge my first life identity when an important business situation occurs. This post is merely to show another niche perspective. But when I do find myself over at IBM sim I am often encouraged by the fact that most of the employees there have not tried to mimic real life. Tezcatlipoca Bisani conducts design research and teaches computational art for IBM’s Collaborative User Experience Group for Social Software. He holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Art Institute of Chicago and a Masters of Science from MIT Media Lab. He is a purple wolf. Jessica Qin can often be seen floating about as girl frozen in a sort of hovering freezer. She runs IBM’s many sims. As of right now some mainstream businesses such as IBM do let their employees showcase their creative expression in this medium. Hopefully Valiant Westland prediction never comes to pass.
Truthfully, I believe you are asking the wrong group of people about the future of VR worlds.
The future will be what China does with VR worlds. What is their population interested in? Are they enamored of their avatar fantasies?
And economies need real, hands on industrial businesses. VR economies will only work on a strong industrial base. And a base that controls world economy. That won’t be in the West.
I suspect that the problem of overly narrow, short-sighted and and simplistic perspectives has more to do with the general state of public discourse than the specific topic of Virtual Worlds.
It seems to me that modern culture suffers from Punditry Poisoning. We’ve become addicted to the dramatic energy of controversy. Instead of working cooperatively in a collective search for greater understanding, the important issues of the day are battlegrounds for entrenched partisan camps.
On the issue of Virtual Worlds, the good news (I hope) is that the inherent ramifications of the technology are going to emerge regardless of any camp’s position. My guess is that the way people and businesses use Virtual Worlds and Virtual Identity five years from now will make all of our current controversies seem antiquated and a bit silly in retrospect. In the meantime, it’s fun to ride the wave.
Excellent analysis and you’ve inspired some very good comments so far. Working for one of those businesses that wish to “monetize” in order to justify, I cannot wait till that old business model is placed in a museum. Virtual worlds are going to break these old ways of doing things just as radio and television did–forgive the dichotomies, which in themselves are faulty if not false.
[...] How Old Is Your Avatar? by Dusan Writer (a longer post on this topic can be found here). [...]
Television and radio both created “ecosystems” or more plainly “economies” around them that benefited many many individuals and companies. So far virtual worlds have been sad mirrors of the TELEPHONE which for most, led to nothign but payments to ATT for decades upon decades. Only when the technology was destroyed by internet did the telephone media as a business open up and become wider. thast and earlier anti trust actions.
Virtual worlds have for over a decade so far been ATT attempts… from SGI to CA to Linden Labs and the dozens of the class of 2006 that have gone nowhere based on “we own it all” type biz plans.
as a media vr worlds have very far to go to be a possible democratically fair media for usage. As Entertianment providers the current buisnesses are fine but the mistake of thinking that these systems can be used for any fair- sustainable real cultural/ governing systems still shows ignorance of the humans that will use these systems.
the limit we should hope to virtuality is the human spirit, cultivated over 50k years.
There is quite a bit of research going on at the moment into DI in particular not just in VW but other online platforms.
http://thisisme.reading.ac.uk/pg/pages/view/12/
As someone who works within the field of VW’s and education with younger children – I doubt you’d get very far in the system if you didn’t set up some sort of walled garden to deal with online safety issues, police checks etc etc. But what people still don’t understand in these areas is that it comes down to personal accountability and community cohesion no matter what safeguards or contexts you put in place.
There is always the worry by the few educators operating in this area that the bogey man of traditional media will come and fry them alive if anything untoward happened in a virtual landscape. Part of the key to digital safety in this particular context is that you have to establish firm boundaries and protocols for all concerned in an educational community but you also need to have the grammar and syntax of the system before you can be more flexible. Currently too few educators have that or even know where to begin.
Educators like Viki Davies in Texas sure do and she operates a dynamic curricular model in Open Sim – on Reaction Grid – whereby the the teens there act as mentors and role models for behaviour in that setting. In fact their builds are based on teaching Digital Literacy and identity and how to navigate and explore the online world safely and in a way that fits in with their real life roles but the environment is highly collaborative and they are encouraged to reflect on what their roles are in that environment and how those rules and interactions operate for an emergent model like that. From that base they gain a pretty savvy understanding of how to represent themselves in that tribe in that context but they might not have had that if not given Viki’s excellent guidance, elicitation and, yes, pretty strict parameters for operating within that particular space. In fact I have a video interview with them coming up tomorrow on how they achieved this.
Yes people will have to understand there are different contexts. I’m happy for my 15 year old to go off and play GTA at home with his own tribe but try and introduce that in a traditional school system given the nature of the content in there – I think not.
But what is my son “actually” doing in there – well he’s currently looking at how to explore the outer fringes of the map and exploit all the bugs in the code with lots of creative interaction and problem solving going back and forth between friends – for the most part they ignore the narratives and try to subvert the game…not what some people might expect teen boys may be getting up to in that environment… The “reality” of what they’re doing is totally at odds to what some people might suppose. But then again they are pretty sophisticated users of all online and digital forums and have been for years, They know how to protect and mask their multiple identities and what is appropriate for what context as it stands now and as they move into the adult arena they have no problems about hedging their bets about the lie of the land in the future. But, unfortunately, not all teens are so insightful…But I do agree, if you set up false dichotomies based on “what if” rather than “what is” you’re going to come unstuck pretty quickly especially when binding these models into education.
Children now carry mobile phones and laptops to school….. we have no idea what THEIR children will use, it probably won’t be pencil and paper. ….but they may delight in hearing of the old days when 4Gb RAM was sufficient to order life and entertainment, and how people talked of Real Life….
Fear of future change is a common problem and always has been, the idea of travelling in a vehicle that went faster than a man could walk was predicted to cause numerous illnesses and ailments…
TV is still a good subject for occasional newspaper articles and there is nothing more synthetic than a TV star…. the avatars I meet actually HAVE personalities…….
Probably we should all just relax a bit… it’ll turn out totally different to how we think it will.
re: above – it would help if I spelled Vicki Davis’ name correctly
– you can see their digiteen project here http://digiteen.wikispaces.com/ for those interested.
•According to Winifred Gallagher, author of the recently published “Rapt”, we constantly make decisions determining what we are going to pay attention to. Any events, experiences, and activities not within the scope of our chosen interest will not exist to us as we immerse ourselves in our selected targets of concentration and focus. What we choose to concentrate on defines our state of consciousness and becomes our Reality.
• The fact that our mind and body may be “in two different places at the same time” is not a unique characteristic of Virtual Reality, and does not therefore create the need to refer to this immersive technology as “Virtual Reality”
–If we are deep within our own thoughts, and no longer mindful of our physical surroundings, are we in “virtual reality” ?
–If we are reading a news article on a website, and are so engrossed that we forget that we are late for a meeting, do we say that “virtual reality” interfered with “physical reality”?
•The power of “Virtual Reality” software is in its ability to emancipate the mind from the body, making physical “reality” a minor element of our Federated Reality.
–Federated Reality has two parts:
•Consciousness
•Physical Existence
–For our purposes, we will always need to address the requirements of Physical Existence and Consciousness. However, it is our objective to relegate Physical Existence to nothing more than a set of requirements for accessing a medium that will manipulate the Consciousness away from Physical Existence
•In other words, people have bodies: eyes, hands, etc. We must build software that provides convenient physical access. But after t hat, the vast majority of our attention will be turned to capturing the full attention of the user
–We use “federated” to mean that the two parts of Reality have a partnership, but are not so close as to be synonymous. They are individualy self-sustaining.
•At Étape Partners we believe that there is only one relevant reality, and it is defined as:
– A context of stimulation that acutely focuses awareness and defines our state of consciousness.
[...] Dusan Writer’s Metaverse » False Dichotomies and the Limits to Virtuality – Virtual worlds and creativity, business, collaboration, and identity. [...]
This is a great piece, and I’m glad you’ve nailed Castronova, who always and everwhere seems to get only genuflections from the gaming gang, especially on Terra Nova, and never get any decent criticism (except from me, and apparently I don’t count).
I think you have to go further and see what is really sinister — Kurzweil sinister — in his last book. And that is not only that he wants to overthrow governments and make them have Ministries of Fun (his term!) that will engineer reality to be more like a quest and skill-up with rewards, he wants to tap into the primal spinal cord animal instinctions of fight or flight stirred up by virtuality and use them to control people to have different experiences. That’s just sick. And wrong. Yes, he’s trolling for all kinds of consultantships from government or corporations that would love in fact to be able to control people, just like they were controlled in the middle ages.
As for the false dichotomies and the need to blend them, well, I agree they’re a bit false, but I don’t feel the need to blend them in politically correct balanced fashion, either.
In fact, tribalism online is a terribly conservative, retrograde, atavistic force that is a hurricane gale of reaction against modern life. That’s why you get BDSM, Gor, and all the rest putting women down lower than they have been in centuries. That’s why you find fiercely loyal tribalistic coding guilds that will use violence on people criticizing anything unethical about their means. That’s why you find this sick craven overlordism with game gods and VW makers and their coteries of fanboyz. It’s all stuff that is completely non-modern and completely a throwback that undoes all the progress of all kinds of civil rights movements for a hundred years. And has to be understood as such.
Modernization makes sure that territorialism also doesn’t lead to the village mentality where you depend on everybody to make a sale and you conform to burghers’ morals or get run out of town on a rail. The modern city and urbanization has brought a self-service and depersonalized marketplace that might inspire horrible nightmares to sensitive children raised on Marxism, but for other people, they’re glad they don’t have to know the store’s owner or pay him a bribe in order to buy an apple, or obtain a service from a government official without a bribe or a connection to his relatives. It’s not progress when you have to go back to that stage, and it’s not something you need “balanced in” to a modern way of life with voluntary participation.
People stress virtual worlds to bring back to them the chatting around the cracker barrel they craved as part of the connectedness of life in the village. That’s why the chicken thing is so popular in SL. You can stand around the feed bag and talk breeding techniques with the old boys until the cows come home. People love playing store that way in ways that they don’t love, in fact, having to sit around and discuss Foucault.
As for Valiant Westland, he’s just trying to get himself his consulting contracts, too. He think if he can show a no-nonsense and take-no-prisoners attitude toward fake or scary avatars that disrupt business that he will be seen as a can-do sort of guy. His clients are therefore infantalized and made dependent on him. He should just teach them how to turn on autoreturn so they aren’t spammed with penises and teach them to study people’s groups as clues about their online character and tell them they can log off any time if they are bothered, and it will go away.
In response to Bryn Oh:
I can see what you mean with your analogy of the puppeteer and if you feel you can best work your magic with the lights off, then by all means leave us in the dark.
The lights on/lights off dichotomy is a false one, too, however. To stick with puppeteers, perhaps you’ve heard of Neville Tranter. If not, you’ll easily find him on the web. He plays his puppets with the light on. You can see right into the machine and you still believe the magic.
There are more puppeteers who choose to be seen with their puppets. And it’s not just something for puppeteers, either. Any decent actor can sit with you on the couch (can’t get much closer to the real person, right?) and at some sign that sets off your shared suspension of disbelief, be someone else.
I’m not — repeat not — trying to make you change your mind about the way you operate. Just please know that if you should at some point feel the need to change course, you will still be able to weave your magic.