I don't consider myself a technophobe, nor do my friends and colleagues see me as such. I carry around a Bluetooth-enabled camera phone, a Nokia 770, and a Palm Tungsten T3. I spend a lot of time on the Web, even more on computers generally. It's how I make my living, and it's also been a kind of passion for the past 26 years of my life. But over the past couple of years, I have become increasingly afraid that the emerging global culture is losing touch with reality, consciously and deliberately entering into a kind of endemic psychosis. I want to be wrong, but the evidence is becoming more and more compelling. A great example: the Second Life phenomenon.
I haven't posted in a while due to the internal struggle I've been feeling about all of this, made no less complicated by intense activity at work, in my grad school classes, the needs of my immediate family, and an utterly untimely and unfair death in my extended family. In particular, the inciting incident in my internal struggle is the Economist's recent Special Report on Virtual Worlds which focused on the Second Life phenomenon, about which I've been ambivalent for some time. I apologize for linking to a story that requires a subscription to log in, but a) there's no good excuse for you not to subscribe to the Economist site if you can afford it, and b) I'm going to quote from it so I can't avoid linking it somewhere in this post.
For those who are not already familiar, Second Life is a virtual world with its own economy and an emerging virtual society, both of which interact in many ways with the each resident's "first life" back here in the real world. I've already written about some of my reservations about virtual worlds in my post entitled Second Life: Recalling the Dark Side of Virtual Reality. Second Life is an example of a Serious Game, a concept of which I am very fond, witness my posts GameTomorrow, 3d Generation User Interfaces, and Serious Gaming Applications in Healthcare, all of which touched on Carolyn Watter's research in applying the game paradigm to healthcare. The "Dark Side" I referred to in my earlier post concerned a virtual rape that happened a long time ago on a much more primitive virtual world. My concerns, though, were about much more pervasive dangers than cybercrime. I said at the end of that post:
A week from now I will be in a mountain wilderness again for the first time in many years. It will be a good time to ponder my role and responsibility in the creation of the Information Age. I'll try to revisit this topic in the aftermath of that retreat.
What follows is the result of those weeks of wilderness wandering and rumination and a number of real-life events and discoveries that ensued. Let me state up front for the record that I have never "visited" Second Life, though I have sometimes felt the temptation. My reasons for not joining in have nothing to do with the concerns I express below - I just don't have time. I reason that awareness of the potential dangers would "vaccinate" me in some sense, so when I have time I will join in. There's a lot going on there that is intriguing, and I don't want to miss out altogether.
Second Life, Third Place
Second Life has recently been touted as a new kind of Third Place. What is a Third Place?
The first place is your home, where you can relax and be comfortable. The second place is where you usually are when not at home — work; work provides social interaction and sense of community. Howard Schultz, founder of Starbucks introduced third places as somewhere besides home or work where people can socialize and feel comfortable. Think Cheers.
Because I prefer my "First Life" over any other, to me a representative Third Place would be Sweetwaters Cafe here in Ann Arbor. Historically and/or cross-culturally speaking, the term connotes gathering places the agora, bazaar, mercado [page in Spanish] or marketplace, and the village well.
I have no problem with the idea that Second Life can be someone's Third Place. But Second Life is already becoming a Second Place (workplace) for some, with some very interesting applications in biomedical research. The lead-in to the Economist article talks about one example of this:
PETER YELLOWLEES, a professor of psychiatry at the University of California, Davis, has been teaching about schizophrenia for 20 years, but says that he was never really able to explain to his students just how their patients suffer. So he went online, downloaded some free software and entered Second Life. This is a “metaverse” (ie, metaphysical universe), a three-dimensional world whose users, or “residents”, can create and be anything they want. Mr Yellowlees created hallucinations. A resident might walk through a virtual hospital ward, and a picture on the wall would suddenly flash the word “shitface”. The floor might fall away, leaving the person to walk on stepping stones above the clouds. An in-world television set would change from showing an actual speech by Bob Hawke, Australia's former prime minister, into Mr Hawke shouting, “Go and kill yourself, you wretch!” A reflection in a mirror might have bleeding eyes and die.
When Mr Yellowlees invited, as part of a trial, Second Life's public into the ward, 73% of the visitors said afterwards that it “improved [their] understanding of schizophrenia.” Mr Yellowlees then went further. For about $300 a month, he leases an island in Second Life, where he has built a clinic that looks exactly like the real one in Sacramento where many of his students practise. He gives his students “avatars”, or online personas, so they can attend his lectures inside Second Life and then experience hallucinations. “It's so powerful that some get quite upset,” says Mr Yellowlees.
Mr. Yellowlees is actually Peter Yellowlees MD, a Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at UCDavis, and the first project described in the above quote is his Virtual Hallucinations Project:
The virtual hallucinations project at the University of California, Davis is a continuation of work performed at the University of Queensland, Australia at the Advanced Computational Modeling Centre under Dr. Peter Yellowlees and Dr. Kevin Burrage. In this project hallucinations were developed in an expansive room-sized 3D environment which was not accessible on the Internet. The hallucinations selected for modeling were based on interviews with patients with schizophrenia. Thus they represented an actual set of patient experiences, rather than a hypothetical set chosen to be dramatic or easy to implement. The patients were shown the simulation, and they indicated that it was an accurate representation of their experiences.
We have reconstructed the hallucinations so that they take place in a simulated psychiatric inpatient ward which we have also constructed on our virtual island in Second Life. The island allows us to control access to the simulation, as Second Life is constantly used by thousands of other people.
So far, so good. There are Second Place work life examples that are less high-minded. Real estate agents, for example, make a good living there, speculating on the value of Second Life's virtual islands. There are creators of avatars, the virtual bodies people "wear" in Second Life, some of which are very attractive and fashionable in a cartoony sort of way. The dark side (assuming you don't consider real estate speculation and haute coutoure dark enough): virtual prostitution is reported to be a booming industry in Second Life. There is supposedly even a "rating service" for "escorts", run by someone under the nom de je n'sais quois of Tommy Thompson:
Thompson, who lives in Amsterdam in real life, has rated five escorts in the virtual region of Amsterdam within Second Life, giving an average rating of 3.4 in that area--the highest of three "Best Places," which includes The Barbie Club and The Sex Club. Out of nine escorts reviewed, only two have received a perfect rating. "If you score three Tommies, you are recommended," Thompson explains to review candidates via a posting on Second Life Escort Ratings. "Scoring three Tommies means that you've made the impression you are a human being. You seemed to care about what was happening on your screen."
The post from which the above was gleaned, Kissing and Telling in Second Life from Tony Walsh's Clickable Culture blog, had a link to a blog for the above-described rating service, but the link leads nowhere as far as I can tell. Walsh's post had a trackback to a post in a game security blog, a post entitled In Virtual Worlds, It's the Second Oldest Profession by Steven Davis, CEO of SecurePlay. Davis raises issues in his post which are highly relevant to my concerns:
It is amazing, sad, or something how pervasive virtual prostitution is... The interesting question in all of this is the continuity between the virtual world and the physical world. My basic assertion is that there is no "virtual world" that is exempt from real laws (though jurisdictional issues are complicated).
He goes on to ask some pertinent questions regarding the jurisdictional issues, which I can't quote here or I will have stolen almost his entire post. But to me, it is his assertion that is significant, an assertion with which I wholeheartedly agree, though I would reduce the qualifiers:
There is no "virtual world".
If you think a virtual world exists when you are participating in a virtual reality, you are deluding yourself - more specifically, you are identifying with a character in a fictional story. It exists only in your imagination, though your delusion may be shared by many others. Virtual reality is to reality as Emeril's TV show is to food: it looks great, but try to live on his food and it will kill you.
Of course I don't mean the food you cook emulating what you saw Emeril create on TV - that's in the real world. I'm sure you knew that already, but I'm making a point here. If you believe you are having sex in a virtual world, you are deluding yourself: what you are doing is called "masturbation". I'm not being prudish here - from what I've heard, masturbation is actually a lot of fun and doesn't make hair grow on your palms. But persons who are unaware of the fact at the time they are engaging in that act are a danger to themselves and to others.
The current denizens of Second Life's underworld are most likely not in much trouble yet. If you are male, and you conflate that bulbuous, impossibly long-legged cartoon figure with an attractive flesh-and-blood female of the species, you do have a problem, but I suspect the problem is not endemic to Second Life's sexually active residents.
However, the technologies underlying virtual reality are not standing still. By the time my fifteen-month-old grandson reaches puberty, multisensory virtual environments will have achieved a high degree of realism. The potential for these virtual beings invading one's First Place and First Life is not just great, it's inevitable - a question of when, not if. Worse, convincing computer-driven "avatars" will very likely be commonplace, so not only will the virtual bodies be fake, but they won't necessarily have real persons behind them. They will be dei ex machinas, ghosts in the machine.
It won't just be the other "people" that will have become much more realistic than they are now; the virtual environment itself will (if the authors so desire) resemble the real world ever more closely as the technologies, both soft and hard, co-evolve.
Let's say the "normal" twelve-year-old child in the year 2017 manages to avoid becoming addicted to the sexual side of virtual life. There is still the problem of friendship. Real friendship is a hard thing to learn. Flesh-and-blood friends-in-training beat you up from time to time, lie to you, steal from you, and talk trash to others about you. You do it to them too, while you are learning what it means be friends. Virtual friends will have no such weaknesses; the urge to avoid conflict and still have "relationships" will be easily satisfied. But virtual relationships are to real relationships as wax bananas are to bananas.
The Marginalization of Nature
There's no need for a virtual world to have bugs and spiders, to be rainy and muggy, to have hard edges and nasty falls to crunch your body. You can't get melanoma from a virtual sun. There's no risk of frostbite or hypothermia on a virtual mountaintop. As Richard Louv, author of Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder, wrote in an article on the Chicago Conscious Choice site:
Though we often see ourselves as separate from nature, humans are also part of that wildness.
My earliest memory of using my senses, and sensing wonder, came on a cold spring morning in Independence, Mo. I was perhaps 3 years old, sitting in a dry field behind my grandmother’s peeling Victorian home. Nearby, my father worked, planting a garden. He threw down a cigarette — as many were likely to do in that age, when Midwesterners habitually tossed refuse on the ground, or launched beer bottles and soda cans and cigarette butts from their car windows, sparks flying in the wind. The dry grass caught fire. I remember the exact sound of the flames and smell of the smoke and the whoosh of my father’s leg and foot as he stamped and stepped quickly to chase the fire as it skipped across the field.
I'm sorry, but to have an experience like that in a virtual world is, for now, impossible. And when it becomes possible, I will not consider that eventuality to be progress in any humane sense of the word.
Bottom line: the less virtual reality sucks, the more dangerous it will become. As Alice B. Toklas said about Oakland, California in the early 20th Century, "there's no there there." More and more business, play, and ordinary "life" will occur in the virtual world.
The problem is, there is no "virtual world". We'll be living in our minds.
The Global Village and the Death of Accountability
More than a half century ago, Marshall McLuhan predicted that the world would become a global village, as described in an essay on the Living Internet site:
McLuhan chose the insightful phrase "global village" to highlight his observation that an electronic nervous system (the media) was rapidly integrating the planet -- events in one part of the world could be experienced from other parts in real-time, which is what human experience was like when we lived in small villages.
This essay opens with a quote from McLuhan that put it in his typical semi-apocryphal, semi-poetic style:
Today, after more than a century of electric technology, we have extended our central nervous system itself in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned.
- Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, 1964.
The thing about village life, real village life, is that it is governed by two sets of immutable laws, the laws of physics and of proxemics. Proxemics, a term coined by the anthropologist Edward T. Hall, refers to how one's proximity to significant others (relatives, friends, neighbors) determines the nature of one's cultural self. Proximity governs the degree of direct influence a person or persons can have over another, influence that can take the form of access to food, clothing, and shelter, but also of bodily safety and mutual pleasure (or in many cases their opposites). In village life, your relations with those around you are directly and ineluctably expressed in your physical, psychological, and emotional well-being.
Hall said that "Culture is not made up but [is] something that evolves which is human." This assertion foreshadowed Anthony Giddens' Theory of Structuration, which describes how social agency and social structure interact to create culture. In the real-world village, the ambient interplay of the forces of signification, legitimation, and domination creates in the minds of the inhabitants a mutually perceived structuring of their society. This structuration never truly settles down into a stable "consensus reality", but instead is a shared worldview rife with inherent conflicts, differences of opinion and belief that are always under renegotiation. The relations implicit in the shared worldview drive the behaviors that enact the social structure, behaviors that express various mixes of power, affection, and indifference.
The behaviors driven by the shared worldview in turn become manifest in the life of the village in the form of physical structures, pathways, food, clothing, weapons, objets d'art, the domestication of animals and plants, toys, the telling of stories and singing of songs, humorous and hateful banter, gossip, and myriad other accretions and artifacts of human culture. Accountability to the village as a whole is enacted and enforced by behavior and phenomena inescapably governed by the laws of physics. The fate of each person in the village is inextricably bound to the fate of the others.
The Deprecation of Experience
No affordances and constraints exist in a virtual reality other than those provided by the creators, or those generated by technologies provided by the creators. Structurational forces exist, there is a kind of proxemics involved, but the connection with the laws of physics is broken, and without that inescapable connection with the messy, analog real world, there is nothing to prevent all hell from breaking loose. Beyond the "rent" on the "property" you own in Second Life and the explicit and implicit "rules of engagement" built into the software, there is no true accountability, none at all in either the sensory nor the structurational dimension. To borrow Plato's allegorical description of the mechanisms of our perception and cognition, there is no real connection between Second Life's "shadows on the cave wall" and the real-world archetypal phenomena they attempt to imitate and ultimately to supplant.
Virtual experience is not experience. The word "experience" comes from the Latin verb experiri, to bring out through trial or testing. It's about trying things out in the real world and the learning that derives therefrom. Its secondary meaning is to feel, and again it has always referred to feeling what is real - "experience it for yourself".
This disconnect between the phenomena of Second Life and those of real life is not a problem as long as we remain aware of the distinction between what is real and what is imaginary and retain, even cultivate our connection to the people, places, artifacts, and emotions of real life. The risk as I see it is that a generation will soon grow up unable to see that most important distinction. The connection between their minds and the phenomenal world in which their bodies live will be broken. And as we have seen in aboriginal cultures when their connection to the natural order is distorted or broken by the influence of our enlightened, democratic, free-market globalized civilization, once the connection is broken, it is next to impossible to restore.
Real Is Beautiful
I chose the title of this post with apologies to E. F. Schumacher, whose book Small Is Beautiful played a pivotal role in my life. Mostly concerned with the Second Place (workplace), Schumacher was an economist who broke with the mainstream of economic thought in his time, having had the insight that economic growth was not synonymous with increased quality of life. To quote an online essay by Noah Enelow:
Schumacher's most radical break with the mainstream of economic thought, however, comes with his willingness to sacrifice economic growth - for so long the Holy Grail of economic policy and strategy - for a more fulfilling working life. Perhaps more than any economist since Karl Marx, Schumacher called attention to the quality of people's lives as producers, even stressing its importance over their lives as consumers. Work, rather than being, as in neoclassical theory, a "disutility," becomes in Schumacher's philosophy a means towards satisfaction, fulfillment, and personal development.
What Schumacher said about the Second Place is valid for all three places, applicable to our home, work, and social lives. Quality of our imaginary life is important - as humans, one of our most important needs is the need to dream. Virtual worlds like Second Life can succor our very real need for a life of the imagination, and serve very real and humanitarian purposes, as we saw with the work of Dr. Yellowlees. What is important, though, is to make sure that we never forget that realms of the mind, though limitless in nature and scope, cannot supplant our need for the constraints and affordances of the real. We need real food, real clothing, real shelter, and real connection with real human beings.
Earlier I quoted "Tommy Thompson" as saying, ""Scoring three Tommies means that you've made the impression you are a human being. You seemed to care about what was happening on your screen." We need to do more than just "seem to care" about our fellow humans, and the other beings who share life on this planet with us. We must really care, and really act on our caring, and that requires above all that we remain connected with what truly is.
Real is the feel of a baby in your arms three days old. Real is the sound of the troubled breath of an old person who is dying. Real is mountain sunrise and city smog, being caressed by your lover and being cut by a knife. Real is not always painless or pleasant, but it is always true. Real is evanescent, but there is always more reality to follow. Real is alive, irreplaceable, and at its root indescribable. Real is beautiful.
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