Last week I wrote in my First Annual Chinese New Year Technology Predictions post that "Serious Games, especially 3D Virtual Worlds, will start being taken seriously by mainstream academic health researchers." This prediction is my small contribution to the storm of controversy around Second Life. When I made the prediction I hadn't yet seen a post in the blog of Irving Wladawsky-Berger (hereinafter W-B) entitled A Dialogue on Virtual Worlds, in which he contrasts his view with that of perhaps the three most prominent voices in the Second life debate, Clay Shirky of NYU and Beth Coleman and Henry Jenkins of MIT's Comparative Media Studies program.
W-B's post reports on the point of view he expressed at a panel on Transforming Healthcare, Education and Business through Virtual Worlds at the Westport (CT) Public Library. (Sounds like a great public library, by the way!) W-B's point of view is unlike either of the two most prevalent views in the technology predictions space, which I referred to in my Predictions post as the enterprise prognosticators and the gadget geeks. As an IBM executive it can be argued that his viewpoint is closest to the enterprise prognosticators, but as chief of IBM Research he takes a longer, wider, and deeper view than that expressed in the business mainstream. I watch his blog closely because he is in a position to see further down the road than most IT mavens.
Clay, Beth, and Henry's viewpoints, while strongly divergent with each other and to some degree with W-B's and my own, are of similar quality to that of W-B's in my estimation. Clay in particular is prominent in the health IT arena, most recently as chair of the Technical Subcommittee of the Markle Foundation's Connecting For Health initiative.
Many are trying to figure out whether [virtual worlds and Second Life in particular] are serious subjects that go beyond games and entertainment. Some of us believe that this is the natural evolution of the Internet and World Wide Web, and therefore worthy of the considerable attention being increasingly devoted to it by the technical and business communities, as well as by the media. Others, however, feel that this is all the marketing hype of a hungry IT industry looking for its Next Big Thing. Perhaps the biggest skeptic about the future of virtual worlds and Second Life is Clay Shirky, a consultant, writer and teacher who is Adjunct Professor at NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program.
He, Beth Coleman and Henry Jenkins have started a very interesting dialogue on virtual worlds and Second Life through their respective blogs. Henry Jenkins is Professor of Literature at MIT, where Beth Coleman is Assistant Professor of Writing and New Media. They are both also on the faculty of MIT's Comparative Media Studies program. Here are Henry's, Beth's and Clay's blog entries to kick off their discussion. I would like to contribute to this civilized exchange by explaining my own point of view on the subject, which I come to from a somewhat different angle than Clay, Beth and Henry.
W-B's post reports on the point of view he expressed at a panel on Transforming Healthcare, Education and Business through Virtual Worlds at the Westport (CT) Public Library. (Sounds like a great public library, by the way!) W-B's
point of view is unlike either of the two most prevalent views in the
technology predictions space, which I referred to in my Predictions
post as the enterprise prognosticators and the gadget geeks.
As an IBM executive it can be argued that his viewpoint is closest to
the enterprise prognosticators, but as chief of IBM Research he takes a
longer, wider, and deeper view than that expressed in the business
mainstream. I watch his blog closely because he is in a position to
see further down the road than most IT mavens.
Clay, Beth, and Henry's viewpoints, while strongly divergent with
each other and to some degree with W-B's and my own, are of similar
quality to that of W-B's in my estimation. Clay in particular is
prominent in the health IT arena, most recently as chair of the Technical Subcommittee of the Markle Foundation's Connecting For Health initiative. W-B frames the discussion in the following way:
Many are trying to figure out whether [virtual worlds and Second Life in particular] are serious subjects that go beyond games and entertainment. Some of us believe that this is the natural evolution of the Internet and World Wide Web, and therefore worthy of the considerable attention being increasingly devoted to it by the technical and business communities, as well as by the media. Others, however, feel that this is all the marketing hype of a hungry IT industry looking for its Next Big Thing.
W-B is not new to this debate. His June 2006 post entitled Life and Business in the Virtual World was his most articulate expression of his viewpoint. Rather than wasting time agreeing with the POV W-B expresses in that post or the recent one referenced above, I want to add my own intuition about the meaning of Second Life.
Computer-Supported Cooperative Work, or CSCW, is a relatively recent field of study, going back to the 1980's. CSCW has traditionally categorized systems in by the permutations on same and different times and places: same-time same place (STSP), same-time different-place (STDP), different-time same-place (DTSP), and different-time different-place (DTDP).
In a universe with viable worlds, time remains time, so the meaning of the T's in these acronyms is constant, but what about the meaning of the P's? Is a location in Second Life a place? What is the essence of place? SL fits in this framework as STDP, a kind of extension of internet chat or the shared applications of Microsoft's NetMeeting. But it has a different feel to it; it feels a lot more like STSP. Virtual worlds are a new kind of "place", one that merges the colloquial use of the word with the computer science concept of address space.
For a long time now we have been referring to conceptual entities in computing as places. The concept of an address space in a computer's memory goes back to the very beginning of computer science. The dreaded "GOTO" command, the one we were all supposed to avoid in computer programming, provides a clue to this. In the execution of a computer program, it was possible to be in the wrong "place" altogether, or to be at the right place at the wrong time, for example when the stack wasn't set up to make it possible to "return" from that destination in any meaningful sense of the word.
There is another historical use of the concept of place that provides an analogy, tthe Method of Loci as described in this passage from Wikipedia:
In ancient advice, the were physical locations, usually in a familiar large public building, such as a market or a church. To utilize the method, one walked through the building several times, viewing distinct places within it, in the same order each time. After a few repetitions of this, one should be able to remember and visualize each of the places in order reliably.
To memorize a speech, one breaks it up into pieces, each of which is symbolized by vivid imagined objects or symbols. In the mind's eye, one then places each of these images into the loci. They can then be recalled in order by imagining that one is walking through the building again, visiting each of the loci in order, and viewing each of the images that were placed in the loci, thereby recalling each piece of the speech in order.
The Method of Loci culminated in the concept of the "memory palace" as described in Frances Yates' 1966 book The Art of Memory (ISBN 10226950018) and Jonathan Spence's The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci (1984, ISBN 0140080988). A memory palace was just a mnemonic device, of course, but it has a lot in common with virtual worlds. The primary difference is that in SL or any other "place" in the computing sense of the term, memory is shared and external, not bound to the constraints of the memory of a single individual. The idea of the Internet as humanity's collective memory is not new, going back at least as far as Vannevar Bush's 1945 Atlantic Monthly piece As We May Think:
Professionally our methods of transmitting and reviewing the results of research are generations old and by now are totally inadequate for their purpose. If the aggregate time spent in writing scholarly works and in reading them could be evaluated, the ratio between these amounts of time might well be startling. Those who conscientiously attempt to keep abreast of current thought, even in restricted fields, by close and continuous reading might well shy away from an examination calculated to show how much of the previous month's efforts could be produced on call. Mendel's concept of the laws of genetics was lost to the world for a generation because his publication did not reach the few who were capable of grasping and extending it; and this sort of catastrophe is undoubtedly being repeated all about us, as truly significant attainments become lost in the mass of the inconsequential.
The difficulty seems to be, not so much that we publish unduly in view of the extent and variety of present day interests, but rather that publication has been extended far beyond our present ability to make real use of the record. The summation of human experience is being expanded at a prodigious rate, and the means we use for threading through the consequent maze to the momentarily important item is the same as was used in the days of square-rigged ships.
But there are signs of a change as new and powerful instrumentalities come into use. Photocells capable of seeing things in a physical sense, advanced photography which can record what is seen or even what is not, thermionic tubes capable of controlling potent forces under the guidance of less power than a mosquito uses to vibrate his wings, cathode ray tubes rendering visible an occurrence so brief that by comparison a microsecond is a long time, relay combinations which will carry out involved sequences of movements more reliably than any human operator and thousands of times as fast—there are plenty of mechanical aids with which to effect a transformation in scientific records.
My interest in virtual worlds is in line with Bush's and with at least a part of W-B's interest - as a medium for "big science", for cooperative interdisciplinary research on a scale thus far unimaginable in human history. Crude as the medium is at present, CSCW in Second Life is already viable and already tangibly different from the forms of CSCW we've had at our fingertips thus far in the field's evolution.
And the "tangible" aspect will soon be more than a metaphorical use of the adjective: already the sordid side of SL is being augmented with haptic interfaces, as described in Regina Lynn's Wired article on teledildonics in SL, Second Life Gets Sexier. She also hints at broader applications than cybersex:
Integrating physical machines with virtual worlds has many more applications than sex, of course. QDot's next project was to connect an exercise bike so you could power your in-world vehicle while getting a good workout, thus ensuring your hotness if your Second Life romance migrated offline. (And why this is not standard equipment at every gym across America, I have no idea.)
The applications of haptic interfaces for communications are no more restricted to sexual signals than real-life touch and gesture. This realm is so new that we can't possibly see all the implications, and won't be able to for some time to come.
Beth Coleman hints at the larger and more wholesome implications of virtual worlds at the end of her post, in a section she entitled "Be @ Home":
A virtual world plan for Net domination calls for a merger of the experiential with universal standards––amongst worlds and even across media genre. Yes, I want my Blog to talk to my Webpage, which should, in turn, be in close communication with my avatar…who skips merrily ‘cross portals.
That said, let’s keep some perspective on why this is interesting in the first place. What virtual worlds promise is an augmentation of human-to-human communication. We seem to yearn for synchronous connectivity and virtual worlds promise to deliver exactly that. Looking at the 150-year build out of telecommunications capabilities, what we find with many of the current platforms from text message to instant messaging to virtual worlds are designs for simultaneous connectivity.
Putting a human face to things is a lot of what this is about, even if that human face is a codebot. These platforms are not simply to facilitate shopping but to develop further (or perhaps more massively) the ways in which virtual and “portable” spaces can be inhabited as a home. Hello worlds.
Those worlds will be places where we live and shop and work, in the same we we "go places" on the World Wide Web today - places that until recently have made no pretense of being loci in the original sense of the term.
Thus far, while I share Clay's skepticism about the hype, I share Beth's optimism and her POV about place. I have seen things in recent days, things I can't write about for reasons of confidentiality, that have opened my eyes to the possibilities of virtual worlds as loci for research, both on and in CSCW environments. They are only possibilities at present, but as Beth points out, online shopping was a possibility that in the mid-'90's was viewed with considerable skepticism.
So in spite of the lurid side of SL and its being untimely cast into a panacea role, I await the coevolution of real and virtual worlds with a sense of eager anticipation. Hello worlds indeed!
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