Facing Reality

Yes, this is a generic picture of Kitti. No, I couldn't think of a picture I could take that might be related to this post.

I wanted to talk, just a little bit, about that giant of social networks, the book of faces. Yes, I've seen The Social Network (the best bits of that film were the ones where I could recognise the soundtrack as being from Nine Inch Nail's Ghosts, or variations of, anyway. And, of course, the bits with the very attractive Andrew Garfield). I know what a big baddie Mark Zuckerberg has become - and yet pretty much all of us, for all of our whinging, still use Facebook.

As I understand it, a growing number of SL users have taken to making Facebook pages for their avatars, and in a few instances, those pages have been removed from Facebook on the grounds that they are not 'for real people'. In terms of Facebook policy, I understand the move, but from the perspective of the people who have put time and effort into these pages, it sucks massively. Often, there was no plan to deceive or trick anybody into thinking the SL avatar the page was for was, in any way, a flesh-and-blood being. 

On a related by tangential note: there exists now a search engine that apparently beats the Turing test - Eugene Goostman. The creepy little guy in the top left-hand corner looks like an SL avatar from 2009.  I wonder if he has a Facebook page.

There are, however, plenty of flesh-and-blood beings out there that use Facebook to create accounts for people who are not real in either life. You only have to watch five minutes of Catfish the TV show to see that, and to see the lengths some people will go to to maintain these false accounts - with intentions to deceive. 

There's no guarantee, either, that the accounts created by flesh-and-blood people using their real names and faces are any less deceptive. There are no restrictions on the number of personalities we are 'allowed', if you like, to play out on the Internet, and there's no obvious way to weed out the fake personalities from the real. It's also possible, depending on the way you engage with Facebook, that the information on your profile and/or your wall could create an image of you that is nothing like the real. And what I understand to be 'real' from one person's page might not be what you perceive to be 'real' from that same page.

As I have written about before, the levels of reality involved in avatar creation in SL vary drastically, and I suspect it might be equally difficult, in some instances, find the line between first life personalities and second, even amongst those who claim to take on a role when interacting in SL. How do you begin to prove the reality of a virtual existence that represents perhaps one side of your first life self? Is there a button you can tick on Facebook's Prove You Are Real system for 'this person is all my good bits', or 'this is a version of me who gets to live out some of my crazier dreams'? How about 'me, but with the legs that go on forever' - because I bet most of us would need to tick that option.

I realise that there are systems in place with Facebook that mean flesh-and-blood beings - 'real' people - can be investigated and asked to prove their reality, too. But it's still a complex issue. Being asked to prove that you are 'real' is a weird request, a really bizarre thing that we are being asked to do more and more frequently these days as computers become ever more wired into our lives. Passwords, your mother's maiden name, your first primary school, the name of your first dog, captcha forms, pin numbers, separate pin codes, alternative email addresses, someone-in-Korea-has-signed-in-to-your-account-is-this-you-? emails: it's only going to get worse and weirder.

Some laptops, designed for personal use, have face scanners and fingerprint readers built into them. My laptop has the latter, and when I first got it, a little icon would pop up in my taskbar practically begging me to create an electronic fingerprint lest some awful being attempt to switch my laptop on without my consent. I've a slightly better idea, Hewlett Packard - how about I just don't let weirdos who might attempt to use my computer without my knowledge into my house in the first place? It's not like it's an anti-theft device, really, either, because burglars are not really the types to hand my laptop back once thwarted.

Whilst setting up to take the picture for this post, Norah appeared behind me doing what appeared to be a sneaky pose. When I asked what she was doing, she said, and I quote, "photobomb = reality". So there. P.S. - no, I changed my dress for the opening shot, your eyes haven't gone squiffy.

I'm not really trying to start a philosophical debate here. I don't have the philsophical knowledge to back it up, and frankly, the nature of reality is interesting but has been debated a thousand times by a million people, all of whom are more interesting than I. What I wanted to do was draw attention to this phenomenon, and say...since when did we allow Facebook to weigh in on this? Since when did Facebook become a philsophical heavyweight?

And the bottom line is: understanding the necessity of such does not make it cease to be WEIRD.

A Date to Remember

This week has been busy in terms of dates, and it's fantastic. Yesterday, Norah took me to Rose Borchovski's in-world installation, The Inevitability of Fate. I had been before, but much more briefly and it became apparently very quickly that I had only seen half of what the sim had to offer. Norah's quick wit and considerate, empathetic brain deepen any and every experience, and I just love spending time with her.

but then the war came

Borchovski's piece is part installation, part experience, and part memorial. The Holocaust has had, now, a lot of artistic treatments, and there's always a danger in approaching a subject as painful and enormous as this with any kind of creative lens. It's too easy to dismiss, to belittle, and to appropriate. Of photographing atrocities, Susan Sontag wrote "people want the weight of witnessing without the taint of artistry, which is equated with insincerity or mere contrivance", but looking at a photograph of a past event is passive and in many respects, too safe to provoke anything more than compassion. 

That isn't to say that compassion is useless or pointless - not at all - but it is an "unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers". Compassion for the victims of the Holocaust has a limited ability to manifest itself in action because the event is past and, as I have said, attempts to create additional memorials are fraught with difficulty. 

At no point during the installation is the word "Holocaust" used. We are introduced to the characters of Beth and Lot, whom the narrative follows, and at no point is it stated that what becomes of them is a fate that was forced upon anyone else. It is obvious, though, from the semiotics and "the war" what this is about. In the subtlety, there are no label-boundaries, nothing separating the audience member from touching, if you like, the horror of what one might otherwise claim as a Jewish experience. At the same time, sitting before my computer, I know that I was not a part of this event, that I hold no claim over anything pictured on the screen before me. It is a flaw of empathy that we struggle to negotiate the ownership of suffering - and that, in my experience at least, we seem to find it easier to respond to the plight of an individual than to the mass murder of a whole.

I am tiptoeing, here, around my own explanation and analysis. I am wrighting, as opposed to writing, it out. If I can keep my foot out of my mouth, that would be a good start.

Beth reaches for Lot

Empathy and sympathy are dangerous, too, in that experiencing them whilst forcing ourselves to look at images of atrocity make us "feel we are not accomplices to what caused the suffering". If we look beyond the individual, do the multiplication to make the many Beths and Lots, we begin, too, to feel that "the sufferings and misfortunes are too vast, too irrevocable, too epic to be much changed by any local political intervention". Both of these systems allow for personal detachment, both from the event itself and from any responsibility to do anything other than remember it. "Lest we forget", we mumble as we file passed - and then we go home and put the kettle on and watch reruns of QI.

What the Inevitability of Fate does, then, is offer us a way in to the whole through the individuals Beth and Lot. There is a narrative to follow, but there is little to stop you wandering from tableau to tableau in any order you choose, doubling back to see them again or working backwards. It is still a flat image, yes, contained by the computer screen, but it utilises the liminal space of the virtual as best it can, and employs movement and sound in really interesting ways. Things spring up out of nowhere, other things drop down. You dance, you fly, you hide, you climb. You are bombarded, literally. You are given space to think.

 

There is no accusation in the installation, not pointed fingers. From the beginning, Borchovski has really worked to make the audience feel watched, but that watching is done by a faceless, nameless power that seems to be omnipotent, omnipresent. Placards fly up from the ground bearing the new rules for the new regime, and the voices that repeat them are heavily distorted, inhuman. You are watched by floating, disembodied eyeballs.

you are not allowed

A real effort has been made to include the audience in the narrative, with countless poseballs dotted through the tableaux allowing you to literally insert yourself into the frame. You do not, at any point, however, take the place of Beth or of Lot in any (virtually) physical sense. We are alongside, witnessing, sometimes joining in.

Happy Birthday, Lot!

 

up

 

in happier times

There are no images of atrocity, no reliance on the familiar photographs of the Holocaust that we have come to accept as part of a social consciousness (although there are some photos on display in the sim, they are not emblazoned across the walls and floors and burned onto the retina). Nothing about the scenes feels familiar in any boring, dismissive way, and there is so much going on that the act of looking and exploring never gets boring. At no point, either, does it become too much. The semiotics, as I have said, are recognisable, understandable, but not stale. 

Ultimately, I think the sim works because it can be understood as an expression and memorial of grief - Beth's grief for her daughter, Lot, who goes missing and can safely be presumed dead. We aren't asked to appropriate the horror that befell people who died before most of us were even born, and we aren't told to take to the streets and hang the descendents of those responsible. We aren't asked to imagine that we ourselves have been tortured or killed. We have all, at some point or another, felt the fear of potentially losing a loved one, and the personal horror of that is easily transmutable from the all-too-human and contorted faces of the models before us. 

 

Honestly, I think their expressions are the most human things I have ever seen in Second Life.

Lot and a forbidden book

Beth, in grief

 Again, personal grief is an individual route into an otherwise enormous and difficult subject matter, and taking such a personal interest in an event that categorically did not happen to you has criticism.

 

So much more could be said about this sim, and where it might fit within a canon of memorials and installations. I haven't touched upon the props we are given and told to wear as you follow the narrative (and which have an afterlife as they remain in your inventory when you leave the event). I haven't talked about the use of light, or the installation walls which are covered with names we assume are the names of the dead. I haven't made any kind of list of symbols for further analysis, and I haven't reached for any text books beyond Sontag's Regarding the Pain of Others from which I have source all of the academic quotes in this post (if you'd like specific references, I will gladly give them). I haven't touched at all on the performance of guilt, nor on the significance of a memorial in an ephemeral realm. There is criticism in abundance of everything I have brought up here, but I wanted to focus now on what the sim achieved (which I think is a lot) and not what it may have wrongly assumed or been lacking in. But I think, for now, that I have written more than enough.

 

no chance

Thank you so much, Norah, for taking me here and letting me experience it with you. If you would like to visit the Inevitability of Fate, you can do so by clicking here - here! If you would like to share your opinions, comments are always welcome.

Ballooning Vulnerability

I don't consider myself to be a particularly weak person. I have my soft points, but I think anybody who knows me would probably agree that they are not easily got at. This morning, I was made to feel more uncomfortable and more vulnerable than I have ever been in Second Life.

The worst part is that the person who IM'd me and landed their hot air balloon, uninvited, on my skybox roof this morning was not unpleasant. At no point did he insult me, nor make any stupid sexual advances or comments. He sent me a message saying he was in the sim, had seen me on the map, and was saying hi. He told me he was in a hot air balloon, and was coming to find me. Was I in my skybox? I was? Cool. He was coming for a cup of tea. He did ignore my attempts to point out the weirdness of him inviting himself into my virtual home, but I wasn't especially insistent with them.

And why wasn't I? Whilst this was happening, I was relaying the chat to my friends sian and Norah, and they were equally weirded out. Norah was especially uncomfortable, and began to talk about the way girls are taught to be nice in the face of awkward and unwanted advances of all kinds.

She's right, of course. But this is something I am aware of, and something I have seen in my own behaviour and tried to moderate. It isn't that we shouldn't be nice to people because we should, whether we are male or female, but where and how do you draw the line? How do you make the switch from nice to firm? To nasty, even? 

With obvious provocation, it's easy. I kept expecting this guy to sudden realise I was trying to repel him and break out into insults. I expected to be a 'stuck up bitch', or a 'slut', or some 'prudent' combination of both, and had he begun down that path, I'd have had no trouble drawing the line in the sand and linguistically annihilating the bastard. 

But the insults never came, and when he landed on my roof, he still didn't understand that I didn't want him there and that I wasn't about to invite him inside. He stopped just shy of coming in of his own accord, but had my skybox possessed an obvious door, that wouldn't have been the case.

I had thought, as I could see him getting closer on the map, that he would get lost on the way somehow, or that he would get bored and go away. I thought he would get the message and stop. I considered, laughingly, moving the house when he got close by - but that wasn't a particularly practical notion. I also considered teleporting out of the sim and going somewhere else. I'd vanish from his map, and then maybe he wouldn't even be able to find my skybox. 

That's when the vulnerability set in. I had been told when I moved in to this sim that people could only access it if their names were on an 'accepted people' list, and I dutifully gave my friends' names to my landlady so that she could add them to that list and thus they would be allowed to come to visit. The security system in place stops people on the list from teleporting into the sim - but it doesn't stop them walking in, or, say, flying in in a hot air balloon. I have no system for ejecting someone from my house, and I seriously considered leaving it because of somebody else.

That annoys me. The idea of giving up my own turf for fear of somebody else annoys me. And yet, even with that realisation, I didn't know how to make the transition from being nice to telling this guy where to get off. I was afraid of judging it wrongly, of being, ultimately, impolite and/or more heavy handed than the situation called for. 

If it had been sian or Norah, or any of my other friends, faced with this situation, I would have had no qualms about stepping in and telling this guy where to go. I wouldn't have had a single one of these worries. It wouldn't have mattered.

...What is that about?!

Om Nom Noming into Forever

Simon took this. His shots came out much prettier than mine.

So the feedback I've had to my proposal idea has all been positive, and I'm excited to say that people are starting to message me and ask to take me to places. This is exciting!

My first came on Saturday in the form of Simon May and the Pixel Pot Restaurant and Cafe. The only warning I had about where we were going was "for dinner", and Simon had never been to this place before either.

The restaurant was very prettily put together, with indoor and outdoor dining spaces and, across the way, a stretch of pretty prim-sea complete with a ship and a lighthouse. The best, weirdest and most interesting thing about the restaurant was that the owners provided a waiting-on service, a full menu, and what we ordered was actually brought to the table, in actual pixel-food form. I'm just going to let that sink in a minute.

This is one of my shots. See, not half as pretty as Simon's.

There it is, see. The waiter showed us to our table, sent us a menu, took our order, took it away to the kitchen for the "chef" to "cook", and returned with plates of exactly what we had ordered. Here's my spaghetti and meatballs, and Simon's tuna steak with asparagus. There were animations in the chairs that allowed us to simulate eating, and knives and forks were given to us to make the experience all the more authentic. We even had a glass of white wine each. And dessert.

I took a shot with the interface in view, so you could see the menu and how the ordering worked. And our waiter, Gavin :). In the background is the main restaurant itself.

The desserts too pretty to eat, even if we could.

The restaurant even has a reservation system, although it was pretty quiet whilst we were there. You do have to pay for the experience which, I confess, I found slightly odd since we weren't actually paying for any ingredients. However, the owners of the restaurant must still have to pay rent, and I guess we were paying for the waiter's time (and I have no issue with that). We spent about as much time there as I would expect to spend in a real life restaurant, and it didn't cost anywhere near as much as that real experience would have.

Whilst we were eating, too, the waiter, unbeknownst to us, took our picture, and when we came to leave, we were presented with the picture in a frame and stamped with the restaurant's logo. The idea seems more reminiscent of rollercoasters than restaurants, but I think it says a lot about the kind of experience the restaurant owners expect it to have been.

Simon remarked that it was funny how something as mundane and normal as eating could be transformed into something I considered to be weird in SL (and I do think it's weird, really weird), especially considering the time I spend in science fiction and fantasy roleplay and dress. We can be anything we want to be, and that is normal, but eating? Eating is weird. 

I see his point, but I think the strangeness of the concept is rooted in something other than flouting supposed impossibilities; it lies in necessity. It reaches back to the first essay I ever wrote about SL wherein I commented on virtual washing machines and toilets. Why worry about eating when you don't have to?

Of course, dining has become an activity for pleasure as much as need - for some, I guess it could even be considered a hobby. And whilst there is nothing stopping me from going out to a restaurant in the real world, it would take an awful lot of time, effort and money to arrange to go out to a restaurant in the real world with Simon because he lives quite a way away from me. There is something good and happy, I think, in the spontaneity of virtual dinners with faraway people. We take intimacy from breaking bread with each other, and after this experience, I think it's fair to say the breaking of virtual bread feels no different.

I found it absolutely impossible not to laugh. Set up with the repetitive eating animations and what was, essentially, plastic pixel food, Simon and I could have sat there eating for all eternity. The food would never run out. Our arms would never get tired. Our bellies would never be full. The waiter might get a bit bored, I'll grant, but unless he's got a hud that allows him to twist his avatar's face into an expression of annoyance, we might never know. We'd be om nom noming into forever. If that isn't funny, I'm not sure what is.

I'll be over here laughing in the corner by myself. 

The conversation was sparkling, of course, and Simon is a charming and always impeccably dressed companion. I had a great time, and it was certainly a unique experience in my Second Life. Thank you, Simon :).

If you're like to visit the Pixel Pot, you can do so by clicking here - here!

Without a filter, man is just chaos walking

You know when you know you're supposed to be doing something else but you're doing something else instead? No, me neither. So I decided I would answer Strawberry Singh's Monday Meme - and this week, it's about books.

Kitti is scared because her balance isn't great and she's wondering who taught her books to fly.

1. Are you a bookworm? I guess so, yes. I read 48 books last year.
2. Which do you prefer: hardback, paperback or electronic? I used to only buy hardback if I could, but now I'm not so fussy. My one rule is that if I begin a series, I must buy all of them either in paper copies or electronic copies.
3. Which book is your favourite? That's tough to call, but probably Blood Canticle by Anne Rice.
4. Which children's book is your favourite? I Want My Hat Back by Jon Klassen. I discovered this book only in the last couple of years, and I absolutely love it. So does my ten year old cousin, and my mother. Make of that what you will.
5. What's the last book you've read? The Wolves of Midwinter by Anne Rice. Currently reading The Book of Dead Days by Marcus Sedgwick but it's kind of slow-going at the moment.
6. Name your top five writers: That's so difficult! Anne Rice, Bernard Cornwell, Patrick Ness, Garth Nix, and Paul Hoffman.
7. Name a book that had a strong impact on you: I could list many, but let's go with A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness.
8. Favourite and least favourite book genres? My favourites are fantasy and history. I don't tend to enjoy reading non-fiction books for pleasure, but I don't dislike them particularly. They just wouldn't be my first choice.
9. Favourite and least favourite book-to-movie adaptations? I know it isn't a movie, but Game of Thrones is a fantastic adaptation of A Song of Ice and Fire. Even when the series isn't wholly true to the plot, it is true to the narrative and to the characters in a way that I find really exciting. I don't always agree with the way certain characters are explored (ask me about Joff and Roz, if you really want to know) but I still respect those decisions. Least favourite...Interview with the Vampire. I know Rice loves the film version of her novel, but I just can't find it in myself to like it. It feels gaudy and silly whereas the book holds a lot of meaning and a lot of weight for me.
10. Have you ever bought a book based on the cover alone? No, I always read the blurb. Covers attract our attention though, right?
11. Where do you usually buy your books? A mix. I used to only buy them from WH Smiths, but then I discovered Waterstones and now I use Amazon too.
12. Do you go to the library? Sadly, I don't. Libraries always make me feel a little sad because they often feel sterile and isolating and I don't think reading should be like that.
13. How many books to you own? I would guess nearly two hundred, but it could be a little more than that. I haven't counted the ones on my Kindle in that figure.
14. If you were to write a book about Second Life, which topic would you focus on? Ahaha, I'm not sure! There's a fantastic book by Tim Etchells called The Broken World about the idea of a merging of life and video game, and I'd like to write something that captured the blurring, of both reality and emotion, that that book toys with. 

Now ask me these questions tomorrow and I'll give you different answers. Isn't that almost always the way when it comes to books? 

The title of this post comes from The Knife of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness. It's the first of the Chaos Walking series. I couldn't recommend it enough.

Read Strawberry's original post here - here!

T'internet at Twelve

Kitti says Trololol

 I have a feeling that this might be the most boring blog post I have ever written - and now I've just sold it to you so beautifully. I know, I know, I'm a genius. Anyway.

I have been online since mid-2002 when my grandad brought me my first computer. It was kept downstairs in the dining room and I was allowed to be on the internet for an hour an evening. To begin with, I spent most of my time on roleplay forums, but then my friends signed up for MSN Messenger and all-too-quickly my evenings were consumed (for an hour, anyway) by talking to people I had already spent six hours that day with. I have absolutely no idea what it was we said to each other, but we thought we were cool (we were twelve at the time).

The first thing I learned about the internet, aged twelve, was that we are alone here. Whilst the internet undoubtedly facilitates communication with people on the other side of the world, it is also a tool for isolation. I don't recall ever surfing the net with a friend sat beside me, and even when my friends and I were talking via instant messenger about homework or who upset who at school or something equally shallow and pointless, I would minimize the chat screens when my parents walked passed and might see. If this is how secretive those of us who are twiddling our virtual thumbs are, I cannot imagine how awful those who are doing things that are genuinely dodgy must be.

I also learned that if I got myself into trouble online, nobody was going to come to help me. That was a little more vague a lesson than the first. A friend sent me an email and, somewhere along the way, the email picked up a worm virus. I believed this friend had sent the virus on purpose, and when confronted, that friend cockily announced that he had (which I sincerely doubt). My parents were furious and called the Police, and an officer came around to our house to speak to me about Internet safety. Even aged twelve and new to computers and the Internet, I realise how out of his depth this officer felt, and everything he told me was stuff I had known since day one. Don't give out your name. Don't tell people where you live. Don't give people too many personal details about yourself. You have no idea who the person on the other side of the computer is (unless he happens to have the same Science homework as you, and saw that kid get hit in the eye with that snowball last week). Etc etc etc. The Police Officer had to agree that I was obviously clued up and he left having done exactly nothing to fix the problem at hand - the fact that someone might have fucked up our computer from the inside on purpose. 

The final maxim/rule I learned, if 'rule' is the right word, is that things said online could not be repeated offline. This came a little later, when I was around fourteen/fifteen. My school friends and I were still chatting on MSN Messenger, and one day I received a friend request from someone in my tutor group whom I didn't know particularly well. We started talking and became pretty good friends, although we only saw each other at school during registration as we didn't have any classes together. One evening, we decided to go on webcam and were just chatting and waving at each other when I realised this guy was flirting with me. We were talking about the non-uniform day we had tomorrow and what we thought the weather would be like and etc etc etc. He said I should wear this jacket I had on because it looked really good. Flattered, I walked into registration the next day wearing the same jacket and flashed him a big smile.

He didn't even catch my eye. He actively avoided me all day.

You knew that was coming, didn't you? Well, aged fourteen, I didn't, and I spent the whole day feeling so annoyed that this friendship I had with this guy online did not translate offline. By the time I logged into MSN Messenger that night, I was thoroughly pissed off. Of course, he wanted to talk to me then and put webcams back on, but I didn't want to know anymore. The separation between the Internet and 'the real world' did not - still does not to this day - exist for me in that way.

These might seem like such trivial anecdotes (and they are), but in the past eight years, things haven't changed that much. Admittedly, nobody logs onto MSN Messenger anymore and we now plaster the Internet with our real names and personal details a la Facebook, but you still cannot assume that something said online holds water offline, nor can we seem to stop being so secretive and alone.

And where online exists the culmination of these tendencies and behaviours? Where are they played out to extremes? You guessed it.

Where did you learn your Internet lessons? And for those of you who existed online in the days before Facebook, how many pseudonyms do you have? Maybe we've met before and known each other by other names ;)

Not Too Soon

Not Too Soon

I have a friend in Second Life whom I haven't heard from in weeks. I'm sure she's fine, but there's always a little worry in the back of your head when someone goes quiet for a while that maybe everything isn't fine. There's a kind of arrogance that goes with the it-won't-happen-to-me assumption that none of us want to be found guilty of, and it feels too much like tempting fate to be something most of us are comfortable with anyway. I've written before about this strange missing-persons problem, and - don't worry - I don't have any real intention of repeating myself. I wanted to focus instead upon another, equally strange, idea involving people that go missing in SL.

Half of the time, we're not sure we want them to come back. 

As I have said on more than one occasion (oh hush), there are a myriad reasons why people sign up to and engage with Second Life, and since many of them are rather on the negative side, it is very difficult not to worry about the quality of first life your friends might be languishing in when not plugged into SL. However, it's also impossible not to hope that their absence might mean that whatever they came to the virtual world in search of might have materialised for them in the real world, and thus their need to log in has been diminished dramatically if not altogether.

The second friend I made in SL was sian pearl, back in the days before she fell out with capital letters, and at the end of one of our first proper conversations, she said to me something along the lines of 'I hope to speak to you again soon - but not too soon'. It's impossible to ignore the idea that spending too much time online and in the virtual world can be unhealthy and detrimental to what may already be a difficult circumstance to exist within IRL. With that in mind, it's easy to see why we might not always want to log in to SL and find our friends online.

I'm not saying that this is the case for my friend. I think she's a pretty well-rounded person and her priorities seem to be in what I would think of, at least, as a good order. Her absence just gave me cause to talk about this. 

I bet she's off somewhere skiing in a bikini and Trent Reznor 'Closer' -esque goggles doing super stunt tricks (safely) and quoting, I don't know, e.e.cummings, to a line of adoring fans. 'Listen: there's a hell of a good universe next door; let's go'.

Miserable Pornstars

Miserable Pornstars

Paraphrased but real conversations I have had in Second Life over the last two days.

#1 - Wednesday
- How do I know you?
- I don't think you do
- Where do you hang out?
- Well, not many places...sometimes the Library, Hangars Liquides...I did some readings at Commune Utopia
- I've been at the Chamber and I'm new to the Library
- I think I've been to the Chamber once
- Are you a submissive? I don't seem to have a record
- You don't have a record because we've never spoken before
- Are you single? Is your husband not romantic anymore?
- I haven't said anything to either effect. Are you single? Unhappy?
- No
- So why did you think I was?
- Most people in SL are

#2 - Thursday
- Ur a hottie
- Ah, thanks
- I'm a pornstar baby
- In SL, or IRL?
- In SL lol
- Isn't everybody a pornstar in SL?
- Except my neighbour
- It was a rhetorical question
- How did you like my answer?
- Well, it was an answer
- :D
- You liked your answer, didn't you?
- Yes I did lol
- I could have bet money on it

So apparently, we're all miserable pornstars.

The Red Pill

Let's see how deep the rabbit hole goes

Because I'm as mad as a hatter, I logged onto Facebook, and then Tumblr, this morning and invited questions from non-SL users about Second Life. I thought I might get a little variety in the questions, maybe get asked how something worked, or if such-and-such was true, but the four - I know, I know, I need to sit down, it's so many - responses I received were all to the tune of one question: What is Second Life, and why would you ever 'go' there?

Deep breath. 'What is Second Life' has got to be up there with the great unexplainable mysteries of life. God, the Big Bang, dark matters, why washing machines make widows of socks, why toast always lands butter-side down: we may never know the answer to these, nor may we ever come up with a completely satisfactory answer to What Second Life Is, but - take another deep breath - I am going to try and answer it nonetheless. I am going to bravely go where a thousand pink-haired rabbits have probably gone before me (we are talking about the Internet, after all). 

We're going to take the red pill. Fasten your seatbelt, Dorothy.

What is Second Life?

Second Life is a virtual world that exists somewhere within the Internet. When you download SL, what you are really doing is downloading what we call a 'viewer' - software with which to open a portal to allow you to see into, and create an avatar within, Second Life. The language of this suggests the opening of a window - literally - to view something which is already in existence just, usually, beyond your line of sight. When you log out and the window closes, the world carries on without you.

The easiest thing to do is to liken SL to a game - preferably, an MMO like World of Warcraft, except with more possibilities when it comes to character creation and customisation. Whilst this analogy works to explain how SL exists in the first place, it doesn't take into account that SL has no predefined objectives, no scoring system, no health or experience bars. In WoW, you can create characters that all exist in the same world, from the same lore, and all learn and level-up based on the same markers for advancement. In SL, not only do you not 'level-up', but the people you are meeting and interacting with may be pulling ideas and information from entirely different worlds and lores from you. The basis for the creation of their characters might be wildly different from yours, and you cannot even rely on the idea that the person before you comes from the same society as you in the real world, because that person could be from a country on the other side of the world from you. 

It's impossible not to draw similarities between SL and The Matrix. A whole virtual simulated world, a replica of the real world, which you reach by plugging yourself into a computer. If you die in the Matrix, you die in the real world - not the case with SL, but then that's because you cannot really die in SL. If someone upsets you in the virtual world, however, it's not so easy to let that emotion go when you go back to the real world. Whether you like it or not, just as your mind travels into the Matrix, so your mind travels with you into SL. And as Morpheus says and as I have repeated here ad nauseam, 'the mind makes it real'.

It's not all nearly as scary as I have made it sound there. Most of the characters I have come across have been 'normal' humans, so to speak, and because of time differences, and because of the social circles I have fallen in with, most of the people I meet are British or American. Those contexts are not, exactly, worlds apart. The only people I have come close to offending with my foreign-lore-ways were the Tolkien elves, and they turned out to be more laid back than I had been warned they would be. Usually, if you say please and thank you, and know how to take turns in a conversation, you'll be just fine.

In fact, SL seems to thrive on a kind of honesty not found, at least in my social circles, in real life. Anonymity can be a great bolster to confidence, but people in SL are often very forthright and open about things as personal as mental health, and sex. Sometimes, they can be a little too forthright, and as such, a lot of 'drama' takes place. Drama is a major issue for SL, and it's something that has been known to drive people away from engaging with the virtual world. 

Because of the drama, and because there is no specific law (that I am aware of) for SL, SL is populated with vigilantes. On forums, personal blogs, and social media networks such as Plurk, vigilantes launch attacks, rightly or wrongly, against those they deem to be wrongdoers, accusing them of everything from copyright infringement to child pornography. Charity fundraisers that didn't give the money they raised to charity, people that think it's O.K. to sell clothes featuring swastikas or dressed inspired by the Columbine school shooting, insensitive remarks about rape - it's all happened in SL, and it's all been pointed out and dealt with by vigilantes. In terms of social and individual empowerment, it's fantastic; but, with any good vigilante film, there's always the fear that people see and accuse first, and ask questions later. Butchering one person doesn't change a general attitude.  

In terms of physicality, SL looks like...well...a whole lot of different things. There is no one aesthetic, and no rhyme or reason to how the virtual world is arranged. If you owned the land and the building skills, you could place Australia beside, say, Sweden, and have one foot in each replica-country, except SL is usually more diverse than that. Instead of building two countries next to each other, more often than not I find I could have one foot in a boxing ring a la Fight Club, and the other in a meadow which is home to a race of fairies with mermaid fins. 

Because there are so many individual creators and designers, the lands (sims) you can walk through can change as often and as quickly as the English weather. Since there is no are-you-any-good-at-this test, the quality of the builds can vary dramatically, too, and they will only exist as long as you keep paying for the land you are renting from Linden Labs. If you stop paying, you lose your right to build there. If you choose to rent land through a middle man, and someone offers you a better deal, you can move your building to another virtually-physical location. In that way, you can never wholly be sure that the place you are trying to visit is still going to be there. I tried to teleport (main method of transportation, after walking) to the World's End Garden earlier (see what that looks like here - here!), and instead ended up on a sim full of everyday-looking houses and great big palm trees.

Why Second Life? What is the point?
Second Life means a lot of different things to a lot of different people, and what drives them to the virtual world in the first place is not necessarily what keeps them there. There's no way I can account for everyone's motives, but here are some thoughts.

SL is, potentially, a fantastic platform for design, creation, and money-making. Designing avatars and building houses in SL has the same appeal as designing avatars and building houses does on programmes such as the Sims. In SL, however, whilst you can get a limited about of clothes and items for free, things cost money, and land to build on costs money, and so many people turn to creating and selling their owns items or clothing in order to make SL pay for itself. For creatives, it's a great way to make a bit of pocket money, and also another forum for you to spread your artwork. I know of more than one real life artist who uses SL to sell artwork in various forms and to build up another fan-base. SL also offers access, thusly, to a wide range of other creatives with which you can bounce ideas and collaborate. That's exciting, no?

Some people with anxiety and/or depression also find solace in the virtual world. Being able to hide behind a different face can be a confidence booster, and it allows greater control over who you interact with, and when - especially since there are a thousand legitimate and familiar excuses you can employ to soften the I-don't-want-to-speak-to-you blow. There is one person I call friend who uses SL to get out and socialise because he is a full-time carer and cannot leave his house for personal time very often. 

It is also, alternatively, a place in which to hide - just as people hide from real life in books, games, and TV shows - , a place where the thing you are running from doesn't have to exist for a while. There's a danger there, in that a lot of expectation is made of what the virtual world is capable of, and sometimes it is all too easy to hide within its virtual boundaries and not to deal with the issues that originally drove us there. Alternatively, it offers a sanctuary in which to gather strength and support until you are ready to confront the real world. SL can't give you any answers that the real world can't, but perhaps the performance of life, the framing of it - and the performance and framing of yourself - can help lead you to the answers we can only get from ourselves.

Other people use SL as a place for self-experimentation, whether that be on a shall-I-dye-my-hair-purple level, or a am-I-into-BDSM-sex level. This ties (ha ha) into roleplay, but goes beyond just sexual roleplay - SL presents another medium in which to roleplay, listing itself beside the tabletop and forums. People in SL take RP very seriously, and the creation of collaborative stories like this is a wonderful thing in my opinion.

As I have written about here (- here!), there is no obligation to be the person you are in real life in your Second Life. If you want to log on and act like a chauvinist, off you go (it happens more than you might imagine). You can use your avatar to pretend to be confident, to pretend to be a rogue - to pretend to be whatever you like. As I've suggested, you don't even have to be human. You could be an animal, real or mythological, or a car, or an aeroplane, or a robot. The limits are the building skills of the virtual community.

The point, truly, is that Second Life has no point other than the point you give it, and many people stop engaging with Second Life when their original motive finds some real-life conclusion. If you get passed the difficult interface and utterly unintuitive avatar customisation, as well as the idiots that line up to flash their fake penises at newbies, there are some fantastic things to see in Second Life. Virtual coastlines, beautiful dream-worlds, spaceships, dragons, diners plucked straight out of the 1950s; if you can think of it, it probably exists, and if not, you can create it for yourself. 

Of course, there are an awful lot of fake penises kicking around, too.

Does that even begin to answer either question? There seems to be so much to say, but I think that is enough for now. I'm late for a very important date.

Stuck in Yesterday

Tiny irony: I took this screenshot last night...so technically, I took it yesterday. That is the level I'm at here.

Plurk has been buzzing lately with conversations about the changes Linden Labs have been trying to make to the Terms of Services and, freshly, news about the Australian annulment of same-sex marriage. I know very, very little about the former issue, but I saw the second on the BBC, and right in the middle of the television screen was a placard held by who-knows-who dismissing gay marriage because it isn't accepted in the Bible.

How are these two issues connected? They both represent our attempts to make new rules and regulations for today's people, and we aren't finding it very easy. If anything the media says is to be believed, there are many other ways in which our law system is becoming out of date. The very foundations of our societies are formed by treaties and agreements signed over fifty years ago by people who thought we'd all be flying around on jetpacks now if they could imagine this time at all. 

Those treaties and agreements are intensely important, and whilst they do the job generally, they don't take into account the way we have changed. They don't take into account the Internet, nor the collaborative way in which it allows people to work and to share ownership. In an age of CCTV and Obama reading our emails, we need to redefine 'privacy' and what we are entitled to. In an age of school shootings and children on Prozac, we need to have a conversation about mental health and gun ownership. I could go on.

That people think they are exempt from the law, even when that law has been revisited recently, is obvious: Mark Duggan, slavery in Bristol, even the crisis in Syria are examples of that. These issues should, technically, have been covered by the Geneva Convention, as well as anti-racism initiatives and on-going investigations into police brutality and what it does to your brain to hold a gun in your hand. It's a huge job but we have to keep going back, to look at these problems, to look at the laws and the attitudes that govern them. We need to make sure that they are applicable and relevant to the people they are governing, and we need initiatives in place to spread awareness, understanding, and acceptance of responsibility. 

I am not so naive as to think that there will never be people who commit crimes, and I know that there are a million mitigating factors that come into play, but I don't see how we can be ready to deal with those maturely and sensitively if we are not sure of what, exactly, we have allowed and not allowed in the first place.

I admit, I am not a religious person, but I have grown up in a country whose laws come from the Bible, and I have respect for the Bible as an important and sacred-to-some text. The Bible encourages us to be responsible and to be conscientious - to think of others as well as ourselves, and to look at each other with love. When in doubt, I understand that it is one of many places people go to look for an answer, but I think it is very, very important to remember that those words were committed to paper centuries ago. They weren't given to us; they were given to the people that lived centuries and centuries ago. They were given to people that couldn't imagine the world being anything like the way it is in 2013. They couldn't imagine a jetpack to even begin to envision us flying around with them right now.

The rules we make have got to take into account the way we have changed as well as the ways that we haven't. Go back to Geneva, make our current leaders sign the treaties they weren't even alive to agree to the signing of in the fifties after we have updated them to talk about Guantanamo Bay and the Internet and the liminal space of an airport. 

This will take time, and I am sure that we will face teething problems. The trick, I think, is to be patient but determined. Keep going, keep pushing, keep being sympathetic to everyone, not just those that share your cause. Keep going keep going keep going.

We are not the same people we were twenty years ago, let alone fifty years ago, or a thousand years ago, or two thousand years ago. And we all deserve happiness, safety, honesty and love.

Naked Truth

In a recent blog post, sian asked 'how nude can an avatar get?', and then 'does it matter?' That wasn't throwaway rhetoric on her part, and she explained her reason for asking in the subsequent line: 'our identities are mutable.'

I asked exactly the same question - 'does it matter?' - in a post I wrote on this blog in June, and concluded, a little uneasily, that for reasons I couldn't wholly put my finger on, the nudity of my avatar did matter. It does matter. And it matters moreso now than it did in June because the pictures in that post featured an un-naked Kitti, wearing a skin that was beautiful but which appeared to be made of porcelain. In the picture in this post, Kitti is wearing her everyday non-porcelain skin, and combined with Second Life's advanced rendering and lighting settings, it looks all too real. And, of course, this time Kitti is naked.

 But this brings us back to sian's first question- 'how nude can an avatar get?'. Whilst Kitti might not be wearing clothes in this picture, she is not naked in terms of avatar-nakedness. She is wearing mesh hands and feet, hair, eyelashes, eyes, skin, and a body shape. It is impossible for an SL avatar not to have a shape and a skin and eyes - those are a given, simply part of the way SL works - but I have chosen to put on everything else. 

And why have I chosen to include these 'wearable' items in my attempt at a tasteful nude of my SL avatar? Because these are the things which allow the picture to be about Kitti's nakedness. Without them, it would be impossible, after the initial oh-she's-naked, not to notice the unreality of Kitti's virtual body. Her blocky hands and strangely triangular feet would act as a barrier between the point of the picture and the viewer (and so would her baldness, but that's mostly because Kitti doesn't look good bald). They would serve to alienate, in more ways than one, her nudity, perhaps offering it up instead as a critique of Linden Lab's graphic skills. 

Don't get me wrong; the supposed reality of this image could also be used to offer a critique of Linden Lab's graphic skills, and a whole lot more besides, but that it not its primary purpose.

This isn't the picture that I wanted to take. I wanted to take a nude photo which revealed precisely nothing, but avatar limbs don't always play ball, and finding poses that weren't uncompromising in one way or another was impossible. Whilst I didn't want Kitti to be flashing her bits, so to speak, I didn't want her to be actively hiding them either. I didn't want her posed with the intention of being seductive, nor did I want her nudity to seem like a mistake. This turned out to be quite a tall order, and in the end, I felt forced to compromise, although I did so on my own terms. 

Posting this picture here is still something of an ordeal for me, and I still cannot put my finger on why exactly. Perhaps it is partially because, as I began to say in my original post (link at the end), Kitti acts as my medium in the virtual world, and her body is the only body many will ever come to associate with me (That I could change everything about the way she looks the moment I released the picture into the world, making the photographed body no longer even exist, is not the point). Whilst she speaks with my voice and shares my thoughts and opinions, and whilst I have always acknowledged the differences between my avatar and my self, her nakedness is a kind of honesty I have not yet ventured to share. Would her nudity be so important to me if that gap between us was greater, or if the truth of it was not so broadly known? Would I feel so uncomfortable if I wasn't going to post a link to this blog post on my Facebook profile where it will be seen by people I am friends with in both lives?

The picture I mentioned in the opening paragraph of my June post has never been posted. It is buried, as it were, in a folder on my laptop, and there it remains. It might seem strange not to post it now, along with this picture, but the truth is that Kitti's pose in that image is far more revealing. When I published that post, there were no rallying cries, no pledges of support, no encouragement to post the image if that was what I wanted to do. There was no conversation at all. Whilst that might be the reaction I was expecting, I don't suppose it was the one I was hoping for.

I'm going to see sian's questions, and raise her a couple: What does it really mean to be naked in SL? Is nudity in the virtual world measured by how many clothes we are wearing, or by how honest we are about our real and virtual selves? How naked is your avatar now?

Related/further reading: my original post, 'Stripped' / sian's post, 'Naked' / 'the intrepid reporter on: nakedness'

Unready

 

 A thought: Second Life is a wide and varied platform for social creation and experimentation. It is a new world, ready to be shaped by our values and desires. It is already well-established, both on this blog and abroad, that those values and desires are pre-conceived, and are often implemented wholesale in the virtual world without any interrogation. We haven't created a new world so much as re-created the 'old' one, making changes that are based on ideas from our real-life selves living in a world of more-limited creation and social rules. We know this.

Avatar customisation is left almost entirely to the SL user. The loneliness of this is enhanced by the way it is deemed inferior to dress yourself in the library stock clothes and accessories provided by Linden Labs. And in the age of free-things-on-the-marketplace, and mesh, it's not difficult to pick up 'better' items.

In the past, I have decried the sense of 'variety' Linden Labs advertise Second Life as having when it comes to avatar customisation. Logging in and deciding you would like to be a cyberpunk tortoise today is the easy part, but finding the type of neon-filled brain tubes you're looking for, in a colour that isn't pink, is much more difficult than dreaming them up in the first place. The masochistic would say 'build it yourself!', which is an option open to all SL users, but again...this is not as easy as it sounds like it might be (and if you think it sounds tough, the reality is probably double that).

Technically speaking, you can build your avatar from a thousand assorted bits and pieces. But there is another limitation I haven't talked about, and which I am finding now endlessly difficult to word. Despite the advances made in the last sixty/seventy years, race is still a difficult issue in real life worldwide. In the UK at the moment, we are contending with a huge percentage of the population expressing fears of a 'flood' of Islam - as if being a Muslim makes you automatically of a different race, and not a different religion. Personally, I don't care what country you're from, what colour your skin is, or what your religious beliefs are, but this is not a viewed shared by the majority. 

Here's the more difficult-to-word bit. Avatar customisation is also inhibited by those real life fears and prejudices.  We are not yet in a position, in the real world or the virtual, to pull apart the pieces that make up what we call 'race' and use them in any way we see fit. There are too many tensions and prejudices involved - too many connotations, too much fear of national identity and cultural appropriation. To wear a black African skin over a white American shape, just as to wear a white American skin over a black African shape, is to make a political statement and not an aesthetic one. I can't decide to have thick, long black hair like one of my university friends today because I find it beautiful, because I don't share in her French-Algerian descent. What this fails to take into account, too, is the way our real life world is changing, and the way immigration has allowed people with completely different physical characteristics to come together and produce children who have a share of both.

The countries we are attempting to tie ourselves don't even exist in SL - at least, physically. Admittedly, a few have been recreated, although if anybody tries to tell me that the numerous sims claiming to be London (UK) look like the real London, I'm going to start laughing hysterically. They are brought into the equation more truly by our real life selves, sharing the information that we are English or French or Indian or Japanese because we like to share, and/or because we are trying to make friends across time zones.

How is any of this policed in SL? Vigilante-ism. I don't think Linden Labs care one hoot, but some other users do, and something as simple as sharing your time zone could start a riot. There are two instances that I am aware of in which people have 'come out' about their avatar not being of the same race as they are, and the responses that each faced were vastly, vastly different. I'm not going to share the details of those instances, but I will say that if we began to unpack either, our sense of race and gender equality would take a thorough beating.

I'm not saying it should be a free-for-all at the table of worldwide physical characteristics. I'm certainly not saying that SL needs to invent an entirely new combination of features to create a look we can attribute to a 'Second Life-ian', separate from everything else. I'm simply pointing out another way in which our second world lies in the shadow of the first. And it's a damned thorny shadow.

Coming Out Party

Everyone, I've got a confession to make. Not really a 'confession', because the word 'confession' implies I've done something wrong. I haven't done something wrong - or, at least, I don't think I have. I'm babbling now. What I'm trying to say is that I've got something to tell you.

Some party, huh?

I'm not ginger in real life. I'm not blonde/white-haired in real life, either. I'm not 5ft3" tall in real life. My feet aren't that flat. I can only dream of having a ski-slope nose, high blue-blooded cheekbones and pouty lips (And - just to clarify - I only have one SL avatar. If I want to change Kitti's hair colour, I just change it. And her eyebrows, of course. I made this picture by overlaying two pictures. This is the extent of my photo manipulation skills).

Deception was not my game here, it was just that nobody told me that I had to make my SL avatar look or be anything like my real physical first life self whatsoever. That wasn't even in the fine print of the terms and conditions - which I didn't read, of course, but ctrl+f is pretty handy. Kitti is my representative in the virtual world, yes, and I have expressed before a certain guilt curtailing the way I style and dress my avatar, but at no point have I ever set out to make her a replica of me.

In many ways, we are similar. Kitti has the appearance of a young woman. In real life, I am also female, and also in the 'young woman' category, though Heaven only knows how I made it there. At 5ft3" tall, Kitti is one whole inch taller than me. She speaks with my voice, and the only time I have ever put on a kind of play-pretend voice for her is during role-play scenarios. Of course, it is not wholly my voice - it has been mediated not only by my real-life physical body and presence, but also by Kitti's virtual body and presence. I don't think it lost anything along the way. If anything, my voice gains something different when coming out of Kitti's mouth.

'Coming out' - acknowledging the gap between user and avatar - can be a much bigger deal than I have made it out to be. For me, that gap has always been acknowledged, and never hidden. A number of my SL friends have seen my RL face and heard my voice, and I have seen and heard theirs. We're friends on Facebook. But that was a personal choice of mine, and is connected to my intentions within the virtual world. For others, that gap can be narrower or much, much wider - a chasm, almost - and admitting to that can be arduous. 

It is not always met with the greatest acceptance and understanding, either, and I would go as far as to say that some relationships only function within the virtual world if the real world is censored utterly from the equation. As long as that is known and agreed upon by those involved, then there's nothing wrong with that. But what if someone slips up? What if someone changes their mind? What about if a third party, unaware of the agreement, says the wrong thing? There are so many ways things can go wrong and it's not difficult to see why relations might then turn ugly, especially, I would venture, if sexual intercourse has been involved. The situation can also go sour if one person wasn't made aware of the game in hand.

Ultimately, it boils down to lies and expectations. If I poured my soul out to you in SL under the impression that you were going to do the same back, and I learned later that you had spun me a set of well-written lies, I might well be upset. If you tell someone explicitly that you are male in real life, and later on they find out that you are female, or vice versa, they might well be upset. There are a thousand similar situations you can come up with, taking into consideration even the tiniest details which might seem like nothing out of context but which could mean the world to somebody else.

What I think is unfair is when there have been no lies, and the expectations built up have little to do with the person then accused of betrayal. I have friends in SL who were afraid to 'come out', as it were, about their real life selves and were afraid of how I would react, knowing it made no real ounce of difference to me what colour their hair is or what nationality they are or what their sexual orientation is or what they have between their legs. Imagine how difficult it must be to come out to someone who you suspect does care, or will feel lied to, especially if you yourself have gone to extraordinary lengths to make sure you have never lied to this person about the truth of the matter.

I'm not saying that everyone who gets upset by a revelation of this kind is a terrible person. I'm not saying that you are never allowed to lie about who you are, or that you should tell anybody in SL or any other virtual world anything about your real life self. Those aren't the issues here - because there is no obligation anywhere to tell the truth or to say anything whatsoever in the first place. I suppose what I am saying is that we need to be understanding of each other, in all situations and positions, and try our best to work these things out. To be supportive, and to consider our own motives for being in the virtual world and for presenting the face and persona we choose to present. It isn't really mid-life crisis kind of stuff; we don't need to sit in dark rooms and contemplate the meaning of life for an hour before we log in. I have already written at length about why our avatars can mean so much to us, and I barely scraped the surface in terms of energy and emotional investment. We need to remember, too, that the reason our words and choices have an effect on other people is because we are connecting with them not only avatar to avatar, but mind to mind. And I think that connection is a good thing, even if it means we get hurt sometimes.

So will you forgive the real life me for my brown hair and superior foot-arches?

Be Quiet, Kevin

"Okay, it's like this. 

You wake up, you watch TV, and you get in the car and you listen to the radio. 

You go to your little job or your little school, but you're not going to hear about that on the 6:00 news, since guess what. 

Nothing is really happening. 

You read the paper, or if you're into that sort of thing you read a book, which is just the same as watching only even more boring. You watch TV all night, or maybe you go out so you can watch a movie, and maybe you'll get a phone call so you can tell your friends what you've been watching. And you know, 

it's got so bad that I've started to notice, the people on TV? Inside the TV? 

Half the time they're watching TV. Or if you've got some romance in a movie? What to they do but go to a movie? 

All those people, Marlin," he invited the interviewer in with a nod. 

"What are they watching?"

After an awkward silence, Marlin filled in, "You tell us, Kevin."

"People like me."

- Lionel Shriver, We Need To Talk About Kevin.

Be quiet, Kevin, Big Brother XIII is on.

This kind of idea has been articulated before - most notably, I might suggest, by Fight Club, though, I confess, Fight Club did absolutely nothing for me. I haven't yet read the book, though it's been suggested that I do.  Kevin Khatchadourian, both in the pages of the novel and portrayed so beautifully on screen by Ezra Miller, creeps me out.

But the point here isn't Kevin: the point is this idea of the television. A simultaneously wonderful and awful invention, I don't think I would be going too far to suggest that there is a struggle to fill the clock with wonderful and interesting programming. We've probably only enough for maybe a couple of days. What Kevin says here is both completely right and completely wrong - though, in case some of my readers aren't familiar with his story, I shall put no spoilers here. We do watch the world go wrong. It's bound up in vicariousness, yes, but also in a strange and almost indescribable sense of morality of witnessing, in a need to witness. It's also exciting, and because it's not happening in our living room, directly endangering our lives, we are free to be excited and horrified and saddened and relieved without a great deal of real consequence. That is, perhaps, another essay altogether.

However: how often do we find ourselves watching other people watching TV? How often do we find ourselves flicking through channel after channel of reality TV shows during which we can watch other people living? (Just to clarify: that isn't a value judgement. People are really very interesting, though I personally don't really want to watch them living through a TV screen). Kevin is wrong because we can actually press the button at pretty much any time of the day and see people going to work and listening to the radio and watching the TV. Whilst we spend a lot of time watching people like Kevin, we also spend a lot of time watching people like ourselves (that is assuming that we aren't like Kevin, of course). Perhaps that is partially as a comfort measure, a ward against the sense of the need to witness - or even an extension of it, representing a need to reassure ourselves that whilst That is happening There, People Like Us are living Normally, thank you very much, Here. But again, I think that is another essay. Susan Sontag covers some of it in her volume Regarding the Pain of Others (2003, I believe).

Here's the crux: How much is Second Life an example of these ideas? How much of Second Life is watching reality? How much of Second Life (and its washing machines and sinks and toilets and houses and beds and showers) is a reproduction of reality? How much of Second Life is an awareness of this reality, these ideas of Kevin's, and an attempt to enliven them all? How much of Second Life is a platform for people to carry out desires and ideas and actions that people like Kevin carry out (that is to say, things we consider extreme and unnecessary in the extreme) without having the consequences? Are we watching our avatars? - and if we are, does that make them people like Kevin? Do we wish they were people like Kevin? - people of interest and import, worth interviewing on the TV?

I'm going to stop now.

[If you'd like to see Ezra Miller deliver that strange, horrible, and utterly on-it speech as Kevin in We Need To Talk About Kevin, please click this link here - here!. If you haven't see the film, I would advise that you stop watching the clip once he has said the words "an A in Geometry" (about one minute in), though there are actually few spoilers in the rest of the clip.]