Hi James I agree with many of your sentiments. However, I want to pick up on a couple of points.
>From my research I do not think SL and WoW are fading. They are still growing. They are no longer on the initial upward part of the hype-cycle but nor are they on the downward side. I think they are moving toward the plateau of productivity. Secondly, how do you distinguish between what you call the real and the virtual? I have struggled with that all my life, even before I got into computers (that was in the 70¹s). Perhaps I stuck too many things in my pipe but I have never thought the real was constrained to what I could touch, eat, smell or sense by other means. I always thought what I read, watch and listen to is part of the real, whether made by people or produced otherwise. My conversations, this email, are all part of the real. Not only can cultural things be as real as physical things but the physical is in many ways an aspect of the cultural. That is, the tree I walk into when not watching where I am going is a tree because of how it is located in my mental world, that mental world being a cultural construct. Whilst I feel pain through my interaction with the tree I do so within this mediated context. Thus the tree is also a cultural phenomenon, as is the pain. It is all about mediation and what Bolter calls remediation. Our senses operate within this context, not outside it. Taking such a dualistic view of things, trying to tease out what is real or unreal in this context, is not only likely to prove impossible but even damaging to developing an apprehension of things that accounts for the complexity of life as it is lived and experienced in all its aspects...and we cannot begin to appreciate what and where we are until we do this. Best Simon Simon Biggs Research Professor edinburgh college of art [email protected] www.eca.ac.uk Creative Interdisciplinary Research into CoLlaborative Environments CIRCLE research group www.eca.ac.uk/circle/ [email protected] www.littlepig.org.uk AIM/Skype: simonbiggsuk From: James Wallbank <[email protected]> Reply-To: NetBehaviour for networked distributed creativity <[email protected]> Date: Wed, 06 Jan 2010 17:17:27 +0000 To: NetBehaviour for networked distributed creativity <[email protected]> Subject: Re: [NetBehaviour] Whatever happened to Second Life? I always thought Second Life wouldn't last. Okay, so now it's a virtual porn haven, and sure, they'll make money from that for years to come (sorry...) but that's not really a new way of interacting - it's a glorified phone sex line. Interesting that mainstream SL seems to have tailed off the moment that voice messaging was introduced - I don't think this is chance - when people have a very limited communication medium (like the ever-popular SMS) it leaves space for the imagination. Once the bandwidth of the medium becomes too high, once the resolution increases, people lose interest. Why? Maybe less really is more. I suggest that Second Life and WOW and the others are all fighting against a key truth - we all only have a limited amount of life - every hour spent in the digital realm is an hour stolen from real (first?) life. Getting paler, fatter, lonelier, shorter sighted. I say this with knowledge - getting carpal tunnel syndrome from a 6-month Runescape grinding binge I overdosed on virtual worlds. Going cold-turkey was soooo liberating. Recently I deleted my LinkedIn Profile. It sucked my time to maintain it, while I could have been doing real work. Now I'm struggling to justify microblogging. Yes, everyone says it's "The next greatest..." but I'm looking hard to see the value. So now I'm wondering whether many of the technologies we've been pre-occupied with are poisonous: Every minute you listen to your iPod is a minute of deafness to the real world. Every step you take while you're SMS'ing is a step you're taking blind to the street scene around you. Every time you interrupt a real-world conversation to take a call is a minute spent prioritising the remote over the present. Think of a mobile phone as a comic-book thought bubble. When people hold it to their ear, reads "I really should be somewhere else". Never before have so many people been so convinced for so much of the time that their bodies, their friends and their contacts are in the wrong place. Is the real world, right here, right now, so unbearable? If it is, are we so helpless, apathetic and supine that we're simply looking for an escape plan? Are we so hypnotised by consumerism and fashion that we can no longer value the free, high res, high, bandwidth, streaming, three-d, motor-feedback enabled, olfactory, totally immersive potential of... being here now? Stick that in your Second Pipe and smoke it! Best, James ===== P.S. Meanwhile, the oldies but goldies just keep on rocking. Email is STILL the killer app. _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list [email protected] http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour Edinburgh College of Art (eca) is a charity registered in Scotland, number SC009201
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