All Stars

May 7, 2012 by Leave a comment

My new Chucks arrived in the post this weekend, marking, for me at least, the official beginning of the summer.

I’ve spent the summer months wearing the same style of sneakers – unimaginatively paired with skinny jeans and a t-shirt – for upwards of two decades now, but it’s only relatively recently that I started treating myself to a new pair every year. This isn’t because they’re wearing out any quicker – in fact I’m sure the build quality has improved since they started making them in China – but rather due to an age-related decline in my willingness to walk around in beat-up old shoes. Shiny new ones don’t look too cool either though, so I guess I’ll have to spend the next few days splashing through mud to obtain just the right degree of shabbiness.

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Wasted Youth

April 24, 2012 by Leave a comment

Today (or actually yesterday, since, in true slacker fashion, I haven’t got round to posting this until after midnight), was the 30th anniversary of the launch of the ZX Spectrum. Unsurprisingly, the internet has been awash with articles by 40-something guys fondly recalling long hours spent honing their programming skills on the iconic machine, and pitying later generations, who may have iPads and Twitter and what have you, but missed out on the character-building experience of wrestling with a rubber keyboard to produce the 8-bit classics that founded the video-game industry.

I have to admit that I was one of those sad cases who spent too much time alone in my bedroom typing code, when I should have been out engaging in healthier youthful pursuits, like smoking, drinking, or committing acts of petty vandalism. It doesn’t seem to have done me any harm in the long term though, as long as you don’t count my ongoing tendency to stay up all night blogging about obsolete computers.

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I’d work very hard, but I’m lazy

April 7, 2012 by Leave a comment

I like my job well enough, most of the time, but trekking into the office every morning is a bit of a drag, so I’m always on the lookout for new developments in the field of telepsychiatry, in the hope that one day I’ll be able to practice from the comfort of my couch.

Back when I first got into Second Life I fondly imagined that a virtual world would provide the perfect location for remote consultation, but my actual experience of the grid quickly disabused me of that notion; for all its digital verisimilitude SL isn’t anything like face-to-face interaction. Of course it can be argued that this is actually an advantage, that freed from their corporeal baggage people can access aspects of their personalities that would otherwise remain obscured, thus deepening their self-knowledge. There is something in this, but such information would only be one part of the puzzle, and would have to be interpreted in the context of the whole of a client’s life. In general, people who seek therapy are struggling with concrete problems of everyday existence, and a therapist has to engage with them on that level, which means sitting down, looking them in the eye, and talking to them.

Even if one could find a way around this, there are a multitude of other, practical, problems with e-therapy; things like verifying identity and credentials, licensing and jurisdictional issues, difficulties with record-keeping and confidentiality, and crisis response. These can be overcome, but only if the client physically shows up at the office every so often. Virtual consultation can be a valuable part of a treatment package, but not the whole of it.

That’s been my settled opinion for years now, but I do keep reading the literature on the off-chance I’ll be proved wrong some day.

Anyway, I mention this because this week a press release from Massachusetts General Hospital (picked up on a few SL blogs), featured an interesting-sounding study by Hoch et al, The Feasibility and Impact of Delivering a Mind-Body Intervention in a Virtual World. As is often the case though, the substance was less exciting than the title.

Clinicians routinely grumble that researchers are overly picky when recruiting subjects, which is usually unfair, because, you know, research is hard enough without having to deal with actual sick people. This study’s exclusion criteria seem particularly egregious though; participants not only had to be young and healthy, they had to be familiar with Second Life too. It’s hard to imagine a group less similar to the typical clinic population. Even with this promising start the intervention still managed to fail to show a significant improvement on three out of four of their outcome measures, and a clinically negligible change on the fourth one. In any case there was no control group, so it’s hard to credit the effects, or lack of them, to the treatment.

I’ve read enough of these reports, that sound promising but are ultimately underwhelming, that I should be immune to them by now, but I can’t help feeling disappointed. I guess I’ll be waking up and getting up for the foreseeable future.

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Davy Jones R.I.P.

March 1, 2012 by Leave a comment

I’m too young to have experienced The Monkees first time around, but the show was a staple of after-school TV when I was growing up in the 70s, and their movie Head became one of our late-night favourites in my student days, so I was sad to hear that Davy Jones had passed away. Another sign that time is moving on I guess.

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Livin’ on a Prayer

February 16, 2012 by Leave a comment

While I’ve been patronising our American readers by loftily disparaging the US Presidential candidates, over here in Europe our vastly superior political elite have been making a fine job of solving the Eurozone debt crisis.

So far the plan has involved imposing austerity so harsh that large swathes of the Greek population have been reduced to a state of severe poverty, thus undermining the very fabric of civilised society, with more of the same to come for Italy, Portugal, Spain, and who knows where else. This might suggest that our leaders have no idea what they are doing, but perhaps there is some underlying strategy whose wisdom will only become clear with time. Right now though it all makes Rick Perry’s Texas drought-relief scheme look positively rational.

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You Can’t Always Get What You Want

February 11, 2012 by Leave a comment

Just when I was beginning to think that I had some sort of handle on the dynamics of right-wing US politics, something like Rick Santorum’s unlikely resurgence happens, and confuses me all over again.

I can just about rationalise Santorum’s sweep of Minnesota, Colorado and Missouri by imagining that the GOP base were voting tactically, in an effort to pull Mitt Romney further to the right before he is confirmed as the candidate. There are some indications that this has been happening at the big-money level, as backers of Newt Gingrich, Romney’s other would-be conservative nemesis, have indicated that they will swing behind Mitt now he has embraced their pet policies, like bombing Iran.

But this theory only works if one believes that Romney’s main problem in the general election will be that he is not conservative enough, a view which is completely divorced from reality. Romney has to win over independents and disaffected Democrats, a trick which he might be able to pull off if he spins his fiscal conservatism as sound technocratic business sense, but which will surely be impossible if he is weighed down by the wingnut social conservatism championed by the likes of Santorum.

I think that I can understand the psychology of the Republican right on one level – as a life-long leftist I have supported more than a few hopeless causes in my time, and I do have some sympathy with the idea that one should stick to one’s principles rather than pander to electoral considerations. It is usually better to vote for what you want, and not get it, than to vote for what you don’t want and get it. But there has to be some room for compromise, and when you have a candidate who has a half-decent shot at winning, and who is going to support 90% of your programme, it is perverse to withhold your endorsement because he is soft on the other 10%.

So what’s my advice to Republican voters? Back Romney, and you might get what you need. Let’s hope they ignore me.

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New Hampshire

January 13, 2012 by Leave a comment

So, the New Hampshire Primary turned out more or less as predicted; Romney consolidated his position as front-runner without landing a knock-out blow, Paul maintained his momentum but still isn’t looking like a serious contender, and Santorum did just enough to keep his hopes alive heading into the more conservative territory of South Carolina.

There were a couple of interesting points in the campaign though; the decisive role played by secretive Super PACs, which confirmed that election results are controlled by big money, and the somewhat surprising revelation that Newt Gingrich has discovered that capitalism is evil.

There is a lot of interest in the GOP nomination process on this side of the Atlantic, though much of it stems from the fact that observing the process allows us smug Europeans to feel superior to our dull American cousins; even the Daily Telegraph had a piece this week suggesting that the only way to get elected in the US was by pandering to the stupid vote.

It’s easy to laugh at the likes of Santorum, Gingrich, Perry and Bachmann, because they are clowns, but it may be unwise. Matt Taibbi made a good point in his profile of Michele Bachmann for Rolling Stone:

Snickering readers in New York or Los Angeles might be tempted by all of this to conclude that Bachmann is uniquely crazy. But in fact, such tales by Bachmann work precisely because there are a great many people in America just like Bachmann, people who believe that God tells them what condiments to put on their hamburgers, who can’t tell the difference between Soviet Communism and a Stafford loan, but can certainly tell the difference between being mocked and being taken seriously. When you laugh at Michele Bachmann for going on MSNBC and blurting out that the moon is made of red communist cheese, these people don’t learn that she is wrong. What they learn is that you’re a dick, that they hate you more than ever, and that they’re even more determined now to support anyone who promises not to laugh at their own visions and fantasies.

I come from that school of left-wing thought that tends to view politics as a coldly rational business, and I am generally sceptical of any analysis that focuses on individual psychology, rather than impersonal class forces, as an explanation for world events. I believe this approach is broadly correct, but it can perhaps lead to an underestimation of the emotional power of right-wing rhetoric, which can be a dangerous blind-spot. It’s always worth re-reading Richard Hofstadter’s 1964 essay The Paranoid Style in American Politics, written at the time of Barry Goldwater but equally applicable to the likes of Ron Paul, to remind oneself of the threat that reactionary irrationality can pose.

Finally, mention of the Granite State gives me an excuse to link to one of my favourite tracks by Sonic Youth.

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Iowa forecast

January 2, 2012 by Leave a comment

The race to the White House kicks off in earnest tomorrow, with the Iowa Caucuses, the first real test of the Republican field.

In any sane universe the GOP would already have picked Jon Huntsman, who is clearly the candidate best placed to woo disaffected Obama supporters, but he isn’t even standing in Iowa, where the socially conservative terrain doesn’t suit his relative moderation. Instead the voters of the Hawkeye State look set to choose either almost-sensible (compared with the rest) Mitt Romney, or whichever wingnut is currently in favour with the party’s influential evangelicals – as we write that’s Rick Santorum, but the darlings of the right have been coming and going with bewildering frequency over the last few months, so it’s probably too early to dismiss the chances of Newt Gingrich or Rick Perry, though Michelle Bachmann does look to be out of it.

Away from social issues all the candidates are fairly consistent on the big question of the economy, favouring tax cuts and less regulation for corporate America, disagreeing only on how low the corporate tax rate should be, to the delight of Fox News and the Wall Street Journal.

The dark horse in the contest is of course Ron Paul, who looks set to secure second place, or perhaps even win. Paul has spoken of his desire to unite the Tea Party and the Occupy Movement, and his barely-coherent blend of populism, libertarianism and conspiracy theory does seem to be drawing support from left and right. This is more than a little concerning. We have previously noted that the financial crisis in Europe has the potential to fuel a rise in fascism, and it would appear that a similar process may be operating across the Atlantic, as an economically-squeezed population, disaffected with mainstream politics, looks for a leader who seems to understand their anxieties. There does seem to be some awareness of the danger among US progressives, but the need for an organised party to the left of the Democrats has never been more pressing.

My predictions? Romney to win tomorrow, and to take the nomination. Paul to go all the way to the convention, building a significant movement along the way. Obama to win in November. Then again, this time four years ago I was looking forward to another President Clinton…

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2011: The year in review

December 31, 2011 by Leave a comment

2011 was a year of two halves here at SLS; we were posting regularly up until about June, but never really got started again after the summer break. Embarrassingly, we only managed eight posts in the last quarter, and two of those were apologies for inactivity. Unsurprisingly our traffic has fallen off a cliff in the last few months, and is now sitting around half of what is was this time last year.

Anyway, here are our top ten posts by traffic for the last twelve months:

  1. The Social Network
  2. Second Life demographics – a brief review
  3. On Second Life and addiction
  4. What’s up
  5. Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space
  6. Virtual alchemy
  7. 2010: The year in review
  8. Second Life, with graphics, on the iPhone?
  9. Zombie Epidemiology
  10. Plunging Necklines

Only one of these, The Social Network, is from this year, but at least it is the top post, and one of our better ones too. I’d love to think its high ranking was due to the quality of the writing, but actually it’s because Google kindly chose to link it with the search term “Sean Parker Facebook” for a while over the summer. The addiction and demographics posts from last year continue to do well, probably because no one else can be bothered to write anything on those topics. There is always a steady interest in Second Life zombies, and Olivia’s 2009 Nosferatu-themed post Plunging Necklines made a welcome return to the chart, possibly on the back of the Lab’s promotion of SL as a platform for vampire role-play.

Of the other posts we managed to crank out this year my favourites were, in chronological order:

If I had pick one post of the year it would be The Solution, which I think encapsulates everything we try to do here at SLS; spare prose, literary and political allusion, self-conscious pretension, and all in the service of an utterly inconsequential point.

But what of the world beyond this blog? What of the Arab Spring, the war in Libya, the tsunami in Japan, the News International phone-hacking scandal, the death of Bin Laden, the UK riots, the Eurozone crisis, and everything else that has been going on this year? We did manage to comment on most of these events, but brief blog posts aren’t really the best medium for considering weighty issues, so it was all rather superficial. We might try to follow a couple of topics in more depth next year – perhaps the economy, and the US elections.

Back in January I promised that we would publish more book, film and music reviews, but this hasn’t really worked out. Part of the problem is that I’ve been trying to spread my output over too many projects; I have been doing a bit of critical writing, but I’ve published it in other places. (I could re-post some of my pieces here I guess, but I’m a bit paranoid that someone might Google a passage and link this blog with my other online identities.) The main thing though is that I’ve not been terribly well engaged with contemporary culture; I’ve been on a diet of classic literature and films from the 70s, and the world isn’t necessarily crying out for my belated impressions of The Mill on the Floss or McCabe and Mrs. Miller. At least I kept up with the music scene enough to be all excited ahead of the release of what turned out to be my favourite album of the year, the eponymous debut by Wild Flag, and I also liked Civilian by Wye Oak, Angles by The Strokes and Only in Dreams by The Dum Dum Girls; the latter record’s melancholy tone mirroring the slightly depressing arc of my personal life recently. Overall though I will have to try a bit harder on the cultural front next year.

Finally, what about our core task, the mission to, in the words of our very first post, “wander around the likes of Second Life and report back on what I find, enlightening readers with erudite comments on the interaction that occurs there”? We have been rather remiss in this too. I know why; just about everything interesting there is to say about the psychology of Second Life we have already said in previous years, and I haven’t had the energy to try to put a new gloss on it. The promise that virtual worlds would open up a new understanding of the human psyche has, sadly, turned out to be hollow. There was for a while some interest in watching the dynamics of the conflict between the corporate goals of Linden Lab and the aspirations of the more committed residents, but even that has turned dull since the boringly efficient Rodvik Humble took over at the top. It seems unlikely that this will change in the immediate future, but I will keep an eye on the academic literature in case anyone has any novel ideas.

What does this mean for the year ahead? Perhaps I should accept that this project has run its course, and let it bow out gracefully, but we have been going for nearly five years, an epoch in blog terms, so it would seem a shame to give up now just because things have been a little quiet of late. Politics, culture, psychology; I should be able to make something interesting out of that if I apply myself a little more.

So I guess I’ll be seeing you next year…

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In the Bleak Midwinter

December 24, 2011 by Leave a comment

December hasn’t exactly been a vintage month for our humble blog; the stuttering output of the last few months has staggered to a complete halt. There are a few things going on in my life at the moment that might partially explain this, but I think that the main cause of my current creative paralysis is the enervating effect of yet another harsh North-European winter.

In years gone by I used to enjoy the bracing challenges of this season, but over the last decade or so it has become gradually more wearing, and this year the grey days and long nights seem to have completely drained my vital essence.

Oh well, the winter solstice has passed, and I can look forward to the days lengthening and the promise of new life in the springtime. In the meantime I’ll try to keep things ticking over here, and hope that inspiration strikes again in the new year.

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