Uncertain principles

December 5, 2008 by Leave a comment

Regular readers of this blog may wonder why I seldom make any mention of people I have met during my journeys around the Second Life archipelago. This is partly due to there just not being many other residents about, but I do go to busy places from time to time, and there are interesting stories to be told about the things that go on there.

What’s been holding me back are some ethical concerns; principally worries about privacy and deception.

To what extent can the Second Life grid be considered a public space? Do residents have any reasonable expectation of privacy as they go about their business? Even if you accept that your avatar’s actions may be observed by whoever happens to be around, would you be comfortable with the idea that what you do and say may be recorded, and relayed to the world in a manner over which you have no control?

It reminds of a movie that I’ve mentioned before: 1985’s “Perfect”, with John Travolta and Jamie Lee Curtis. It’s not a great film, it’s not even a good film, but it does sort of illustrate the point I’m making. Here’s the plot, as I remember (with spoilers, in case you haven’t got round to seeing it yet). Travolta plays a writer who has been commissioned by Rolling Stone magazine to do an expose of the LA gym scene, with the slant that “gyms are the new singles bars”. He starts going to this one place, where the quirky clientele take him to their hearts, convinced he is going to reveal to the world the humanity behind the gym-bunny stereotype. He repays their faith by penning a hatchet piece that portrays them all as sex-addicted losers, but along the way he has fallen for aerobics-instructor-with-a-dark-secret Curtis, under whose influence he revises his article to introduce a more sympathetic tone. His editor prints the original version however, exposing the essentially harmless health-freaks to nationwide ridicule. Travolta makes up for it somehow, I can’t recall how, and ends up with Curtis, but the bit-players’ humiliation is not assuaged.

Times have changed since the 80’s of course, and you could argue that, in our reality-entertainment-soaked age, everyone knows, or should know, that life is a performance, with potentially the whole world as an audience if you’re lucky, or unlucky, depending how you look at it. If you choose to create a new identity on the grid then you are implicitly accepting that your alter ego will be open to public scrutiny.

Anyway, privacy concerns can be dealt with on a technical level, by the anonymisation that is built in to Second Life , which I could enhance by never mentioning names or places, and keeping descriptions vague, though that would lessen the verisimilitude a bit.

Nevertheless I still feel a bit uncomfortable with the concept of appropriating others’ experience for my art (if that’s not too pretentious), though I guess it’s what storytellers have been doing since the first raconteur related the amusing tale of Ug and the sabre-tooth tiger. What anonymisation doesn’t deal with is the fact that it is largely impossible to be a passive observer in Second Life; to see what is really going on you have to be part of the action, and that raises the second ethical concern that I mentioned: deception.

I know that the concept of the neutral observer has been out of fashion since the days of Schrödinger and his cat, and practically every feature you read in a magazine these days is written by a would-be successor to Hunter S. Thompson, but the level of duplicity possible in SL completely blurs the distinction between reporting a story and creating it. Inducing someone to invest emotional energy in an interaction that is based on dishonesty – about my identity, and about my motivation – feels a bit exploitative, but the alternative – admitting up front that I’m only interested in meeting people so that I can blog about it – would, I suspect, make me a virtual pariah.

Does any of this really matter? It’s not like this project is a piece of serious research – it would never get past any reputable ethics committee – and I doubt anyone’s feelings will be terribly hurt if they happen to recognise themselves in my ramblings, in the unlikely event that they stumble across them. Maybe I can justify stretching my principles a little, so long as the end product is worth reading.

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Lost in MySpace

November 28, 2008 by Leave a comment

The jury in the Megan Meier cyber-bullying case has found Lori Drew guilty of gaining unauthorised access to MySpace accounts, but cleared her on the more serious charge that she did so with the intention of causing emotional distress to Meier.

The verdict leaves open the question of who or what was primarily to blame for the tragic outcome of the affair. The jury obviously felt that Drew was culpable to some extent, but perhaps didn’t think that she could have foreseen the consequences of her actions.

This raises the possibility that the operators of social networking sites like MySpace or Facebook carry some responsibility for the actions of their users. On one level this seems ridiculous, like blaming the postal service for abusive letters. On the other hand it is well recognised now that there are aspects of computer-mediated communication that are potentially toxic, and it can be argued that the networking sites should be aware of this, and take steps to protect their subscribers from malicious users, and also from their own bad impulses.

My view is that, on the internet as in the rest of life, it is impossible to guarantee a risk-free environment, and probably harmful to try to do so. There should be some technical safeguards, like reliable age-verification, but the most effective protection will come from equipping people to look after themselves when they are surfing the net. Maybe a tutorial on what constitutes functional (and dysfunctional) online behaviour, and the potential for emotional damage, should be compulsory for everyone who signs up for a social networking site.

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Virtual misbehaviour

November 22, 2008 by Leave a comment

Three stories have caught my attention this week; two tragic, one less so, but still a bit sad.

First, the story of Dave Barmy and Laura Skye, two av’s who met and married in Second Life, before their real-life counterparts did the same. Now they’re getting divorced (in RL), after Laura caught Dave cheating on her in SL. I saw a TV documentary about SL around a year ago which featured the couple, and I remember thinking back then that the marriage looked a bit precarious, based as it was on projections of their idealised partners. Dave apparently can’t see what he did wrong, since there was no real-life infidelity. That would fit with research that shows that women tend to take a dimmer view of such activity than their male partners.

Much darker is the story behind the trial of Lori Drew on charges of conspiracy and computer fraud, which opened on Thursday. These bland charges conceal what Drew is really alleged to have done; driven Megen Meier, a 13 year-old classmate of Drew’s daughter, to suicide, by bullying her via a fake MySpace account. Strip away the new technology and it’s a sadly familiar story; a vulnerable adolescent is overwhelmed by sudden exposure to the reality of just how unpleasantly people can behave towards one another in the adult world, but, if the allegations are upheld, the case will illustrate how computer-mediated communication, stripped as it is of humanising context, can be extraordinarily powerful. The medium disconnects a cyber-bully almost completely from any possibility of empathy with the victim, thus increasing the risk of abusive behaviour. In turn the victim can experience the bully’s aggression in almost pure form, amplifying the damage caused.

To round off a depressing post I’ll note that a Florida teenager has killed himself live on the internet. Reports say that up to 1000 viewers of the website Justin.tv watched as Abraham Biggs lay dying. I have no idea why Abraham felt he had to do what he did, but it may be significant that his death has become noteworthy in a way that, in his mind (we can speculate), his life never could. It raises the question of whether the ease with which private pain can be made public via online outlets like Justin.tv, or YouTube, or indeed WordPress, is a good or a bad thing. I’m sure that for some people it can be a relief to think that someone out there may be able to understand what they are going through, but for others the opportunity to seek validation for what feels like a meaningless existence might push them into extreme behaviour. As for the people who just watched him die without doing anything to help, again the distancing effect of the medium must have transformed what should have struck them as a human tragedy into something that was just another sensation to be consumed.

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I’m waiting for my lich

November 19, 2008 by Leave a comment

It’s only been out for a few days, but the latest instalment of World of Warcraft is already proving its addictive potential – some kid in Sweden reportedly had a seizure after 24 hours of uninterrupted play.

I can just about imagine spending a whole day wandering around the pretty, but largely uninhabited, Second Life landscape, but I doubt I’d come across anything that was convulsion-inducingly exciting.

Even so, it seems that my gloomy prognosis for the future of the metaverse was unjustified – virtual worlds like WoW and SL are still making profits, for their owners if not their residents.

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The Bedlam factor

November 14, 2008 by Leave a comment

I wrote ages ago about the freak-show nature of the auditions for reality shows like X-Factor. I’ve since discovered that those who appear on what purports to be the first round of filtering have actually already been through a selection process, so there is no doubt that the hopeless losers have been deliberately included by the producers for some comic relief.

I was thinking about this after reading the tragic story of Paula Goodspeed, who was found dead in a car parked near American Idol judge Paula Abdul’s home in Los Angeles, apparently a victim of suicide. Ms Goodspeed had reportedly auditioned for the US talent contest in 2006, and had not gone down well with the panel, to put it mildly. (No doubt the clip is a favourite on YouTube right now, but I don’t feel like searching for it).

It is of course folly to speculate on someone’s state of mind when all one has to go on are reports in the popular media which vary greatly in detail and luridness, and I suspect that there were other, more personal, reasons for Ms Goodspeed’s actions that were more significant than what happened on a TV show years ago, but even so it does raise questions about the exploitative nature of some of what passes for entertainment these days, and the potential human cost for those who submit themselves to the reality TV industry.

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Conduit (not) for sale

March 23, 2008 by Leave a comment

Weeks pass. Did I tell you that I was a slacker?

I’ve not been on the grid much this month, but I did manage to make up with my neighbour, the guy who overshadowed my little house with two big rocky outcrops. He owns a big estate that completely surrounds my patch, and he has offered to buy me out, though I declined, since I like the view, and I can’t be bothered to look for a new place.

He was a bit pissed off with me because I had restricted access to my land to just me, which meant that there was a “No Entry” zone right in the middle of his property, which I can see would be annoying. I’m not sure why I had done that, since it is impossible to steal things from people’s houses in SL, so there is no reason not to leave your place unlocked, and I have nothing worth ripping off anyway. Some atavistic territorial instinct I guess.

Anyway, he responded by banning me from his property, which meant that I couldn’t step outside my own front door without running into a big red forcefield, and couldn’t go anywhere without teleporting. Again, there is no logical reason why this should bother me, since, at the end of the day, SL is just make-believe, but annoy me it did. I briefly considered starting a proper feud by putting up a big billboard with abusive slogans about him and his girlfriend, but good sense prevailed, and I compromised by buying a lockable door for my cabin, and opening up my land to all-comers. A day or so afterwards my neighbour gave me free access to his property, and now we live in perfect harmony.

Or almost perfect harmony. I’m still a bit cross about the big rocks, so I’ve retaliated by painting my house bright blue, which clashes with the rustic theme he’s trying to create. I’ll probably get tired of it before he does though.

blue_house.jpg

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Elf Actualisation

December 6, 2007 by Leave a comment

I’ve not had much time to be online this week, so I don’t have any interesting Second Life stories to recount, unless you find virtual interior decorating particularly fascinating. (I got a new coffee table!)

Instead I’ve been catching up on some reading, looking through back copies of CyberPsychology and Behavior. There was an interesting article in the August 2007 issue – “The Ideal Elf: Identity Exploration in World of Warcraft”. The researchers recruited a sample of 51 World of Warcraft players, and got them to complete rating scales evaluating their real-life personality, their in-game personality, and their ideal personality. The characters were (mostly) viewed as closer to the ideal than the players’ real selves, with players who rated themselves poorly more likely to idealise their characters. This isn’t terribly surprising, but it’s always nice when intuition is given some scientific back-up.

Also interesting is “Multiple subjectivity and virtual community at the end of the Freudian century” a paper by Sherry Turkle from back in 1997, looking at psychological aspects of MUDs. Turkle notes that a player can create multiple characters reflecting different aspects of the personality, and deploy these adaptively in different situations. She draws parallels with Dissociative Identity Disorder, but argues that, unlike in DID where such personality splitting is dysfunctional, in the context of a MUD it can be integrative, and lead to enhanced functioning.

Neither of these papers relate directly to Second Life, but it seem likely that SL users will create and use their characters in similar ways.

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Attack of the Mutant Space Zombies

September 19, 2007 by Leave a comment

I was quite alarmed when I read this story from Peru today. A meteorite falls to earth and hundreds fall ill; how long before the alien virus (for that is what it surely is) starts turning people into crazed mutant zombies? Sure, Peru seems like a long way away, but this kind of infection tends to have an unpredictable incubation period, so there are probably already symptomless carriers spreading the contagion. We’ll see cases in Lima, then fleeing tourists will take it to North America, and from there it will go global.

Like most municipalities, my home town is woefully unprepared for mass zombie attack. I can only hope that, faced with a rising tide of the undead, the authorities will relax our strict gun-control laws, and issue firearms to surviving citizens. Based on extensive experience of playing Doom and Resident Evil, I would favour a pump-action shotgun, though I guess a good 9mm pistol would do, so long as it had a 25-shot magazine, since zombies can usually take a few bullets before they go down. The whole situation is likely to be fairly chaotic, so I think I could depend on finding plenty of ammunition just lying around.

I’m probably more prepared for this sort of emergency than most people, having suffered from zombie-phobia since childhood. As phobias go, it’s quite a good one to have, since it doesn’t really impact much on my day-to-day life, and an extreme aversion to animated corpses is likely to be quite adaptive once the damned start wandering the earth, feasting on the flesh of the living.

I can trace my fear of zombies back to my first viewing of George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, when I was in my early teens. I’ve seen the film several times since then, and while I can appreciate Romero’s sly critique of consumer culture, my visceral reaction is still “Arrrgh!! – Zombies!!”.

My condition seems to be getting worse as the years go by. I haven’t been able to see any of the more recent zombie flicks, like 28 Days After or Shaun of the Dead, and I’ve had to give up playing zombie-themed video games. Even writing this post will probably give me nightmares.

Why do I find zombies so scary? The idea that friends and neighbours could shed their veneer of civilisation and try to kill and eat me must tap into some sort of subconscious paranoia. There’s definitely a sexual subtext too – a fear that libidinal energy might overwhelm the ego and allow the unrestrained id to act out its destructive impulses. (I’ll blame that on watching Cronenberg’s Rabid at an impressionable age). Then there’s the pitiless and relentless nature of the undead, which surely echoes the creeping reality of human mortality. Or maybe it’s just because the putrefied complexions of the living dead look really unattractive.

Anyway, I’m going to go out to the shopping mall tomorrow, to check out how easy it would be to block all the entrances with big lorries. I might look into learning how to fly a helicopter too…

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The Fictive Personality Revisited

June 27, 2007 by Leave a comment

A couple of posts ago I mentioned a paper about grief reactions in response to the death of Princess Diana. The online archive of this journal (Psychiatric Bulletin) only goes back to 2000, so here’s a summary from my paper copy:

[Update: the full paper is now online here].

The fictive personality revisited
Psychiatric admission as a consequence of Princess Diana’s death
Jill Chaloner

Chaloner presents the case of a 45 year old woman with no previous
psychiatric history, who presented with symptoms of suicidal ideation and
depression which she attributed solely to the effect on her of Princess
Diana’s death. It became clear during her stay that she had significant
marital, financial and childcare problems, but she remained preoccupied with
the subject of Princess Diana, and was unwilling to discuss her own life.
Over the course of three admissions the ward team offered specific pieces of
support with her practical problems, and her symptoms changed to chest pain,
then resolved.

Chaloner notes that the patient expressed herself in the language of
bereavement, even though she knew the lost person only through the mass
media. It was evident that she was failing to influence or deal with the
behaviour of those closest to her.

Chaloner suggests that, instead of reflecting on her own life, the patient
was projecting aspects of herself into external phenomena – in Kleinian
terms projectively identifying with Diana’s situation, splitting good
(Diana) and bad (the Queen) – thus denying the adverse events in her own
life. After Diana’s death she strove for complete identification with the
good object in death rather than taking back the projected good and bad
parts into herself. The practical help provided reduced the badness of the
bad things, allowing the patient to abandon her projection, taking the
problem back inside herself (initially by somatising).

Chaloner cites Martin (1984) who described the “fictive personality” in
which “the self strives towards total identification with characters in
literary, historical or mass media fiction”, and described clinical
examples of people whose “own ego appears impoverished or absent”, to the
extent that they can only keep going by identifying with “available fictions
that fill up their empty selves and allow them to seem real”. Also mentioned
is Winicott’s concept of the transitional object, Chaloner suggesting that
images from the mass media may become transitional objects for adults.

Chaloner quotes James (1998) who points out that in modern life, the balance
between real and represented people in our lives is weighted very much in
favour of the latter. Media representations are often idealised, putting
people in a position of enforced subordination, generating depression. This
process generates low self esteem, increasing the pressure towards
projective identification with fictionalised, idealised, personalities.

Chaloner’s finishes by wondering if, “since projective processes are
continuously and actively encouraged by the nature and content of the mass
media, it may be that fictive personality disturbance has now become a
social norm which goes largely unremarked”.

Chaloner, J. (1999) The fictive personality revisited. Psychiatric Bulletin,
23, 559-561.

Martin, J. (1984) Clinical contributions to the theory of the fictive
personality. Annals of Psychoanalysis 1984-85, vols 12-13, 267-300. Beverly
Hills CA: South California Psychoanalytic Institute.

James, O. (1998) Britain on the Couch, 42-127. London: Arrow Books.

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A bigger picture

June 22, 2007 by Leave a comment

Like the majority of web surfers, I tend not to range freely over the ever-widening ocean of information that is the internet, but stick close to the familiar waters of a few favourite sites. A frequent port of call for me is the Onion AV Club. I like the way that its writers treat popular culture as something deserving serious consideration, without sliding into humourless pretentiousness. (And it also carries Savage Love, for my money the most consistently fascinating advice column out there).

It was a column in the AV Club that steered me towards this blog, written by a woman grappling with the complexities of being one partner in a polygamous relationship. It’s not as interesting as it sounds though, since the woman in question is not a real person, but a fictional character in the TV show Big Love. The blog entries themselves are a quite well-done pastiche of the sort of self-absorbed musing that all compulsive blog-readers will be familiar with, but what really gives the site verisimilitude are the replies left by visitors. I’d love to think that these comments are genuine, but I’m pretty sure that they’re made-up too. It’s all essentially indistinguishable from the real thing though, and illustrates how simple it is to create a false sense of familiarity in cyberspace.

There are plenty of other examples of characters taking on a life beyond the bounds of their fictional worlds of course, but this is usually driven by fans, and it feels a bit manipulative when it’s done by a big media corporation.

This case is fairly harmless though, compared with some of the fake blogging that’s around. Katie Couric’s video blog, for example, which was at the centre of a minor scandal a few months back, when it turned out that a touching personal story about Katie’s first library card had been lifted from a column in the Wall Street Journal. Personally I wasn’t too bothered by the plagiarism, nor by the barely-surprising revelation that Ms Couric doesn’t script her own journal entries, but delegates the task to a staffer. What does annoy me is the thinking behind the blog, the idea that, if we can be fooled into thinking that we have some sort of personal relationship with a complete stranger, we might be more prepared to believe that the stuff she is paid to read out on the TV is actually the truth, rather than sanitised corporate propaganda.

For the connected citizen in the technologically advanced world, the amount of social interaction that takes place in cyberspace is increasing at at accelerating pace. This is especially true of the communication that mediates the multiple relationships between individuals, the institutions of civil society, and the state. There are many positive aspects of this, not least the widening of the concept of community beyond traditional geographical and cultural boundaries. How can we be sure of the integrity of this communication though? How do we know that our emotions are not being subtly manipulated, by state or corporate interests, for their own ends?

It could be argued that anyone who has grown up watching TV – that is practically everyone in the developed world under the age of 60 – should be able to tell the difference between a real personal connection and the fake sincerity of a newsreader, but I think that underestimates the extent to which the internet as a medium of communication can replicate the experience of true intimacy. Even the most cyber-aware of us haven’t really had the chance to develop the psychological tools that would let us judge how much we can trust our own feelings when it comes to online interaction, and most of the time we don’t even think about it, or are at best only dimly aware of the possibility that our reactions may be unreliable.

I don’t know if studying cyber-interaction at an individual level will answer any of the broader questions about how society and politics are being affected by the changes in patterns of social communication that are developing as we live more of our lives online, and how we should react to those changes, but it seems as good a place to start as any. Self-knowledge can only help us fulfil our responsibility to be vigilant cyber-citizens.

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