Second Life Shrink

In the Bleak Midwinter

December 24, 2011 by johnny 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.

Filed under Blogging, Culture, Psychology Tagged with Blogging, Culture, Psychology

Subdivisions

November 25, 2011 by johnny Leave a comment

Regular readers will recall that I am a big fan of the work of Sherry Turkle (though, shamefully, I haven’t read, or even purchased, her latest book Alone Together yet; I might download a copy if someone gives me a Kindle for Christmas.) I’ve been particularly influenced by her 1997 paper Multiple subjectivity and virtual community at the end of the Freudian century, in which she advances the idea that online interaction allows one to dis-integrate the various strands of one’s personality, in a way that allows one to gain greater insight into one’s internal mental landscape, and, in theory at least, escape the restrictions of a unitary conception of the self.

This was in my mind the other day, when my Second Life Premium membership came up for renewal. I duly handed over the $80 or so, which is small beer in comparison with what I spend on other types of entertainment, but enough to set me thinking about how many different online identities I have, and how much they cost me each year.

The answers to those questions depend on what one considers as a separate identity; my virtual presence divides into four main groupings which have no overlap at all, but within these there are multiple blogs, web-pages, Twitter, Facebook and forum accounts, and, of course, virtual world avatars. Most of these are free, but I must pay out about $200 annually in hosting and subscription fees, not to mention all the valuable time I spend maintaining the whole show.

Is this worth it? Have I become more self-aware by disaggregating my personality traits? Do each of my four core online identities represent a pure strand of my self, uncontaminated by the other three, and better for it?

Not really. I certainly appreciate the freedom to express myself in certain contexts without having to worry too much about how people who know me through different channels would react, and this has sharpened my understanding of how I function internally, highlighting some strengths, but also a lot of flaws. In each guise I do, in some ways, feel more like my “real” self, but also that there are important parts of “me” missing.

The main thing I have learned, if that’s not too grand a phrase, is that I actually like my messy, complicated, contradictory, every-day, real-life self a lot better than any of my supposedly idealised avatars. Maybe it’s because I started off from a good place; if my self-esteem was lower I might be more inclined to identify with my virtual representations. Perhaps it’s harder to reinvent oneself online than it might appear, and I’m actually just reproducing myself over and over, and delusionally believing that each time I’m somehow different. Or it could be that I am at heart a conformist, and I’m subconsciously inhibiting myself from embracing the full liberating potential of virtual life.

Whatever. It seems unlikely that, at this point in my life, I’m going to be changing much, so I guess that you, my dear readers, the parallel audiences for my other projects, and those fortunate enough to know me in real life, will have to go on putting up with the same old nonsense.

Filed under Blogging, Culture, Psychology, Second Life Tagged with Blogging, Culture, Internet, Music, Psychology, Second Life, Social Media

Thoughts on the Eurozone crisis

November 11, 2011 by johnny Leave a comment

I must admit to having rather mixed feelings about the ongoing Eurozone crisis. From my leftist point of view the difficulties besetting the neoliberal Euro project should be encouraging, since they expose the democratic deficit at the heart of the EU, which one might imagine would raise public consciousness about the need for progressive social change, but, on a more personal level, the prospect of the European economy entering a prolonged period of recession, with the accompanying political turmoil, is rather unsettling.

People have been comparing the current crisis to the situation in Europe during the inter-war period, which obviously didn’t work out too well, what with the rise of Fascism and the mass destruction of the Second World War. That may have sounded a bit hyperbolic a few months ago, but events since then on both sides of the Ionian Sea have added to the general sense of gloom, and the transparent inability of our political leaders to address the problems hardly inspires confidence.

Things went badly wrong the 20s at least in part due to the mishandling of the situation by the Comintern, but at least back then there was an international Communist movement, with influential mass parties in most European nations, and the still-fresh example of the Bolshevik revolution to provide inspiration. Today the organised left is much weaker, and such opposition as there is tends to coalesce around disparate formations like the “Occupy” movement, which are all over the place politically, and in some ways openly reactionary.

So I’m finding myself hoping that the Eurozone leaders will pull some sort of rabbit out of the hat, probably involving the ECB issuing Eurobonds to relieve the difficulty Italy is having accessing credit at affordable rates. As these will be underpinned by the German economy, the quid pro quo will be Berlin taking over control of financial policy for the Eurozone as a whole, since the prospect of the ECB printing money to bail out the Greeks and Italians terrifies the Germans who remember the hyperinflation of the Weimar era.

It probably won’t take a great deal of time for the populations of Italy, Greece and the other peripheral economies of Europe to wake up to the fact that they are being forced to endure severe austerity by politicians over whom they have no democratic influence. What will happen then is the big question; the stage would be set for a populist neo-fascist movement, but hopefully the left will have enough time to formulate a coherent response, and to get sufficiently organised to withstand the troubles that lie ahead.

Filed under Economics, Politics Tagged with Economics, Politics

Life During Wartime

November 5, 2011 by johnny Leave a comment

Tonight is the night that we in the UK display our liberal values of tolerance and inclusivity by letting off fireworks to celebrate the fact that Roman Catholics are constitutionally barred from becoming Head of State.

I quite like pyrotechnics, but in recent years the ubiquity of cheap Chinese imports has meant that, in the run-up to Bonfire Night, even a quiet middle-class neighbourhood like mine reverberates with explosions for half the night. Obviously it’s nothing like living in an actual war-zone, but it does get to me a bit. Another sign I’m getting old I guess.

Filed under Culture, Politics Tagged with Culture, Music, Politics

The Physical Impossibility of Running an Art Gallery in Second Life

October 29, 2011 by johnny Leave a comment

Readers may recall that about 18 months ago we ran a review of the virtual installations at the Primtings Museum. If you want to see the gallery’s lovingly-sculpted recreations of famous artworks you had better hurry; Artistic Director Ina Centaur has announced that the space is to disappear some time in the next few days, along with the associated sims of the SL Globe Theatre.

I went over there this evening, to walk up the staircase one last time:

and to contemplate mortality:

(On a brighter note, the other art space we covered in that review, The Leominster Galleries, is still going strong.)

Filed under Culture, Second Life Tagged with Art, Culture, Second Life

Time takes its crazy toll

October 17, 2011 by johnny Leave a comment

The news that Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore are to separate has caused a wave of consternation to sweep around the internet, as all we ageing Sonic Youth fans are forced to confront the fact that a band that seemed young and vital back when we were young and vital has members who have been married for 27 years, and are in their 50s.

I guess I’m not alone on The Diamond Sea…

Filed under Culture Tagged with Culture, Music, Nostalgia

Steve Jobs R.I.P.

October 7, 2011 by johnny Leave a comment

I’d love to say that my first-ever computer was an Apple II, but it wasn’t, it was a ZX Spectrum; I just fantasised about having an Apple II, which seemed like a properly futuristic machine when I read about it in Omni magazine in the 1980s. I never actually got round to buying an Apple desktop, even when I had the money; at some point I was seduced by the counter-cultural charms of Linux, and have stuck with that ever since.

I do however have an iPhone, and I think I can say without much exaggeration that it has changed my life. I guess that an Android smartphone would have had the same effect, and preserved my open-source purity, but Apple got to me first, and, at this point in my life, I can’t be bothered with the dislocation of changing software ecosystems.

I am planning to get an iPhone 4S, despite the lukewarm reviews, since my current model is a 3G, which is getting to be embarrassingly clunky. It’ll be interesting to see if Apple’s products can retain their cachet now that Steve Jobs is gone, or if people will finally notice that everyone and their granny has an iPhone or an iPod, and Apple are just another producer of (somewhat overpriced) consumer commodities.

Filed under Culture Tagged with Computing, Culture, Nostalgia

Enmeshed

September 25, 2011 by johnny Leave a comment

So, I’ve been working on a couple of other projects, and haven’t had much time for virtual world stuff recently, but I was looking for an excuse to slack off the other night, so I decided to go on to the grid to collect this month’s free premium gift. Here I am, sitting on my fine new sofa, trying to look intellectual:

Moving the furniture around was fun for about five minutes, but to be honest I’ve never found the dolls-house aspect of Second Life particularly interesting, so my attention soon wandered.

I had downloaded the 3.0 viewer, so I thought I would check out some of the new mesh objects that are now available, to see if they really would be the revolutionary force that I had predicted a couple of years ago.

Here’s a ukulele I found at the Mikki Miles Mesh Department, along with various other musical instruments:

and they have some interesting-looking creations at MeshAvatars:

It certainly looks much nicer than the usual prim-based stuff, though I’m far from a connoisseur in these matters. It seemed quite expensive by SL standards, which made me wonder how much trouble it actually was to upload these things, since prefabricated examples can be found pretty easily on the web, and the mesh creation tools aren’t that hard to master (I’m told).

The answer to that turned out to be “more trouble than I can be bothered with”, what with having to register with the Lab as a mesh uploader, take a test in intellectual property rights, and wade through the technical details of the actual process, not to mention paying the upload fees. I’m sure there are plenty of people out there with more patience for this than me though, so I still think that there will eventually be an influx of cheap mesh items that will put the old prim merchants out of business. I suspect the relative obscurity of SL might be their best hope of a reprieve.

Filed under Economics, Second Life Tagged with Economics, Second Life

Benign neglect

August 14, 2011 by johnny Leave a comment

I’ve shamefully neglected this blog over the summer, which I rather regret, since there has been a lot going on which I could and should have written about, like the war in Libya, the News International phone-hacking scandal, the massacre in Norway, the Eurozone sovereign debt crisis, the US debt-ceiling stand-off and, just this week, the rioting in London and other English cities.

I suppose that the world has managed to scrape by without the benefit of my opinions for a couple of months; anyone who has read this blog for more than five minutes could probably guess what my take on these events would have been anyhow.

What have I been doing instead? Well, as I’ve alluded to previously, I’ve been working on another writing project, one with somewhat greater pretensions to serious literary merit than the idle musings that make up my output in this space. I’m pretty excited about it at the moment, but, if past experience is any guide, my interest will wane soon enough, when I remember that proper writing is actually quite hard work, and I am far too lazy to keep it up for any length of time.

I expect that things will stay quiet here for the next month or so, and after that it’ll be back to the usual diet of lightweight psychological, cultural and political commentary, leavened with a little whimsical nostalgia. I have managed to read a few books over the holidays, so I may throw in a couple of reviews too, we’ll see.

Filed under Blogging Tagged with Blogging

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