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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In the neighbourhood

November 20, 2008 by Leave a comment

In another sign, if one were needed, that I am some way away from being sufficiently immersed in Second Life to make this project a success, I completely missed my av’s first birthday at the end of last month. I only noticed when I saw the $72 charge on my credit card statement. I think that’s about the same as I paid last year, though the sterling price has gone up by around 50%, on account of the deteriorating exchange rate. Even so, $6 a month is pretty cheap, and I get $1.20 of it back as my monthly L$ stipend. Not that I ever spend any of it; my current balance is about L$12000

I’ve managed to spend a few hours on the grid this week, and I’ve concentrated on exploring the locality. I hadn’t previously paid any attention to where my land actually was on the SL map, but a little research has shown that it’s on the north-facing slopes of the mountain at the centre of Heterocera Atoll, the second-oldest of the SL mainland continents. The landmass is misnamed, since it’s obvious from the topography that Heterocera is not a coral island, but rather a volcanic formation. The central peak rises to a considerable height, and the rocks that are visible above the tree line appear igneous in nature.  The mountain is topped by a large bowl-shaped  feature, the Zygaena Crater, partially filled by a deep, still lake.

An old stone-paved road runs on the edge of this central lake, and I took a walk around it, stopping now and again to look in at some of the buildings that line the waterfront. The whole place was completely deserted, and the empty stores and houses had an eerie, post-apocalyptic air. In a huge railway terminus rows of clocks counted down the minutes to the arrival of trains that never appeared. A roaring fire burned in the grate of a log cabin that had no other sign of habitation. Neon signs called out to non-existent window-shoppers.

Night fell eventually, and as I stood on the shore looking up at the stars I began to see how people could feel that Second Life might have some sort of reality beyond the monitor screen. I should have more time to spend online over the next month or so, so I’ll try to do my best to get properly obsessed.

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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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Re-tagged

November 10, 2008 by 1 Comment

A few weeks ago I started tagging my posts, and added a tag cloud to the left-hand column. This initially gave a rather misleading impression of what this blog is about, since only a minority of the total posts were indexed; for a while it looked as if I was completely obsessed with Sarah Palin.

So over the last week or so I’ve been back through 19 months’ worth of posts, adding tags to each one, and now you can see which are the topics that really interest me. “US Presidential Election” is still big right now, but will fade away with time, “Politics” will probably persist in an attenuated state, and hopefully “Psychology” and “Culture” will begin to grow in stature. I’m guessing that “Blogging” and “Second Life” will remain the top tags though.

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Yes he could

November 5, 2008 by Leave a comment

I had been planning to go to bed early on election night, since I had a busy day ahead, and I was, after all, completely confident that Obama would win, but in the event I couldn’t bring myself to retire without seeing at least some of the returns. I ended up staying up until about 1.30, when the result from Pennsylvania came in.

McCain’s fading hopes of victory had rested on the idea that the white working-class voters who supported Hillary Clinton in the primaries would, faced with an Obama candidacy, switch to the GOP, or at least stay at home. If this was going to happen anywhere it would have happened in Pennsylvania, and when even Fox News called the state blue within a minute of the polls closing it was clear that the game was up.

The theory that Obama was going to turn off the Democrat base was based on a complete misunderstanding of what happened in the primary campaign. Those voters who favoured Clinton over Obama did so because they were worried about his electability, not because they thought he was too radical. There was never any significant policy difference between the candidates; if anything Clinton is further to the left. Once Obama was the candidate the party was always going to be behind him, united by a desire to defeat McCain.

Could McCain have done anything to stem the tide? Probably not, given the state of the economy and the electorate’s determination to hold the Republicans responsible for the mess. He must be thinking that he could have played a bad hand a little better though. As McCain gave a valedictory speech to the press on his campaign plane, Joe Lieberman could be seen at his shoulder, like Banquo’s ghost. Might a McCain/Lieberman ticket have prevailed? We’ll never know.

Anyway, that’s all the excitement over for four years at least, and probably for eight. I can get back to blogging about important stuff like Second Life…

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A message to my friends in the US of A

November 2, 2008 by 1 Comment

[Thanks to Matt Groening.]

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A hostage to fortune

October 31, 2008 by 1 Comment

I have to admit that it looks as if I was completely wrong about Barak Obama’s electability – there doesn’t appear to be any way that he can lose now. In my defence I would say that I couldn’t have imagined just how badly the GOP would screw up their campaign. With one decision – picking Sarah Palin as his running mate – John McCain threw away the single biggest advantage he had, his ability to criticise Obama’s lack of experience. Palin has done all that could be expected of her, shoring up the core Republican support, but I cannot fathom how McCain’s strategists ever thought she would be able to appeal to voters beyond the conservative base. McCain himself has tried to pose as both the elder statesman with the wisdom to lead, and the iconoclast who would shake up the establishment, and has failed to convince on either count.

The main factor that has helped the Democrats more than might have been anticipated though is the state of the economy. Back in the primary season it did look like there was trouble brewing, but no one foresaw that the federal government would be taking over the banking system. Now that even the Bush administration believes in state intervention in the economy on a massive scale, McCain’s jibes about Obama’s “socialism” don’t carry much weight.

Could the Republicans try to steal the election by outright fraud? Right-wing pundits have been advancing various theories about how the opinion polls could be wrong, and why we shouldn’t be surprised if McCain does much better than is expected, and you don’t have to be too paranoid to see that as an attempt to prepare the public for an unbelievable result. It seems to me though that the trouble this would cause – I would anticipate serious civil unrest if McCain is declared the winner next week – would far outweigh any advantage to the ruling class of keeping Obama out of the White House. Despite all the Republican rhetoric Obama is no radical, and there is no evidence to suggest that his administration would be seriously inimical to the interests of American capital. Some special interests – defence contractors and oil companies foremost among them – may have to trim their profit forecasts a little, but for the bulk of US corporations it will be business as usual. They are likely to be much more worried about the general economic situation than the prospect of an Obama presidency, and anyway, of the two candidates, he seems to have the firmest grasp of what is actually going on, and what needs to be done to keep US capitalism on the road.

I still think Hillary Clinton would have made a better candidate, and a better president, but I doubt I’ll be feeling too disappointed next Wednesday.

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A foreign country

October 29, 2008 by Leave a comment

I was out of town for a few days last week, at a conference in the city where I went to university, prompting some elegiac reminiscence.

Several years have passed since last I was there, and, unsurprisingly, the place has changed a bit. The hotel where my meeting took place was in the district where I used to live, which has gentrified considerably in the time I have been away.

I know that everyone claims that they lived in an edgy part of town when they were in college, but I really did. Even at the time I found it less charmingly picaresque, more scarily lowlife, and I couldn’t imagine residing in such a locale these days. Hookers and dealers on the corners, regular stabbings, an occasional axe-murder, it was never dull I guess. Each day threw up new and interesting questions. Is that body lying on the waste ground across from my house an actual corpse, or just a passed-out junkie? What the hell was all that screaming about last night? Why, despite all the mayhem, do you never see any cops around here? (Except of course when you’re holding, when they seem to be fucking everywhere).

Anyway, it’s all much nicer now. High-end apartments, boutique hotels, classy gift shops and faux-bohemian cafes have taken the place of the crumbling tenements, soup kitchens and thrift stores. Our conference venue occupied a site where once stood the city’s largest homeless shelter. I spotted a few members of the homeless community hanging around in the side alley, looking wistful, as if they were pining for their old haunt. The strange thing was that they all looked much too young to have personal experience of the place; maybe it was some sort of wino ancestral memory.

My friends who still live in the city tell me that all the violence has moved out to the suburbs these days, and if anything it is a bit more intense. Their stories of drive-by shootings make my tales of the bad old days seem a little quaint.

As the years pass I do look back with increasing fondness on my student days, which I guess is an unmistakable sign that I am getting old. I do try to stay focused on the future, and most of the time I succeed, but not many days go by when I don’t think about how nice it would be to be 23 again.

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October surprise

October 18, 2008 by Leave a comment

I’ve had a good October on the blog; posting regularly, and traffic way up. Now I’m off on vacation for a while, so it’ll probably be back to my usual slacker pace when I return.

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