Formal confusion

June 26, 2007 by Leave a comment

Avid readers of this column (that is me, and that guy in Japan, who is probably actually a computer program) will have noticed that I haven’t really decided what form these articles should take. I’m torn between the classic blog model, with daily updates on whatever happens to be passing through my mind, or something more akin to a newspaper column, well thought-out and researched, and appearing every week or so. Thus far I have been turning out a sorry hybrid of ramblings that are both infrequent and ill-considered.

Part of the problem is that I do have a fairly demanding real life, though with some more discipline I could probably increase my output a bit.

Anyway, there are two topics I could go for this week; the MySpace/Facebook class divide, and the addictiveness or otherwise of video games. I do want to do a bit more reading and thinking before coming up with an opinion though, so look out for something in a couple of days.

And what about the original Second Life project? That’s still stalled, until I get around to ordering the parts I need to upgrade my box. Then of course I’ll need to find time to fit them, and do a new Linux installation, and before I even start that I’ll have to do a long-overdue backup… Before the end of the summer is what I’m aiming for.

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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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Crime and Punishment

June 10, 2007 by Leave a comment

Since everyone else seems to have an opinion on the Paris Hilton in/out of jail saga, I thought I should weigh in with my bit of ill-informed reaction too.

I’m not going to say anything about whether or not Ms Hilton deserves to serve time, beyond noting that, from a European perspective, the US justice system is ridiculously punitive, and there is no evidence that short jail terms serve any rehabilitative purpose. Rather I’m going use the fact that so many people are interested in the story to expand on a point made in my last post.

I was writing last time about virtual intimacy, and how this can work best when the object of the supposed intimacy acts as a blank screen upon which a person’s desires can be projected. The whole phenomenon of celebrity culture is one big example of this.

It’s hard, even for sceptics like myself, to maintain a realistic perspective when it comes to celebrity stories. I first really noticed this a couple of years ago, when I was standing in line at the supermarket checkout, and I happened to glance at a magazine cover, which carried the story of Angelina Jolie’s pregnancy. I experienced a feeling of sympathy, which on reflection resolved itself into the thought “That must be hard for Jennifer Aniston”. (If you have no idea what I am talking about, don’t worry. In fact, count yourself lucky). It wasn’t until a few hours later that I realised how strange that thought was. I wasn’t close to Jennifer Aniston. I had no way of knowing how she would react to that event. Yet I had experienced an emotion in relation to her that was indistinguishable from a feeling that I would have had upon receiving troubling news about someone that I did know well.

Now I’m someone who hardly ever watches TV and only reads serious newspapers. I do try to avoid frivolous stuff on the web, though not always successfully. Yet, despite this, I have managed to pick up an amazing amount of trivial celebrity information – I recognised a picture of Perez Hilton the other day, without having to look at the caption. It must be some kind of cultural osmosis. No one can escape it.

It’s hardly original, I’ll admit, to note that people experience vicarious emotions in relation to celebrities, and I’m sure there has been some work done on identifying personality traits that predispose to extreme forms of this – I remember reading a paper about people who experienced severe grief reactions following Princess Diana’s death (I’ll try to track down a link). Come to think of it, it will be the tenth anniversary of that soon, so there will probably be a resurgence of such cases.

It would be interesting to study if there is some connection between the propensity to experience intense emotion in relation to celebrities, and the ability to experience virtual intimacy. Another thing to explore when I set up my practice in SL.

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Virtual intimacy

June 9, 2007 by Leave a comment

“Marge, it takes two to lie. One to lie and one to listen.” – Homer Simpson.

Following on from our consideration of online dishonesty, we turn our attention to the other side of the equation; the suspension of disbelief that is required to make it possible to have a relationship in a virtual universe like SL.

There is some interesting research into the phenomenon of virtual intimacy, which shows that it is possible to develop a degree of romantic affinity using only computer-mediated interaction, though not so much as in face-to-face relationships. Unfortunately, little detail is given in the paper about exact type of online relationships that study participants had experienced, though reference is made to email communication via dating websites. It would seem reasonable to suppose that similar if not greater levels of intimacy could be experienced in a more realistic online environment like SL. A study carried out in SL suggested that real-world social norms mediated by quite subtle non-verbal communication may also be observed in virtual space, which lends weight to the theory that interaction in SL can replicate experience in real life.

Is intimacy in cyberspace really achievable though? Does true intimacy not imply some special understanding of the other person in the relationship? How is a belief in the possiblity of such insight compatible with the knowledge that many people online are dishonest about such basic aspects of their personality as gender or age?

To come to some understanding of this we need to recognise that there are different types of intimacy that may be sought online.

The most straightforward type is exemplified by users of web dating services. Here, the electronic portion of the courtship is, in most cases, just a means of reaching the true goal, that is a real-life relationship. A little creativity in their prospective partner’s profile may be acceptable, but lies that go much beyond moving a birthdate a few years forward or forgetting an ex-wife are likely to be found out, and prove fatal to the liason.

There is a separate population, however, for whom the online relationship is the objective itself, rather than a stepping stone to a real-world meeting. For these people the issue of dishonesty is much less critical. Indeed, having an untruthful partner may be may be positively advantageous. In such an affair the focus of affection is not a real person, but rather an internalised love-object. Too much honesty would be an unwelcome intrusion of reality; it might mark the blank screen upon which the lover wishes to project his or her fantasies.

There is obviously a lot more subtlety to the process than this crude outline, and there is of course a huge amount of psychoanalytical writing on the phenomenon as it occurs in therapy, and other real-life situations. My theory is that an environment like SL will be the ideal setting to study such interactions in an unusually pure form, which should be interesting.

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Online dishonesty

June 3, 2007 by Leave a comment

While spending the last couple of days dealing with various things in my real life, or in meatspace as the vernacular would have it, I’ve been thinking about a couple of related but separate issues that relate to interaction in cyberspace, namely dishonesty and perceived intimacy.

I’m sure you won’t be shocked to learn that there is a lot of the former around; the last paper I read said that around 70% of net users report they’ve been lied to online at some point, while about 30% admit lying to others. Of course people aren’t always completely truthful when they talk to researchers either, so those figures should probably read 100% and 99%. What kind of mendacity is out there? The same as in real life; lies about age, occupation, marital status, but also about gender, which is harder to pull off in the flesh. Males and females were equally dishonest (or maybe all the women surveyed were really men). Why do people resort to deception? Parallels with meatspace again; to elevate their their status and attractiveness, and to guard their privacy. The biggest motivator however, was the desire to try out a new identity – this was particularly true for those who switched gender.

So far, so unsurprising. What good would a second life be if it was just the same as your first one? And is it really dishonest to try to be a different person in SL? Isn’t that person just the real you, your true self unencumbered by all the things (and people) that frustrate you in the real world?

It does raise the question though of how far it is possible to reinvent yourself online. People try to change their lives all the time, by moving city, or getting a new job, or a fresh relationship, or a new haircut. Some manage to pull it off, but most are disappointed, because the most important factor is what hasn’t changed, that is themselves. Conventional wisdom would say that to really transform yourself you need psychotherapy, (conventional wisdom among therapists that is, who can hardly be expected to say otherwise), but can an alternative reality like SL give people the opportunity to be someone else, even if it is only temporarily, or can it only ever be acting?

This raises some core issues about identity. Is it possible to act exactly like someone else when you are in SL, and thus actually become them, for all practical purposes? Or is there some part of your personality that will always show through the character you construct for yourself online?

Well, that’s what I’m hoping to find out, if I ever get it together enough to get in to SL. I plan to try to interview people when they are in character, then hope they will answer a few questions about their real life. Eventually I’d like to construct some sort of personality inventory to use online, one that would measure how well people can shift identity, and see if that correlates with any other personality traits.

It’s late at night, I’ll have to come back to the subject of perceived intimacy.

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Moving on up

May 31, 2007 by Leave a comment

I’m evidently going up in the WWW – SL Shrink now has an authority rating of 1 on Technorati, resulting in an impressive 1176061 place jump in its ranking, and making me officially the 2121799th most influential person on the internet.

I followed the link to find out who my new friend was, and it turns out to be Metaverse.jp, a Japanese blog offering “virtual world information”, mostly in japanese of course, so I can’t see why they’ve linked here. I’d like to think it’s because they admire my elegant prose, but I suspect that there’s some sort of automated data aggregation going on. I’m not complaining though; a few more links like that and I’ll be in the top one million

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Political Blogging

May 30, 2007 by Leave a comment

I consider myself to be a bit of an internet veteran; I can remember 14.4 modems, bulletin boards, Usenet, and how exiting it was to see the first web pages, with their plain text on grey backgrounds. I still think ASCII art is pretty cool. So I’d have to admit that I initially approached the whole Web 2.0 thing with an old-timer’s conservatism, and I started reading blogs at a relatively late stage.

What first got me into the blogosphere was my interest in US politics. Around the time of the last presidential primaries there was a lot of talk about how bloggers were going to change the whole nature of political discourse, by bypassing the sclerotic mainstream media and engaging in polemical warfare reminiscent of the golden age of pamphleteering in the 18th century. Intrigued by this promise of a new style of politics, I started looking at the Blog Report feature on Salon, and following the talking points as they bounced around the blogs of the left and right, and I’ve been doing it ever since. It’s certainly entertaining, but not always particularly enlightening.

Now I live in western Europe, Scotland to be slightly more precise, and so perhaps I don’t really appreciate how bad the TV networks and newspapers are in the US, but I have never felt that blogs add a great deal to the experience of being a politically active citizen. It’s not that they don’t contain useful information, just that it’s very hard to make any sense of just how important, in political terms, any given story is. Although events in the real world are (usually) the trigger for whatever debate is exciting bloggers at any given moment, the self-referential nature of the medium almost always means that a sense of perspective is quickly lost.

Here’s an example: Glenn Greenwald’s column from a couple of days ago. Now Greenwald is a good writer, he’s living the dream by getting paid to blog for a reputable media organisation and his politics are not too objectionable (though personally I’m well to the left of him), but this piece is just nonsense. Over 1200 words (words that could have been devoted to any one of a myriad of unreported stories) to bring us the “news” that right-wing bloggers don’t always tell the truth, and can sometimes use objectionable language. Greenwald tries to make some overarching point about the “right-wing noise machine”, but it doesn’t really wash, and just exposes how badly he misjudges the resonance that such stories have within the mass of the population. Five minutes spent talking to real people on the street would set him right. The irony is that Greenwald and other left bloggers continually (and correctly) criticise the Beltway media for existing in a world of their own, but seem not to realise that the blogosphere is in many ways equally self-contained.

I’m not saying that blogs never break big stories, just that the political impact of such issues is best judged by how they are debated on the streets and in homes and workplaces, not by the blog entries they inspire.

A bit off-topic there; no Second Life, not really any psychology, unless you want to analyse the meaning of a blog post about the irrelevance of blog posts. It’s because I’m no further forward with getting the SL linux client to work – I didn’t notice that the blog I thought would be helpful hadn’t been updated in ten months. Look out for more posts about blogging, maybe something about social networking sites.

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Research resources

May 29, 2007 by Leave a comment

Before starting this project I did review the relevant research to some extent…

I have noticed that when bloggers use the term “research” they tend to mean “looking up stuff on the internet” rather than “uncovering new information”. A lot of the time what is presented as original insight is simply a rehash of old opinions. Ideas gain credence by being repeated, and the perceived authority of a source counts for far more than any concept of objective truth. I could illustrate this by linking to the numerous articles by trusted internet opinion-formers wherein exactly the same point is made, but that would be just too ironic.

I was thinking about this after posting yesterday about the Technorati ranking system. Blogs gain authority by being cited by other bloggers – and bloggers tend to cite the blogs that have authority. Opinions become self-reinforcing, and morph into accepted fact. (For an illustration of this look at the comment section following George Monbiot’s Guardian article debunking the 9/11 conspiracy movie Loose Change).

So when I say I reviewed the “research”, what I mean is that I typed “Second Life” into Google, and read the Wikipedia article that popped up. Most interesting fact? (Of course everything in Wikipedia is fact). That more than 90% of SL user accounts are inactive. It really cheered me up to read that, since it suggests that the vast majority of people prefer to interact with other real humans rather than computer screens. And that means that the 10% who do get really into SL are likely to be quite interesting, from a psychological point of view at least.

If you’re interested in real academic research on online issues, I would recommend the journal Cyberpsychology & Behavior, which is an excellent resource for the latest thinking on online interaction and its impact on real and virtual societies. Read more of this post

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The Competition

May 28, 2007 by Leave a comment

Since it looks like it could be some time before I actually make it on to Second Life (I need a new graphics card, some more RAM, probably a distro update – you can see that I had really thought this project through), I took a trip over to Technorati to see what else the blogosphere had to offer on SL.

Technorati must be a depressing site for the average blogger, since it sets out in harsh figures exactly how little attention the world is paying to your ramblings. This blog is currently ranked number 3297860, alongside all the other losers who have “no authority”. (Though the site does kindly append “yet” to that killer phrase, like the “Author NYP” that creative writing graduates put on their business cards).

Ranked a mere 3294251 places above SL Shrink is Second Life Insider, which seems at first glance to be mainly about scripting and commerce, with nothing about psychology.

Ranked 4294 is the Second Life Herald, which has more of a gossipy tone. A quick search did turn up a few posts relating to analysis of online interaction, though nothing particularly deep.

On the face of it more closely related to SL Shrink is Gwyn’s Home (rated 48661), which promises commentary on “socio-political issues on Second Life, the virtual world platform of Linden Lab.” There are a few posts in the “psychology” category, but again nothing particularly profound. And the animated avatar on the home page is frankly creepy.

Technorati lists a total 3184 blogs on the topic of Second Life, and I can’t really be bothered to look at any more tonight. No-one seems to be doing exactly what I’m planning though, which is encouraging.

I’ve also discovered ninjafoo Ng, an SL linux blog, which will hopefully get me on the grid sooner rather than later.

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Technical difficulties

May 27, 2007 by Leave a comment

I can’t get on to Second Life. Which, for someone who has read all about the easy money to be made on SL, and wants a piece of the action, is a major problem.

The issue is this: as a left-field, alternative, non-corporate kind of guy, I will of course have nothing to do with the evil monopoly that is Micro$oft, relying instead on my trusty old linux box, old being the operative word here. There is a linux client for SL, but it’s an alpha version at the moment, and I can’t get it to work. I probably need some new hardware too.

If I was really serious about this I would go out and buy a cheap windoze box just for this purpose, but, in line with my general half-assed approach to things, I’m going to try to get the linux solution working first.

In the meantime I’ll try writing about other internet phenomena, like Youtube, or Myspace, or specific blogs, or blogging in general maybe. Though three posts in seems a bit early to be getting all metatextual.

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