Culture | Second Life Shrink

Poetic Truths

January 15, 2009 by secondlifeshrink Leave a comment

I was feeling that I had slightly overdone the negativity in my last post, so I decided to check out the reports on Gwen Bell‘s “Chicks who Click 09” conference, which took place last week. I figured that a gender-based discussion of virtual interaction was bound to be quite interesting, and I was sure that I could find something positive to say about it.

The list of speakers wasn’t too promising however; mostly marketing people and motivational gurus rather than serious academics. Then there was the fact that one whole day out of a two day meeting was devoted to skiing and networking, which suggested that the organisers were perhaps aiming for a less intellectually rigorous ambience.

The formal proceedings of the meeting haven’t been published yet, so all I have to go on is the tweets exchanged by the participants. The medium doesn’t really lend itself to deep and meaningful discussion, but even so the conversations were pretty vacuous.

Some of the comments were almost archetypal in their pseudo-profundity, like “We’re moving from an era of fear-based branding to one of hope, thanks to @barackobama.” It’s like there’s a formula they teach you in Inspirational Writing 101; [Fatuous Generalisation]+[Imaginary Transition]*[Zeitgeisty Buzzword]=[Comment that sounds Meaningful so long as you don’t think about it for more than two seconds].

There was one contribution that I thought made some sort of sense, though perhaps not in the way its author intended. “Twitter is your canary in the coal mine” wrote zenawiest, and I couldn’t agree more. When the “Social Media” industry curls up and dies I’ll know that it’s time to sell my Google shares.

Well, I did start this post with the best of intentions, but I’ve ended up serving another dish of cheerless cynicism, with a side helping of intellectual snobbery and a schadenfreude garnish. I should maybe take up Twittering, it might help me lighten up a bit.

[Update: Read a more balanced review of the event from someone who was actually there.]

Here’s today’s tune. I had thought that the lyrics would be a suitably obscure reference to the content of the post, but of course several bloggers got there before me. All their blogs seem to be defunct, one, poignantly, after just one post; I think that this one is the best.

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

Modern Romance

January 9, 2009 by secondlifeshrink Leave a comment

Now and again I come across something on the internet that reminds me how disconnected I am from the world of the young. (Actually for “now and again” read “every 20 minutes or so”).

Occasionally though I read a piece that doesn’t just make me feel old and out of the loop, but cynical and misanthropic as well, and not in a good way. The latest example of this is Gwen Bell’s blog, and specifically this post: “A Guide to Falling in Love + Growing a Modern Romance Online“.

Gwen feels qualified to write about this because she met her boyfriend Joel, who is now her fiancé, via Twitter. The story is rather sweet in its own way, especially the bit where her beloved proposes by making an elaborate sign and hanging it up in their favourite coffee shop. They are due to wed later this year; you can follow the build up to the nuptials on their joint website, as well as on Gwen’s Twitter feed.

So why does this happy tale awaken my inner curmudgeon? “A bad-tempered, difficult, cantankerous person” sums up my personality pretty well at the best of times I guess, but the sort of unselfconscious narcissism that drives people to use a service like Twitter, or to write “A Guide to Falling in Love + Growing a Modern Romance Online” based on their own personal experience of doing so once, is something of a bête noire for me.

(I know that I am the author of a blog which deals mainly with my random thoughts, so we’re deep within “pot, kettle, black” territory here, but, come on, Twitter? Like even your closest friends are so interested in what you are doing right at this minute that they need a constant update on your mundane daily activity? RandomTweets.com, a site dedicated to finding anything on Twitter “humorous, weird, inspiring, newsworthy or just plain cool”, hasn’t been updated since July 15th, presumably the day the webmaster went insane after reading “I’m shopping!!!” once too often).

Gwen’s “Guide” contains so much that feels completely alien to my concept of “Romance” that it’s hard to pick out examples. You really have read the whole thing to appreciate it. This is my favourite bit though (with Gwen’s emphasis):

Joel and I have shared a calendar for about 6 months now. We each had our own Gcalendars (free) associated with our Gmail accounts, and then we set up a joint calendar for shared events. Once a week we go over the details of the week together. We roll over events that we missed.
Most important, we associate a time and date to things so that we get a reminder sent to our phones before it’s time for it to start. Believe it or not, this seemingly small point is a crucial ingredient to the success of our relationship.

This is how the kids live these days? A boy can be so overwhelmed by information that he will forget he has a date with his inamorata unless a computer phones him up to remind him?

If I’m honest though, I have to admit that I’m the one with the problem here, not Gwen. She has the confidence of youth, and I have what Socrates called True Wisdom, that which “comes to each of us when we realize how little we understand about life, ourselves, and the world around us”. I could never write a “Guide to Love”, not because I haven’t been around that particular block more than a few times, but because the experience I have had has convinced me that, when it comes to affairs of the human heart, we all have to make our own way. So good luck to Gwen and Joel, may they have many happy years together, and avoid True Wisdom for as long as they can.

[Socrates also said “Enjoy yourself — it’s later than you think”, so from now on I’m going to try to lighten up some of my more dour posts by ending with a link to the song that inspired the post title. Though, come to think of it, this one is a bit of a downer.]

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

Art star

January 6, 2009 by secondlifeshrink Leave a comment

After buying a couple of posters from the Warhead Rock’n’Roll shop, at L$25 each, I figured it would be cheaper to make my own, since uploading image files is only L$10 a go.

After a quick google for pictures of suitable concert posters I set to work creating objects in Second Life for the first time. They turned out fairly well I think, though I guess making simple two-dimensional shapes isn’t that much of an achievement.

interior02

Pretty neat huh? I should go into the virtual poster business.

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

Ninja Tool

January 4, 2009 by secondlifeshrink Leave a comment

Looking at my blog stats I discovered an incoming link from “The Samurai Factory Official Website” which, as far as I can tell, is a Japanese record label. That’s more than a little impressive, in my book anyhow, but what’s really cool is that SLS is listed in their “Ninja Tools” section. Obviously no black-clad assassin can contemplate going on a killing spree without first getting armed with some sharp cultural commentary.

Since I read no Japanese it is possible that I’ve completely misinterpreted the site, and that they are in fact mercilessly mocking my writing rather than likening it to the keen edge of a samurai blade, or, perhaps more likely, that they have co-opted SLS into some sort of search engine optimisation scam. Perhaps a reader with the requisite language skills will be good enough to translate the Samurai Factory site and enlighten me.

Filed under Blogging, Culture Tagged with Blogging, Culture, Internet

New Year, new me

January 2, 2009 by secondlifeshrink Leave a comment

Since it’s a new year I decided to update my av’s look a bit:

new_look01

I spent a while adjusting the various facial features, but the main innovation is the addition of prim hair. I had wanted a Johnny Ramone style, but I couldn’t find an exact match, despite visiting numerous hair emporia, so I eventually settled for a unisex mid-length cut, which is pretty close to what I’ve been wearing in real life for the past 20 years or so.

I also did some decorating; painting my cabin interior black and putting up a couple of posters, for that underground club look:

interior01

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

Mad? You call me mad?

December 31, 2008 by secondlifeshrink Leave a comment

I’ve spent this evening in a relatively sedate fashion; dinner with friends, a few drinks. I can still recall the days when New Year’s Eve called for copious drug ingestion and a visit to the Peppermint Lounge. Maybe I’ll do that again next year.

Happy New Year!

Filed under Culture Tagged with Culture, Music, Nostalgia

Hot Chicks with lawyers

December 9, 2008 by secondlifeshrink Leave a comment

In my high-minded discussion of the ethics of blogging I overlooked one obvious hazard of casually appropriating the private details of other people’s lives; getting sued.

That truth has found Jay Louis though, now that he’s on the receiving end of a lawsuit in connection with the book of his blog “Hot Chicks with Douchebags“. It’s interesting that he wasn’t sued over the website itself, presumably because potential plaintiffs need a defendant with some serious money, like publisher Simon & Schuster, before they can persuade a lawyer to take on the case.

I can’t see the suit succeeding, since even someone like me, whose knowledge of the US legal system is entirely based on watching “LA Law” and “Ally McBeal“, knows that the First Amendment protects the right to shower ridicule on your fellow citizens. I guess the claimants – who allege that their appearance in the book has left them needing medical treatment and psychological therapy – are hoping that S&S will settle out of court to avoid the bad publicity. (Or perhaps not; I had it in my mind that Simon and Schuster were a classy operation, but they do publish literary gems like the “Douchebag” book and “Hooking up with Tila Tequila“, so I may be mistaken).

I don’t think anyone could seriously claim that their real-life reputation was damaged by their Second Life activities appearing online, and, even if they did, I believe that Linden Labs have been doing their best to establish that Second Life disputes fall under the jurisdiction of the US courts, so I’ll be able to assert my Constitutional rights. I’m sure that James Madison would approve.

Filed under Blogging, Culture, Second Life Tagged with Blogging, Books, Culture, Law, Second Life, TV

Uncertain principles

December 5, 2008 by secondlifeshrink 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.

Filed under Blogging, Culture, Psychology, Second Life Tagged with Blogging, Culture, Film, Psychology, Second Life

Second reverence

November 30, 2008 by secondlifeshrink 2 Comments

Coming across the Church of the Animated Bunny the other day made me think of the Church of the SubGenius, and I figured that there was bound to be some manifestation of the Word of “Bob” somewhere in Second Life. I couldn’t find anything though, apart from the Fool O’Beans Coffee Shop, which promises “Coffee … cake … praise [of] “Bob””, and when I visited the location there was nothing there apart from a snowy field.

It’s hard to believe that there is nowhere on the grid dedicated to the SubGenius, because it’s exactly the sort of thing I’d expect SL-loving types to be into. The in-world search engine is notoriously poor, so maybe the locations are just not showing up.

Anyway, thus inspired, I set off on a pilgrimage around some of the other spiritually-themed places in Second Life.

Most of the mainstream religions are covered; there are Anglican, Orthodox, and Catholic churches, a whole island dedicated to Islam, a centre of Sufi thought, a Synagogue, a Mormon Tabernacle, a Hindu Temple, a Buddhist Retreat, a Shinto Shrine, and a Confucian Oracle. I was surprised not to find a Sikh Temple, and there was nothing specifically for Taoists or Zoroastrianists either. Apologies to anyone else I’ve missed out.

I was expecting to find a few venues for devil-worship, but all the places that came up on a search for “Satan” turned out to be shops aimed at Goths. The Church of Frog and the Black Church cater to those with Vampiric tendencies, while the Church of the Seven Deadly Sins ministers to the BDSM community. If you follow the Cthulhu Mythos, you might run into one of the Great Old Ones in Innsmouth.

Finally, there’s the Church of Enturbulation, an anti-scientology outfit. They have a website too, but it seems to be down at the moment, which may or may not be due to the nefarious actions of Tom Cruise. (For more anti-scientology stuff, check out Anonymous).

The Scientologists themselves deny that they have any designs on Second Life, but then they would say that wouldn’t they? I’m not a great fan of the followers of L. Ron, but then I’m both a psychiatrist and a communist, so I’m sure that the feeling is mutual.

[Postscript: The title of this post reminded me of this.]

Filed under Culture, Second Life Tagged with Culture, Music, Second Life, Superstition

← Older posts

Newer posts →

Second Life Shrink