The Sprawl

February 4, 2009 by Leave a comment

As I mentioned a while ago, back in the early 80’s I had a subscription to OMNI magazine, and it was there that I read the early work of William Gibson, including “Burning Chrome“, in which Gibson introduced the term “cyberspace“. I haven’t read that story for over 20 years, but I can still remember how excited I was by the idea of plugging your brain into a computer and being instantly transported to a virtual world in which pure information was experienced as unmediated sensual perception.

I have subsequently gone off actually sticking wires into my skull, but I still like the concept of an immersive artificial experience. Part of my disappointment with Second Life has been its failure to live up to Gibson’s vision of cyberspace as “a consensual hallucination … lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind”.

There’s an interesting interview with Gibson on his website, in which he talks about his experience of visiting Second Life, which he compares to “a cross between being in some suburban shopping mall … and the worst day you ever spent in high school”, which chimes with my experience – there’s hardly anyone else around, and the people you do meet won’t talk to you.

It’s well worth reading the whole interview; Gibson touches on a number of interesting points, including the way that the ubiquity of internet access means that everything that is published these days is effectively hyperlinked, and how this alters the relationship between author, reader and text.

Though I guess that authors have always seen their work appropriated as inspiration for other artists.

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Laura

January 26, 2009 by Leave a comment

Looking at my Blog Stats page I’ve discovered that if you Google “Laura Palmer”, then look at the image results, the second photo along links to the tag/tv section of this site, even though there are no actual images of Laura Palmer anywhere in this blog, only a link to the picture in question, in this post.

I wish I could work out how this has happened, so that I could do the same thing with some more-frequently searched-for images, and thus boost my traffic a bit. Though luring people to a site under false pretences is perhaps not the best way to build a sustainable audience.

Anyway, it gives me an excuse to link to this video.

[Update: It’s stopped working now. So much for my career as a search engine optimisation consultant.]

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Prosaic reality

January 16, 2009 by Leave a comment

On second thoughts, maybe I shouldn’t wait for Twitter to go bust before selling my Google shares.

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Poetic Truths

January 15, 2009 by 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.

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Modern Romance

January 9, 2009 by 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.]

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Ninja Tool

January 4, 2009 by 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.

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iPhone therefore I am

December 22, 2008 by Leave a comment

I finally succumbed to temptation and bought myself an Apple iPhone as an early Christmas present. I had been wanting to get a 3G phone for ages, but I didn’t want to sell out my open-source principles by going for a model with a proprietary OS (even if OS X is really just BSD with a custom GUI). Unfortunately the Google G1, when it finally arrived, turned out to be rubbish, and the Blackberry Storm wasn’t much better, so there was nothing for it but to swallow my pride and lock myself into the Apple universe.

I don’t feel too bad though, since it’s an undeniably smart bit of kit. I’m glad that I’m old enough to remember a time when there were no such things as mobile phones, let alone mobile phones with internet access and GPS, so I can fully appreciate just what an amazing piece of technology the iPhone is. I have all the accumulated knowledge of the human race right here in my pocket, and, even better, it can tell me where the nearest pizza restaurant is. Kids today take this sort of thing for granted, so I don’t know what it will take to impress them when they are in their forties – some kind of time-travel functionality probably, so that they can flash back to laugh at us old timers with our phone-boxes and rotary dials.

It’s some way off being perfect though. I had thought that getting a 3G phone would mean I could update this blog more frequently, using the WordPress iPhone app, but the virtual keyboard is much too fiddly for my fat fingers, making typing anything more than a few lines a chore, and the lack of a cut and paste function means that if I want to include hyperlinks I have to revert to good old pen and paper to note the address. Still, it’s good for random browsing during quiet moments, which, in theory at least, means I should come across more things to blog about, even if, like now, I have to go back to my desktop to actually write it up.

Having mobile internet access will probably mean that I spend less time in Second Life though. At the moment most of my visits occur when I have turned on my desktop on the pretext of looking at the weather forecast or some such thing, before logging into the grid for a quick run around, which usually turns into a multi-hour virtual realathon. Now I can get the same information with a couple of taps on my phone there is no way that I’ll be motivated to get off the couch in the evenings.

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Unreliable anonymity

December 11, 2008 by Leave a comment

A while ago now I purchased a door for my little house on the slopes of Heterocera, to preserve my virtual privacy. This was, as I noted at the time, completely illogical, and also somewhat hypocritical, since I am not entirely adverse to trespassing myself. At least my door is relatively polite, unlike the security systems that brusquely inform interlopers that they are on private property, before violently expelling them from the area.

The door is a scripted object that can only be opened by nominated avatars, and which also records unsuccessful attempts at ingress. This latter function had never previously been triggered, but when I logged on yesterday there was a message from the door waiting for me,  containing the name of my would-be visitor.

Curious, I searched for the profile of Ms X, as I shall call her, which contained a picture of her avatar, a photograph of her real self, and a link to her blog. A few clicks later and I was in possession of her real name, more photographs, the rough location of her house, the name of her workplace, and a link to her Facebook page, which no doubt would have provided me with more of her personal details.

I stopped at this point, aware that my actions were becoming more than a little creepy, but also surprised that anyone could so casually share such information about themselves with random strangers, especially on Second Life, which I’m sure has more than its fair share of potential stalkers. (I’ll admit I have no evidence to back that up, but it’s not much of a stretch, is it?)

It set me thinking about how easy it would be to link my avatar to my real-life identity. I don’t think it can be done directly, unless of course someone had access to the details of my user account, which contains my real name and address. I guess Linden Labs would have to reveal that to anyone with a court order – in fact I know they would, since they’ve done it before (to other people, not me, yet). It wouldn’t shock me to learn that the Government (which one? any one) has secretly passed a law giving the secret police all the SL user information too. An ordinary resident couldn’t make the connection though. What they could do is relate my av to this blog, or, more likely, associate this blog with my av, and there is just enough biographical information in these posts to identify me to someone who knows me quite well. It’s an unlikely enough scenario that I won’t be worrying too much.

Enough of my paranoia though. The really intriguing question is this: why was Ms X knocking on my door? I suppose I could IM her and ask, but the answer would most likely be something boring like “I was just passing”. Better that I keep it a mystery, and wait to see if she comes back.

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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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