New World Notes

DAY OF THE DOCTOROW

Excerpts from Cory Doctorow's live appearance before an audience of Second Life Residents last Sunday.  Background details here.  (Originally published here.)

PART I:

Hamlet Linden: Among the top tier 'thought leaders' of the Internet age, Cory Doctorow is an award-winning writer, a passionate digital rights advocate, and the co-editor of the mammothly popular Boing Boing blog.  His latest novel, Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town, is a deeply moving tale of magic, love, family, and Internet connectivity. Ladies and gentlemen, furries, faeries, space warriors, and other Second Life species of indeterminate gender and classification, I'm proud to present: Cory Doctorow's avatar!

[Uproarious applause]

For those few here (and I hope it's just a few) who haven't read Someone Comes to Town yet, why not give us your brief cocktail party pitch for the story?

Cory Doctorow: Hmm-- it's not an easy book to summarize. Alan is a serial entrepreneur who moved to Toronto to get away from his family. His father is a mountain and his mother is a washing machine. He has several brothers, including one who is an island, three who nest like Russian dolls, a precognitive, and a demonic savage. When he was a teenager, he murdered the latter brother, with his other brothers cooperating. And now that brother is back form the dead, stalking them all. Alan has fallen in with a gang of anarcho-info-hippies who are using dumpster-dived hardware to build meshing WiFi repeaters in a mad bid to unwire all of Toronto, or at least the bohemian Kensington Market streets. Meanwhile, his neighbors-- a student household-- contain a girl with wings and a mean-spirited guitar player/bartender, who, it appears, may be in league with the demonic brother.

So that's it in a nutshell.  A very large and n-dimensional nutshell.

HL:  If someone asked me to classify Someone Comes to Town, I'd call it "high-tech magic realism". (That may be a new genre!) But how's that hit you?

CD: I think that's a good classification. I've been calling it a techie contemporary fantasy -- contemporary fantasy being the label commonly applied to magic realist fiction when written by North American popular authors instead of Marquez and his cohort.

HL: I'd say this is your most personal, heartfelt work of fiction, least it strikes me as such.

CD: Well, the most important moment I had in writing instruction was while I was at the Clarion workshop in 1992. My instructor, James Patrick Kelly, listened to my fellow students praising a story I'd written, and when they were done, he said, "Cory Doctorow, you are an a**hole. You've managed to write a completely vacuous piece utterly devoid of any emotional oomph, but with enough clever that it's convinced these people that it has merit." He told me that I needed to learn to sit down at the keyboard and open a vein.

That's what I've been trying to learn to do ever since.

MR. FROGG'S WILD RIDE

From homelessness survivor to virtual entertainer, a hard luck musician with a story to tell streams for his supper (originally published here)...

It was during his two months living on the street that Frogg Marlowe had an insight about the shape of the homeless experience.

“I saw the cycle of it,” he tells me.  “Can't get a job without a home.  Can't get a home without a job.” 

“Pariah Cycle” is the plaintive, blues and folk-inflected song he wrote from his short time without a place to call home, and the feeling he’d get from passersby who skirted past him, eyes averted. Last Friday, however, he had the attention of a capacity crowd at the Lilly Pad, an underground nightclub in Clyde, where he performed that number and other originals, sometimes accompanying himself on guitar, sometimes on a harmonica.

INTO THE ARMS OF AMERICA

Getting a little more love from the world after being in an online world (originally published here)...

How to staunch the rise of worldwide anti-Americanism which has grown so pervasive, China now ranks higher in general global esteem than the United States? One of the more popular solutions ("Elect John Kerry") is off the table, and most of the current Administration's alternatives (i.e., "airdrop Condi into Europe") don't seem to be getting much traction. 

There may be another solution worth trying out: put Americans and non-Americans together in the same online world, let them get to know each other there as avatars, let them collaborate creatively and enjoy events together, and hope for the best.

That's my suggestion, at least, after looking over the results of a poll I launched last week in the New World Notes Residents-only forum. With a subscriber demographic that's now just under 25% non-American, I was curious to know if the in-world experience of our international users in a place that's still predominantly American was having any discernable impact on their perception of Americans as a group. (Indeed, some have described the world itself as distinctly American in character. "[In] the clothes... and the type of objects you script (SUVs/jeeps)," a Portuguese ethnographer studying Second Life told me last year, SL was "American to the root!") 

But if Second Life is still largely an American experience, in the vehicles that are built and the group projects that are undertaken and the games that are played and the money that is made and so on, what do non-Americans make of it? And what did they make of all the Americans they met inside?

So I created a poll, and put the question this way:  "After spending so much time with Americans in Second Life, my general opinion of Americans...", with options ranging from "Has become much more favorable" to "Has become much more negative."  I took this screenshot after 110 replies, which may not seem like a lot, but in a population over 32,000 where about 8,000 are non-American, it's a pretty decent sample. (By contrast, in that international poll which determined China was more popular than the US, 17,000 people are considered an accurate representation of several billion world citizens.)

The (admittedly) unscientific results were pretty striking, to me at least: while 63% of those polled said Second Life hadn't changed their opinion of Americans much either way, 18% said their opinion had become somewhat more favorable, and 7% chose "much more favorable". This versus 12% who said their opinion of Americans was now somewhat or much more negative. So in aggregate, about a 12.5% overall change for the positive. Not a massive shift, but still a very significant one, seems to me.

Hard to tell what the results might mean, though it’s certainly fun to speculate. To the extent that SL Residents have a political outlook, they tend to lean either left-liberal or socially liberal, libertarian- conservative. Does that ideological skew encourage many international Residents to reconsider preconceptions they might have had, of Americans as intolerant Bible-thumpers? Does all the ambition and hard work put into group projects and entrepreneurial activity, most of them led by Americans, leave a positive impression, as an immersive demonstration of Yankee can-do spirit? On the other side of the ledger, what to make of the smaller-but-still-significant rise in negative opinion? What examples of ugly Americanism did these people see or experience, to make them think less of an entire people? And is it the immersive experience of being in a virtual world— of being in the same space with other people, but still feeling safe under the anonymity of the avatar, and the distance of the medium— that's the key to this shift?

Questions I’ll be looking to answer in coming months—though I sure hope others start looking for their own answers, too.

Update, October 16:  Cory Linden just pointed me to this article, which mentions a similar boost of international opinion for Americans after playing another online world, so I wanted to check back on the poll of non-Americans I made, for this entry. Voting has continued since that July post, and now stands at more than double the original sample of (presumably) international Residents. With 222 votes, 27.48% of those voting said their opinion of Americans is now better after interacting with them so much in SL, while 12.16% say it's worse. So a larger sample yields a slightly larger increase for the positive.