NWN Guest Post: Second Life and the Grid of Presence (Or, What Saramago Didn't Understand About Second Life)

A New World Notes guest post by Irah Anatine (aka Ana Alves)

A few months ago, Hamlet asked me to translate comments that Portugal's José Saramago, the Nobel laureate author who died last Summer, once made about Second Life. Quoting Rimbaud, Saramago dismissed SL by saying “real life is someplace else”, suggesting that we should not pretend to be be social or fashion machines online. With respect to my fellow Portuguese, I must disagree. I have managed Second Life projects for members of the European Union parliament and Portugal's government, and even spoken about SL to Iranian refugees in Iraq. So my understanding is quite different.

Second Life is just a small part of what I call a "grid of presence” -- an effective means for reaching as many people as possible in the most optimized form. By using the many amazing tools this new era gave us (Facebook, virtual worlds, open source, Twitter, YouTube) we can, and should, bring knowledge to everyone. We are living the most significant revolution since the creation of the printing press. Software and hardware allow, today, anyone to create, and share masterpieces. Companies can, today, reach and hire people who live anywhere. Reach better results and spend less money doing it. Educators can now educate better. Politicians can reach citizens better, and, more importantly, citizens can become better citizens again, from the comfort of their homes.

But I don't think Saramago was entirely wrong about Second Life.

Ana hosting a Second Life session for Meglena Kuneva, European Commissioner for Consumer Affairs

I think he was suggesting that we cannot use SL to become what we should be working to be in our real lives. Or we’ll end up as miserable and depressed as we are after watching a romantic movie, if we are not lucky enough to have a soul mate sitting by our side on the couch.

However, Second Life is not to blame, or a danger itself. I agree with Hamlet, who says that Saramago should have spent more time looking -– he would have found a great extension for his magic in SL. Because Second Life is nothing more than what books are -– a channel to transmit greatness, if you have it. One cannot use Second Life to feel fulfilled if one is already an empty human being.

Second Life was good for publicity -- for a while. But when things are not created with strong foundations, they will not survive the wave of fashion. Linden Lab was lucky enough to be the only 3D world to have a good service, in a time when that service became fashionable. Firing people like John Lester (Pathfinder Linden, responsible for bringing education projects to SL) was probably not a good choice for the future of the company. Fame will pass, enthusiasm will pass too. Of course, regular users and new avatars will end up quitting -– if they are not capable of creating something special and if Second Life does not even provide the sensation of victory like games do. (Sensations which should be born not from games, but from real human achievements.)

But ultimately, it doesn’t really matter if Second Life is in trouble or not; it's neither for winners nor losers, and, always, just a small part of the puzzle. We have bigger things to think about, to create theory about. The creation of the grid of presence is as important as the content promoted through it. Linden Lab is like an early bookmaker which made volumes often badly printed -– but digital copies can always be remade without the underlying idea eroding forever. Future generations will be born knowing how to use virtual worlds, social networks and open source. And they will no longer read Saramago’s books unless we bring them to this new format. That’s why we, the virtual world pioneers, need to be responsible and think about how that future will happen.

-- Ana Alves, Azores, July 2010

Ana is the founder of Babel Project, dedicated to the practical use of IT when it comes to improve active citizenship, real world knowledge and direct dialogue among common people and institutions.

 

Top pic of Irah by Liz Dorland. All others courtesy Ana Alves and NWN.

Comments

[Miso Susanowa]

Nice post Irah/Ana. I agree; the grid's growth is the really exciting story. Great bookmaker analogy :)

[Scylla Rhiadra]

Irah's analogy of virtual worlds with books is indeed an interesting one. Sir Philip Sidney, in his "Apology for Poetry," compared the poet to the historian, noting that "Nature's world is brazen, the poets only deliver a golden." Second Life could indeed be like this: a "golden" world that allows us to imagine a poetic transformation of our own flawed, violent, and often unjust world. And imagining such a world -- a world of tolerance, of care for others, and of near infinite creativity and imagination -- is the first step in working to achieve such a miracle in RL.

That's one of the reasons why SLactivism, as it is sometimes pejoratively termed, has an important role to play in Second Life: not merely because, as Irah notes, SL is a good place to reach many people (Twitter or Facebook would do that better), but because activists within SL work towards helping to achieve this vision of SL as a kind of paradigm or exemplar for the "golden" world that we ultimately want to achieve for our "real" selves, as well as for our avatars.

It's a bit of an uphill slog, however, because the sad truth is that many come to SL not to build something better than RL, but rather to indulge and wallow in the very sorts of destructive behaviours that plague RL. Want to know what it is like to rape someone, or plug them full of holes with an M-16, but don't feel you can safely try such things in the "real world"? Well, SL is here to serve! Be as base, destructive, and antisocial as you want: it's all just a "game" after all!

What a terrible waste of wonderful tool. What is really needed is a collective re-imagining of the potential offered by virtual worlds: a potential not to indulge in all of the brutality and nastiness that would land us behind bars in RL, but rather to build something new and better, something that allows us all to achieve our full human potential -- something, as Sidney said, "golden."

[Arcadia Codesmith]

Plato believed that the observable world was nothing more than an imperfect shadow cast by a perfect world of idealized forms that could be described simply and elegantly by mathematics.

But Plato was wrong.

Mathematics is a crude tool invented by humans to describe a vast and complex universe of reality. Nature is perfection; mathematics is its poorly-formed shadow.

I love cyberspace and the virtual. It has unprecedented power to bring together the minds and aspirations of people from around the world, and from all walks of life.

But you can't build Utopia in cyberspace. The gold of artifice, be it poetry or 3D modeling, is fool's gold. The only true treasure lies in the messy, smelly, shabby heartbeak of the real world.

The virtual can entertain, educate and inspire us, even provide temporary sanctuary, but if we allow its clean lines and artificial simplicity to seduce us away from nature, it can also destroy us.

Dream abstractly. Act concretely.

[Scylla Rhiadra]

Agreed, Arcadia: you can't "live in" poetry either. But, just as Plato's ideal forms provide models towards which we might conceivably strive, so too can the worlds and communities that we build in virtual places function to unlock our imaginations and fashion virtual paradigms for how we would *like* to live. And the ability to "realize" our dreams in virtual worlds, if only in virtual form, also suggests the possibility of Second Life's employment as a kind of experimental laboratory for new ideas. (Interestingly, btw, Sir Philip Sidney's comments were written in the context of a counterargument to Plato's attack upon poetry.)

[Arcadia Codesmith]

I was too dismissive of Sidney's analogy; it may hold more nuance than the poet intended.

Gold is a soft, heavy metal prized for its beauty and rarity. Although warm and attractive, its utility is inverse to its purity for most applications, and thus it is usually alloyed with one or more 'lesser' metals for everyday use.

Brass is an alloy of copper, zinc and other metals. Because of its low value and superficial resemblence to gold, "brazen" and "brassy" have become synonyms for anything flashy and cheap. But for all its poor reputation, brass is much more durable and useful than gold and was ubiquitous in daily life for most people prior to the advent of plastic.

A societal model created in Second Life is indeed golden. It may be quite beautiful and ornate, rare and precious, but subjecting it to the stresses of everyday use would destroy it in short order.

If I were ordered to build a society and as a starting point given 100 lbs of pure gold or 100 lbs of brass, I would most assuredly take the brass. From a starting point of brass, we could rebuild. From a starting point of gold, we would vanish, leaving only pretty trinkets for the archaeolgists to admire.

[Scylla Rhiadra]

Well, you may be right: metallurgy was never my strong suit. Or Sidney's either, I suppose.

How about instead Percy Bysshe Shelley's "Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world"? Which, by analogy, would mean that content creators in SL . . . or maybe Philip Rosedale . . . or . . .

You're right. SL is one heck of a fun game! Let's just do whatever the heck we feel like there! Right?

[Arcadia Codesmith]

Sure, whatever we feel like. Pass me the virtual chocolate chip ice cream. The ten gallon drum, please.

[Scylla Rhiadra]

Ten gallon? Suddenly I begin to see the true potential of Second Life . . .

[Arcadia Codesmith]

Yes, clean out the ice cream store without gaining an ounce.

[Chimera Cosmos aka Liz Dorland]

Ah! I thought I recognized that snapshot of Irah when I started to read this post. She came into SL while in Iraq around the time of the elections in Feb 09.

I missed this story when it first came out last week. I just now saw it. And Chimera's snapshot.

Thanks Hamlet. :-)

Liz D. / Chimera