Last week's open forum with Leslie Jamison, author of this month's much-discussed Atlantic Monthly feature article on Second Life, "The Digital Ruins of a Forgotten Future", unsurprisingly provoked many pointed comments from Second Life devotees and experts -- most prominently, from my pal Professor Tom Boellstorff of UC Irvine, author of Coming of Age in Second Life (which Leslie cites several times in the article). Tom posted a strong critique which you should read in full here, and I'm excerpting below -- and after that, Leslie's reply. First, Tom's turn:
I do appreciate all of the time you put into it. I also recognize the incredibly strong headwinds we face when writing about Second Life, because the misconceptions about virtual worlds and what people do in them are so significant. But for that very reason, three comments are in order...
[I]t’s unfortunate that throughout your article you distinguish Second Life from “the real world.” From the moment you do that, on some level you might as well pack up your bags and go home, because you have assumed from the outset what you should be investigating... We must remember that the Euro-American culture that dominates the tech world, there is a Christian metaphysics that assumes the physical is more real, as when Christ becomes flesh.
... It is empirically, obviously wrong that not everyone who spends time in Second Life does so to escape or compensate for something they cannot find offline. That might be true for some people on occasion, but for the vast majority of residents, Second Life is additive not supplanting. It creates multiplicity, new possibilities in one’s life, rather than compensating for a lack... Your article simply gives us no way to understand experiences in Second Life that are not about compensating for a lack of what “good fortune,” and this is the vast majority of what happens in-world.
... It doesn’t seem that you ever built anything in Second Life, owned (or even rented) land, or participated in a community in any ongoing manner. The fact that your interaction with the virtual world was quite superficial seems to shape your rather superficial understanding of the virtual world. A limited understanding seems to also seems to be behind the contradiction that on the one hand you speak approvingly of “the grit and imperfection that make the [physical] world feel like the world,” yet speak disapprovingly of the errors and crashes you encountered in Second Life. That virtual grit and imperfection is also part of the online experience: it doesn’t indicate failure.
Leslie's reply to this (and more generally to other commentators in the open forum thread):
It's true that I was present in Second Life as a writer and journalist, not as someone going for a social experience--that's part of why I was so interested in talking to people who had sought and found intimacy and community in SL, more permanent residents of the snow globe! If I'd been offering a first-person account of a decade of SL residence, it would have been a different piece, written by someone coming from a different place; and I would love to read that piece! I found some of the blogs of my interview subjects fascinating for precisely that reason. I also appreciate the questioning of “escapism” as an overly reductive term for a complicated, fascinating, and often adaptive or generative human impulse--I try to get at that very idea in the piece itself, but I agree that there is so much more to say about it.
Addressing Tom and his points in particular, Leslie continues:
I appreciate your thoughtful response to the piece, and—as I say in the essay itself—found your research compelling and useful when I wrote it. What’s perhaps most fascinating to me about your response is the way in which so many of your critiques here actually paraphrase ideas that the essay itself articulates or wrestles with, rather than pointing out concerns it elided. I agree that people use technology in many different ways—the 20-something users I interviewed with certainly testified to that, and I represented as many of their experiences as the piece could feasibly hold—and the piece itself closes with the idea that “escapist” is too simple a word for what happens when people create alternate lives online, and with an interrogation of why we think of escape as somehow antithetical to presence, rather than thinking about the ways in which they are constantly in conversation. (You point out that we could call a baseball game escapist; I point out the ways we might think of art, drugs, smart phones, or daydreaming along similar lines.)
I also wrestle explicitly with this very question of why one might think of the offline world as more “real”—cite Alice, for example, expressing frustration with the dichotomy between “real” and online experiences, and pose that very question near the end of the piece: Why do we consider the offline world more “real,” anyway?
That said, it’s clear we might come at questions of embodiment from different angles. I was interested in looking at how physicality and embodiment inflect our experience of intimacy and identity—and in that sense, there are some very real differences between digital and physical experience. I wanted to look at those differences. I love your point about how the Judeo-Christian tradition might bias us toward the physical as more “real”—I also think we live in human bodies, and those bodies matter. (For me, it feels more like the church of Virginia Woolf.)
I also wanted to be upfront about my own visceral reactions to Second Life over the several months I spent there, confessing subjectivity rather than pretending to be a neutral observer—in that particular sense, perhaps, I was representing an experience of SL more akin to the 200,000 people who show up each month and leave, rather than those who stay. But that’s part of why I spent months talking to people who have set up shop long-term—to hear what they've found, and what it's like for them, how their experiences on SL are in conversation with their experiences offline. In your book, you lay out one methodology: looking at peoples’ Second Lives without reference to their offline lives.
I was—quite simply—interested in something else, in looking at the relationship between Second Life and peoples’ offline lives. Many of the stories I found most compelling were the stories of people who found something in Second Life they couldn’t find in the physical world. That wasn’t pathological to me (or something I claimed was universal) just fascinating. I tried to honor the ways I found their experiences rich, complicated, and layered.
Many readers I’ve heard from felt that complexity and humanity in the piece--Second Life users as well as people who had already dismissed Second Life without a second thought, before reading it—others didn’t. But I’ve found all the reactions--here and elsewhere--fascinating, and yours has certainly asked me to interrogate my own piece is useful ways, and have so many of the other comments on this thread—so thank you for that!
I see validity in both opinions, both of which bring up a paradox: The only way to way to understand (and write about) the virtual world experience on a direct level is to master all the real world requirements that make it possible -- the expensive computer, the complicated software and user interface, the implicit and explicit boundaries of the 3D graphics artificially dubbed to be a "world". And whoever spends the 5-10 hours getting that far is going to lose some perspective while gaining perspective of another kind. Which is a roundabout way of saying Tom and Leslie are both correct or incorrect, depending on the vantage point where you yourself, the reader, happen to be.
You just showed much more of what she said? Why didn’t you give equal print to what he said ?
Posted by: Gloria Wyatt Aquaglo | Wednesday, November 22, 2017 at 02:00 PM
".. perhaps, I was representing an experience of SL more akin to the 200,000 people who show up each month and leave, rather than those who stay .."
yeah this
this is a pretty important point. As a long time player I do find it odd sometimes when the long time are a bit dismissive of the stories of the leavers. Like somehow in leaving, the leavers have some personal failings or something
as Leslie also mentions the article is also highly subjective from a particular leaver's pov. Altogether I thought it was a good article. For sure there is quite a bit in the article that I don't see as relevant to my own understanding/experience of SL. But that's the point really. Its not my story that's being told here
subjectiveness is a good thing in storytelling. Context also
Posted by: irihapeti | Wednesday, November 22, 2017 at 03:50 PM
Well if a bunch of Leslie's text was missing it is now there. I know not as just seeing this in the evening.
I have to say that I didn't read her article. I have had lots of experience with magazines and writers of SL including someone from the New York Times that interviewed me OH so long ago. That article (and I was not a part of it since I didn't want to give my real life name and address) was so very off base and seemed written by a college kid on a summer job -- maybe that was true.
Then there was the graduate student that wanted me to make a film for her where someone in SL ran her fingers across a dusty desk and left a fingerprint track -- and didn't understand why we couldn't film sex on a moderate sim. The come in for a day and think they know the world.
The short story is that for the folks that have been here a decade or more (or even less) SL is just as much a part of the "real" world as doing your dishes and visiting with friends over coffee. Unfortunately reporters that are assigned articles on Second Life rarely (if ever) "get it". They may try and I give them credit for that. But -----
It should be noted that I wrote for national magazines in the past, so I can see this from both sides and I defended the title of the article (wrongly or not) as likely not being HER title at all. Editors do what they want with your text. It is a rare writer who has a contract that lets them have the final say.
Posted by: Chic Aeon | Wednesday, November 22, 2017 at 07:16 PM
The roles these people are playing are quite boring and tedious wouldn't you say Leslie?
Posted by: curious | Thursday, November 23, 2017 at 07:34 AM
Whatever one thinks of Leslie's perspective, I was still struck by the respect she gave to those she interviewed. Second, she got Philip Rosedale where he is still stuck: thinking that the real world will become a quaint and outdated place (though in his interview for the article he did exempt family from that idea).
That notion of replacement is the most pernicious idea about VR and VWs, and to me the reason they will never gain mass adoption. That does not mean they cannot be amazing spaces for creativity, empowerment, and play. But they will never equal quotidian and messy physical reality, at least in my decades left on the planet. Good.
Posted by: Iggy 1.0 | Friday, November 24, 2017 at 05:20 PM
interesting read! There are so many angles and viewpoints, good stuff (and that includes the comments above too)
Posted by: Fred | Saturday, November 25, 2017 at 01:01 AM
"You just showed much more of what she said? Why didn’t you give equal print to what he said ?"
Length more than anything else! But I encourage everyone to read all his comments which is why I linked to them up top.
Posted by: Wagner J Au | Monday, November 27, 2017 at 02:00 PM
In my opinion, yes there is an escapist nature of SL, and sets it apart from the RL. Living a certain sexual life or gender is one. Playing a wolf or furry is another. Flying, when you can't in RL. Safely exploring through role play. I've been in SL 10 years. There's parts of me that I live in both worlds, parts of me that can only be done in SL. Feelings are the one thing that can transcend both.
Posted by: Montecore Babcock | Monday, November 27, 2017 at 03:08 PM
Exploring different roles, eras, genders or imaginary creatures (furries) isn't necessarily escapist. You said it yourself; it's exploratory.
Escape would be to do that exploration at the expense of real world needs and obligations.
People paint this exploration as escapism in order as a way to discredit it or make it seem like something one should be ashamed of. But as long as your bills are paid and maintaining a healthy relationship with your friends and family I think it's a mistake to buy into language that condemns what is actually a beneficial (mentally and emotionally recharching) activity.
Posted by: Han Held | Monday, November 27, 2017 at 09:25 PM